Billionaire Elon Musk on Tuesday took down a post from his account on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that embraced a years-old false conspiracy theory about child sex trafficking after the tech and media mogul received widespread backlash and mockery.
Musk’s posts contained a humor-based sequence of images, informally known as a meme, promoting the debunked notion that a child sex ring had been operating out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C.
“Pizzagate,” as the conspiracy theory became known across the internet, resulted in a man opening fire on the pizza parlor in 2016.
Musk posted that it “does seem at least a little suspicious,” in reference to the meme, which claimed “Pizzagate is real” and that the expert who debunked the conspiracy “went to jail for child porn.”
The billionaire’s post was met Tuesday with widespread pushback from media and technology watchdogs.
It came just a day after Musk returned from Israel, where he toured a kibbutz attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Musk had sparked similar outrage earlier this month over antisemitic remarks he made on X, which have resulted in a mass exodus of advertisers from the platform.
Musk, whose account holds some 164 million followers, frequently posts on the platform and interacts with far-right users and accounts promoting fringe ideas.
In October of last year, he deleted a tweet promoting a conspiracy theory about an assault on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).