Mother Jones illustration
In the three weeks since Donald Trump took office, Elon Musk has posted on X at the pace of an iPad-addicted child. During a roughly two-hour stretch on Friday morning, Musk tweeted more than 40 times—about once every three minutes—on X, the social media platform he bought for $44 billion in 2022.
When looked at as a whole Musk’s posts since Inauguration Day tell a clear story: The richest man in the world—who has now installed unqualified loyalists throughout the US government—is getting much of his information from far-right sources who present a world in which “Western Civilization” is in an existential struggle against Black and brown invaders. These views fit neatly within his work, too. As the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has put USAID into the “wood chipper” and supported blocking assistance to his native South Africa in defense of fellow whites.
To fully understand what Musk is seeing and sharing, it helps to focus on the accounts he has interacted with. Some of the people the billionaire is responding to—Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Vice President JD Vance, and Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán—are more or less household names for those who pay attention to politics in the United States.
Others are far-right trolls and anonymous posters that only the most nauseatingly online of Americans would ever know. They are the source of some of the most extreme information Musk is taking in and sharing with his more than 216 million followers.
This is a look at a few of the posters who Musk is sharing information from, and interacting with, on X and what they have written in the past.
A Racist and Anti-Semite “Impressed” by the Holocaust
On Monday morning, the anonymous account iamyesyouareno, which has more than 430,000 followers on X, called the Anti-Defamation League a “disgusting anti-white organization” for cataloging “The Racist Obsession with South African ‘White Genocide.’” Ten minutes later, Musk, who has been fixated on false claims about the plight of white South Africans, replied to iamyesyouareno. He wanted to know if the ADL still held this position on white South Africans.
The iamyesyouareno account’s attack against the ADL fits with its deep antisemitism. In August, the account responded to a post asking if “jews [will] ever be satisfied with not fully enslaving the world” by declaring, “They will not.” Another post from the account reads, “The Holocaust happened. I’m very impressed by the numbers though.”
It is hard to convey the racism of many posts from iamyesyouareno. On dozens of occasions, the account has captioned videos or images of Black people doing something bad, such as defecating in public, with some version of the conclusion: “There’s no fixing this” or “There’s no fixing this mentality.” Another regular bit is to describe something done by a Black person as evidence of them having a “Room temp IQ.” The poster has also written: “Black men did not abolish slavery, White people did. Be thankful.”
Musk recently shared a post from the account iamyesyouareno featuring a news article from December 2023 about how a Black man had reportedly been awarded rights to a vacant home that belonged to a white pensioner in the United Kingdom after squatting in it.
An Irish Anti-Immigrant Troll
Musk recently replied to two videos posted by Michael O’Keeffe, an anti-immigrant troll whose bio on X site states, “Banned by Twitter regime. Restored by Elon and X.” In one of the videos, which Musk shared with the caption “Wow,” an Irish woman complained about being surrounded by immigrants and said that she rarely leaves home due to fears of being attacked by foreigners.
Musk responded with exclamation points to a post by O’Keeffe calling on “all European men to stand together and remember what our ancestors fought for.” (The video in O’Keeffe’s post was about the Crusades.)
!!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 30, 2025
Some of the posts from O’Keefe last week that Musk did not share claimed: “Ireland fought the British for 800 years just to give the country away to Islam”; “Mass immigration from the 3rd world is making Ireland unrecognisable”; and “Dublin is about to get 10 new migrant plantations!”
An Anonymous Poster Obsessed With Race and IQ
Musk has replied to at least two posts this month from an X user who goes by Crémieux. The account has more than 200,000 followers and is known for writing about purported genetic differences between racial groups. A typical post from the account claims that Black NFL players have lower IQs than white NFL players; other posts strongly imply that Black people are genetically inferior to whites. As my former colleague Ali Breland noted in The Atlantic, Crémieux has been praised on the far-right for tracing “the genetic pathways of crime” and “explaining why poverty is not a good causal explanation.” Referring to Medicare payments, Musk wrote in response to Crémieux on Wednesday that “this is where the big money fraud is happening.”
The Man Who Helped Lies About Haitians in Springfield Go Viral
On Wednesday, Musk replied “Yes” when the anonymous account named Captive Dreamer asked: “So USAID has been propping up the global left via US taxpayer dollars? Even in Poland?” Captive Dreamer, who has said his past accounts were banned numerous times for violating Twitter’s terms of use, is perhaps best known for digging up anything he could find to support the lie that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets.
Other posts from him about Black people aren’t much different. One satirical example denigrating Black fathers reads: “my black father helped me learn a lot about the legal system, correctional visits and how to navigate child support. Invaluable lessons.” He has also written positively on multiple occasions about “HBD,” an abbreviation for “human biodiversity,” a moniker used by racists who focus on alleged genetic differences across populations.
Captive Dreamer also appeared on a podcast with Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP, whose ideology the writer John Ganz has described as “perhaps not even fascism, but Nazism.” On the podcast, Captive Dreamer told BAP that he’d spent formative years of his life in places like Springfield and that, as a result, attacking the Haitians there was personal for him.
Far-Right Danish, Dutch, German, and Swedish Posters
Musk wrote earlier in February that the AfD, a hard-right German political party whose leaders have a history of using Nazi slogans and downplaying the Holocaust, is the country’s “only hope.” Musk was responding to Naomi Seibt, an X user with roughly 400,000 followers who frequently promotes AfD politicians.
On Thursday, Seibt shared a chart that showed people from Arab nations commit crimes at far higher rates than people of European descent. “Wow,” Musk replied. The billionaire has also been sharing content from far-right white posters from the Netherlands and Sweden.
As I previously reported, Musk has also been attacking land reform efforts in South Africa. He endorsed a post calling for “more immigration of White South Africans” on the grounds that they are “one of the few population groups that are fiscally positive when immigrating to Europe.” (The Danish man Musk was responding to in the middle of the night has written that “Non-Western immigration to Northern European countries is morally indefensible.”)
Yes https://t.co/9JCkwqXdav
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2025
A Western Chauvinist Troll
Musk has frequently shared posts from an account called Inevitable West with an X bio that calls on people to “Follow [it] to uphold the legacy of the West!” Aside from its obvious biases, the account’s posts are notably dumb, even by the standards of right-wing engagement farming. One of the posts Musk shared this week claimed that the “legacy media” had been “silent” about the mass shooting in Sweden that left at least 10 people dead. The shooting was covered by essentially every major news outlet.
The BBC has reported that the Inevitable West account, which now has more than 200,000 followers, did not exist until late last year. The only thing the account owner would tell the BBC about their identity was that they were “Gen Z” and “not Russian.”
A DOGE staffer
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Marko Elez, a 25-year-old DOGE staffer, had resigned after the paper linked him to racist posts from an anonymous account. “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account posted in July. “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” it added in September. “Normalize Indian hate.”
On Friday morning, Musk launched a survey on X asking whether the DOGE staffer who made “inappropriate statements via a now-deleted pseudonym” should be reinstated. Vice President JD Vance responded on X that he didn’t think “stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.” In reality, Elez was well into his twenties when he made those statements.
Nevertheless, Vance, who is married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, added, “I say bring him back.” Later on Friday, Musk responded to Vance by declaring Elez would indeed be “brought back.”