In May, Elon Musk mused on his website X that the Marvel villain Magneto, who has a backstory as a child survivor of the Holocaust, reminded him of George Soros, who survived the Holocaust in Hungary as a child. Asked to clarify, Musk replied, “He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” Musk’s comments were widely condemned as racist. “This is the language of antisemitism through the ages,” Yair Rosenberg wrote in the Atlantic. And it is. But did Musk know it was?

Once is unfortunate, twice looks like carelessness. Musk didn’t seem to care. On Nov. 15, he endorsed the cryptic musings of a user who calls himself The Artist Formerly Known as Eric. Ex-Eric opined that the Jewish people engage in “the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” “You have said the actual truth,” Musk replied. This sounds like the language of antisemitism through the ages and in our age in particular.