Elon Musk has been criticized for a tweet comparing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Hitler.
Hot potato: Elon Musk can do a lot of things: the richest man in the world, the CEO of several companies, a self-proclaimed local historian. Yesterday, he justified that last description by posting a tweet that made a satirical comparison between Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Adolf Hitler, drawing criticism from the Jewish community.
Musk was responding to a tweet from cryptocurrency news outlet Coindesk that Trudeau had ordered Canadian authorities not to engage with 34 different crypto addresses associated with the country’s ongoing trucker protests.
Protesters are protesting the requirement that truckers cross the border to get vaccinated against Covid-19. They are camped in the Canadian capital and are blocking the border crossing, leading Trudeau to use the Canadian Emergency Act to stop funding the protesters.
The Tesla boss posted a meme with the words “Stop comparing me to Justin Trudeau” above a picture of Adolf Hitler and “I had a budget” below it.
Musk soon deleted the tweet, but not before it sparked a response at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, located on the site of a former Nazi concentration camp. He called Musk’s use of the image “sad and unsettling”.
The use of the image of Adolf Hitler, and therefore the use of the tragedy of all the people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured and killed by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany that he created, is sad and disturbing. This is a disrespect to the memory of all the victims and harm to many people.
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) February 17, 2022
Time’s 2021 Person of the Year posted another tweet asking its followers to read the book “Pay for Destruction,” which details the economic history of Nazi Germany.
For a more detailed explanation read https://t.co/eEojD2dQ2k
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2022
As noted GizmodoMusk moved from South Africa to Canada in 1988 at the age of 19 to avoid military service. He studied at Queen’s University in Ontario, and a couple of years later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. The SpaceX CEO holds Canadian and US citizenship.
Musk is certainly no stranger to controversy. His tweet calling Thailand’s soccer team savior a “pedophile” led to a lawsuit, which Musk won, and he openly criticized the pandemic lockdown measures, calling them “fascists.” There was also his tweet about Tesla’s privatization in 2019, which drew the ire of the SEC.
