X owner and Tesla founder Elon Musk said Monday that diversity-oriented hiring practices are “fundamentally antisemitic” after he toured the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
“The diversity and equity, inclusion — we should always be, always be wary of any name that sounds like it could come out of a George Orwell book,” Musk said during an interview with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro at the European Jewish Association Conference in Poland.
“What it really means is discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, and it’s against merit and, thus, I think is fundamentally antisemitic,” he continued.
Musk has been outspoken against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies in recent weeks, saying that those policies are racist in a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter.
“Discrimination on the basis of race, which DEI does, is literally the definition of racism,” he wrote in a post earlier this month.
Musk’s comments Monday came after he visited the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Oswiecim, Poland.
Musk faced backlash in November after he appeared to endorse an antisemitic post on X, calling it the “absolute truth.” Later that month, numerous major companies decided to pull their advertisements from X after a Media Matters for America report found that ads for brands had been placed next to pro-Nazi content on the platform.
Musk also claimed without evidence Monday that audits have shown there is less antisemitic content on X compared to other platforms. “The outside audits that we’ve had done, at the ones that we’ve had done, show that there is the least amount of antisemitism on X, if you look at all the other social apps,” Musk said during the event.