Never forget: How I watched Elon Musk hoodwink the world at Auschwitz

He was pilloried for promoting antisemitism on Twitter/X last year. So when billionaire Elon Musk flew to Krakow to meet members of Europe’s Jewish community this week ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, he was in for a rough ride. Right? Wrong, says historian Guy Walters, who was there to witness it unfold with horror and fury

Musk carries his son on his shoulders at Auschwitz, just metres from where thousands of Jewish prisoners were murdered (European Jewish Association/AFP)

If you wanted proof that Jewish people were not the fiendishly manipulative beings that antisemites suppose them to be, then you only had to come to Krakow on Monday.

It was here, in a soulless conference room in a behemoth of a hotel, that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, came and completely played the representatives of Europe’s Jewish community.

In fact, Musk didn’t just play them, he outwitted them, he owned them, he gulled them, he hoodwinked them. He hoodwinked everybody, Jews and non-Jews alike.

What made his legerdemain all the more astonishing was that it was brazenly carried out in plain sight.

The event was part of a two-day conference in Poland (ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January) aimed at combating antisemitism and organised by a group called the European Jewish Association (EJA).

Headlined “Never Again”, and with a subtitle that posed the question “Lip service or deep commitment?”, the conference featured a day of talking followed by a morning visit to Auschwitz.

The delegates were certainly members of the great and good, or, more accurately, the formerly great, because this was a gathering that featured many who had once held high office in countries as exciting as Montenegro and Slovenia.

There were also a lot of Jewish leaders, as well as a few students, and even a Holocaust survivor. This was the 88-year-old Gidon Lev, who had been incarcerated in Theresienstadt. He didn’t get a chance to speak until the end of Monday night’s gala dinner, by which time quite a few delegates were looking at their phones. Most were men, and nearly all had adopted the statesman uniform of navy suit, light shirt, and monochrome tie. It’s a look that screams that the person wants to be taken seriously, that they’re a power broker. In a way, it’s kind of cute.

Women and children arriving at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland, circa 1943 (Getty)

The sessions almost exclusively dealt with the appalling rise in antisemitism in the wake of Gaza. We heard a lot of fine words and learned what we sadly already know: that some areas of European cities and university campuses are effectively no-go zones for Jewish people and that it was vital that all this needed to stop.

But despite the pleading of the chair of one panel for delegates to express some ideas of what could actually be done, almost nobody was able to offer anything beyond talk about “education”.

An exception was Rabbi Avi Lazarus, the CEO of the UK’s Federation of Synagogues, who demanded that the source of antisemitism needed to be “faced head on”, and that the police and the media should be taking a more realistic approach as to where antisemitism was being preached in Britain. He didn’t call on Islamist preachers to be silenced and locked up, but that was what might be inferred.

But the star of the show was undoubtedly Musk. Before we go further, we need to be reminded why he bothered to turn up. The reason is simple. Musk has a problem with Jewish people. One might even call it his Jewish Problem, but that would be to suggest he is like Hitler or Hamas and wants to kill them all, which would be unfair.

But this is a man who just two months ago posted on X the words “You have said the actual truth” in response to a message posted by some charmingly racist anonymous account that claimed that Jews were deliberately pushing for hatred of whites. The same message also stated that it didn’t give a hoot for whether “Western Jewish populations” suffered from antisemitism.

Musk’s response received worldwide opprobrium – as well it should – with even the Biden White House issuing a statement condemning “this abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms”.

But then the owner of Tesla seems to have form for this sort of thing. Back in May, he claimed that Holocaust survivor and philanthropist George Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilisation. Soros hates humanity”.

Such language about a leading Jewish figure sounds like something straight out of that luridly antisemitic Nazi rag, Der Stürmer – just all a bit “tropey”, if you know what I mean.

Musk of course also owns X, which under his leadership has seen a proliferation of antisemitism as well as all other forms of hate speech. Hitherto banned nasties have been reinstated, and the platform is now such a cesspit of antisemitic vileness that the multibillionaire is attracting positive comments from some very unsavoury quarters, including from a neo-Nazi called Andrew Anglin, who edits something you wouldn’t want to read called The Daily Stormer, its title a ham-fisted flick to its Nazi antecedent.

“It is very powerful to have the richest man in the world – who people also say is a genius – coming in hot like this against the Jewish agenda,” said Anglin. High praise indeed!

But while Musk can probably cope with a president of the United States issuing statements expressing his abhorrence, what the businessman doesn’t much like is when he is kicked where it really hurts – his wallet

Because he expressed antisemitism and the fact that X is by far the world’s largest purveyor of hatred of Jews, companies like IBM have stopped advertising on the platform. Even though Musk has apologised and acknowledged that his now notorious “actual truth” post was the “dumbest” thing he’d done on social media, the businessman realised that merely saying a few words wouldn’t be enough.

And so that is why those of us who had turned up in Krakow on Sunday night to attend the EJA conference were surprised to see the world’s leading publisher of antisemitism as the next day’s headline act. The optimistic among us hoped that Musk would use the event as some form of atonement, but nah, because as we shall see, he just used it.

Before he arrived at the conference on Monday afternoon, Musk had spent the morning looking around Auschwitz. He was accompanied by Rabbi Menachem Margolin, chairman of the EJA, and, bizarrely enough, by Ben Shapiro, the ultra-conservative former Breitbart editor-at-large, who, helpfully enough for Musk, is Jewish.

Musk and Rabbi Margolin, chair of the European Jewish Association, attending a symposium on antisemitism (EPA)

Of all the 15.7 million Jews on the planet that Musk could have picked as his travelling companion, it is puzzling that he picked someone as controversial as Shapiro, but no matter.

Photographs of Musk touring Auschwitz excitedly thudded into the WhatsApp group for journalists at the event, and it was clear that Musk was doing his best to look terribly, terribly serious.

Ironically, if he wanted to take a serious look at another expression of antisemitism, he could have just clicked on his app on his phone, but perhaps he had left it on his private jet. Musk’s attempt at gravity was completely undermined by his decision to carry his son on his shoulders, which gave the impression of a dad taking his kid around Disney World or a discount shopping village. It felt casual and disrespectful. It showed that Musk really didn’t get the gravity of the place and was treating it as a Holocaust theme park. But still, he did look very, very serious, and hopefully, all those nice executives at IBM would look at the pictures and then get back on the phone with their ad agency guys.

What Musk saw at Auschwitz was what 1.6 million see every year. Like him, I visited the camp this week, and nothing can ever prepare you for setting eyes on the notorious Arbeit Macht Frei sign above the entrance to Auschwitz I, or the moment when you pass through the darkly iconic structure of the entrance to Auschwitz II, Birkenau.

As ever, there were many tourists at the camp, and all thankfully were behaving with the utmost solemnity and respect. When I asked a guide whether there had been any uptick in visits since 7 October, or indeed whether there had been any antisemitic protests, she denied both.

I have been to several concentration and extermination camps during my line of work, and despite the undeniable horrors currently happening in the Middle East, there is something about Auschwitz that makes it untouchable, its scale and symbolism somehow making it transcend the present day.

Guy Walters during his visit to Auschwitz this week (Alex Asikainen)

So much for the photo opp. Musk’s real trick was coming up at the conference, and at precisely one minute past four, he emerged from a set of double doors into an anteroom to the conference room, briefly acknowledged a line of excited photographers, and then went up onto the stage. He wasn’t wearing a tie. The former prime minister of Slovenia – or was it Montenegro? – almost ran to his seat in the audience, because Musk is a man who can not only make world leaders listen, he can also make them scamper.

What then followed was a disgrace. After being presented with a former missile lobbed by Hamas that had been turned into a sculpture featuring the words “Never Again”, Musk was then subjected to the easiest of Q&As by his Auschwitz buddy, Shapiro. This was about as far from a grilling as you could get. There were no curveballs, no demands to explain himself, or requests for a sincere apology. There were no promises to address not only his own expressions of antisemitism but also those on his hate-filled platform. The nearest he got to an apology was saying that he had been “naive” about antisemitism, which felt a bit, well, lame.

What we did get were numerous versions of the tired old “I can’t be a racist because some of my best friends are black” excuse. Try this: “In the circles that I move I see almost no antisemitism. Two-thirds of my friends are Jewish. I’m Jewish by association, aspirationally Jewish. I never hear about it at dinner conversations; it’s an absurdity in my friend circles.”

We could leave aside the inconvenient fact that saying one is “aspirationally Jewish” is basically a teensy bit antisemitic, suggesting as it does Jews are better and different to other people. To be clear, they’re not. They’re just people.

But oh no, here it is again: “I went to a Hebrew preschool in South Africa. I went to Israel when I was 13. Visited Masada. I’ve checked the boxes on a lot of things. Sometimes I think, ‘Am I Jewish?’ Aspirationally Jewish.”

Musk said all this with a smile on his face, no doubt hoping to charm the many people in the audience whose relatives had been slaughtered for their Jewishness. See! I’m like you guys! Except he’s not, of course.

A proper interrogator might have asked whether Musk would have maintained his cutesy aspirational Jewishness had he been at a selection ramp in 1943 at the place he just visited that morning, but as I say, we weren’t getting curveballs.

We also got a defence, of sorts, of X. According to Musk, the “relentless pursuit of the truth is the goal with X and allowing people to say what they want to say, even if it’s controversial, provided that it does not break the law”.

‘It’s clear that Musk was doing his best to look terribly, terribly serious’ (AP)

It’s hard to know what Musk means by the “truth” because just back in November, which really is just a few weeks ago, he was saying on X it was the “actual truth” that Jews fostered anti-white hatred.

At the very least, Musk unwittingly revealed that truth is devilishly hard to establish, unlike hatred, which of course is easy to establish, and, if he put his mind and wallet to it, might be largely extinguished from his wretched platform. When we started getting stuff like this, it was clear that we were never going to get any atonement.

“I think there are some things that most people would agree are cool and inspiring, like people going to the moon. If you ask kids anywhere in the world what’s the coolest thing humanity has done, I think kids would say ‘going to the moon’. So we need to continue this spirit of exploration. To become an interplanetary species.”

It’s unclear whether Musk would allow Jews as part of his exciting new species, but if I were Jewish, I certainly wouldn’t trust his spaceships.

And then it was time to end. There was a depressing amount of applause, with a few people even standing up, the fools.

Musk was whisked away, and within seconds he was in his car, doubtless en route to his jet. Perhaps he had remembered to take his sculpture, I couldn’t tell. It had been a long day, but now the trick was over. We had all been conned. Never again. Please, never again.