American billionaire Elon Musk visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau site, a former concentration camp from the Nazi era, today (Monday) before giving a speech later at a conference about the rising anti-Semitism after his social media platform (X) faced criticism for some of its content. The European Jewish Association reported that Musk was accompanied by the association's president, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, conservative American journalist Ben Shapiro, and Holocaust survivor Gideon Lev.
A spokesperson for the association stated, "Musk laid a wreath at the Death Wall and participated in memorial ceremonies... at the Birkenau memorial." Later on Monday, Musk gave a speech in Krakow, southern Poland, which is a short drive from the memorial, at a conference discussing the increase in anti-Semitism since the conflict began between Israel and the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas).
The X platform (formerly Twitter) has been struggling with ad revenues as advertisers have hesitated to spend on the platform since Musk said late last year that one user had stated "the actual truth" in reference to an individual who pointed to what is known as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. A report from the liberal monitoring group (Media Matters) led to advertisers withdrawing from the platform, as it claimed to have found ads appearing next to posts supporting Nazism. X has filed a defamation lawsuit against Media Matters.
The Auschwitz memorial preserves the site of the death camp established by Nazi Germany on Polish territory during World War II, where over 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, died in gas chambers or due to starvation, cold, and disease. In August of last year, the Auschwitz memorial criticized the X platform for failing to remove an anti-Semitic post from the site.
