Elon Musk’s longtime fixation on a white racial majority is intensifying.The richest man in the world posted about how the white race was under threat, made allusions to race science or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy content on 26 out of 31 days in January, according to the Guardian’s analysis of his social media output.The posts, made on his platform X, reflect a renewed embrace of what extremism experts describe as white supremacist material.“Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk said on 22 January, a short time before taking the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, while reposting an Irish anti-immigrant influencer’s video about demographic change.Musk’s posts included him repeatedly claiming white people face systemic discrimination, endorsing the conspiracy that there is an ongoing genocide against white people in countries around the world and promoting a claim that white people would be “slaughtered” by non-whites if they become a demographic minority.

“If you stripped Elon Musk’s name off of these things and showed them to me, I would think that this was a white supremacist,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Extremism, who reviewed a selection of the posts.Musk has for years promoted anti-immigrant and far-right content in his posts, as well as endorsed rightwing activists and political parties around the globe.The Tesla CEO’s most recent output displays a more consistent and explicit engagement with white supremacist content and nativist activists than in the past, however, lending them the imprimatur of the world’s richest person and spreading their ideas to his audience of over 200 million followers.Beirich said he appeared “deep into the world of white nationalism”.“The White ‘liberal’ standard for behavior is extremely strict, but is only applied to Whites,” Musk said on 26 January, commenting on a post that claimed there was discrimination against white conservatives.

Musk’s posts repeatedly echoed prominent white supremacist narratives and ideologies, said William Braniff, the former director of the Department of Homeland Security’s office for prevention of terrorism and extremism.Several of Musk’s posts included what Braniff described as “textbook examples” of white supremacist conspiracy theories such as “the great replacement” – a belief that liberal elites or Jewish people are conspiring to use immigration to replace white populations.The danger of Musk’s obsession lies in mainstreaming ideas that are deeply tied to violence and discrimination, according to Braniff, who is now executive director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (Peril) at American University.“The great replacement has been an especially important mobilizing narrative for highly lethal white supremacist attacks in the United States and elsewhere,” he said.Musk has repeatedly denied he is racist or antisemitic, stated that he condemns terrorism and said he does not advocate for violence.

He asserted in a 2024 interview with Don Lemon that he does not subscribe to “great replacement theory”,He also told Joe Rogan in March last year that he is not a Nazi, weeks after facing condemnations from Jewish groups and the chairman of the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel over his speech to Germany’s far-right AfD party in which he told Germans to move beyond their “past guilt”,Although Musk wrote a number of posts on race and immigration himself last month, much of his output involved reposting far-right activist accounts or replying to them with brief endorsements such as a bullseye emoji, implying agreement,On 10 January, Musk replied “yes” in reply to a post from a white nationalist account that claimed “race communism that destroyed Rhodesia and South Africa are the same things they are bringing to America and the rest of the Occident to turn us into the Global Favela”,The author of the post previously published a blog titled How To Build An American Orania – a reference to the privately owned, whites-only town of Orania in South Africa.

Similar interactions took place throughout the month.After a far-right influencer posted “they just want to eradicate White people it’s that simple” in reference to the New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration speech, Musk replied on 7 January “some people really do”.On 9 January, he wrote “true” in a quote-tweet of a post that claimed white people would be “slaughtered” as a minority and that “White solidarity is the only way to survive”.On 16 January, Musk reposted a rightwing influencer’s post claiming “white genocide is the official Democrat party platform”.The same day, he promoted another rightwing influencer’s anti-diversity post that used an AI-generated image of tattooed black women on Yale’s rowing team.

While some of the accounts Musk interacted with are fringe social media influencers, several others are prominent far-right activists whose extremist views have been well-documented,On 17 January, Musk reposted a screed against “ethno-cultural upheaval” in Europe from Martin Sellner, far-right Austrian activist, who is the founder of the ethno-nationalist Identitarian Movement,Musk, who reinstated Sellner’s banned X account in 2024, replied to the anti-immigration post that “this is simply a statement of fact”,“Martin Sellner is probably the most significant global white supremacist right now,” Beirich said,“He’s the one who pushed the great replacement, and has now pushed the idea of remigration – ethnically cleansing western countries of non-whites.

”Sellner gave a presentation in 2024 at an event in Germany on the logistics of carrying out mass deportations that was attended by neo-Nazis and other extremists.The event sparked immense backlash and protests against the far-right across the northern European nation.Lawmakers attempted to ban him from the country.The Austrian activist also received a €1,500 donation from and communicated with white supremacist Brenton Tarrant, who would later go on to commit a terrorist attack in 2019 that killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.Sellner rejected being described as a white supremacist and said he respects “the dignity of all others” in a statement to the Guardian, while taking credit for politically mainstreaming the concepts of the great replacement and remigration.

“Now, from Trump to Musk, everyone is talking about replacement migration, the ethnic vote and remigration,” Sellner said,He additionally claimed that the Potsdam event was “misrepresented” by media and that he rejected any form of terrorism,Sellner described his interactions with Tarrant, which included offering to get a drink with Tarrant if he ever visited Austria, as limited to standard thank-you emails to a donor,Extremism experts said the ideas Musk has publicized are deeply tied to some of the most notorious, violent extremist attacks of the past decade, including the 2018 antisemitic attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the 2022 racist mass killing of 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket,The shooter in Buffalo left a 180-page manifesto filled with mentions of white supremacist replacement theory.

Musk’s posts also reflect an increasing embrace of white supremacist figures and talking points among prominent Republicans and government agencies in the past year.Some of that shift has played out on X, where Musk reinstated a number of formerly banned accounts such as prominent antisemite Nick Fuentes.Federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security have meanwhile posted content that aligns with white supremacist propaganda.Earlier this month, Donald Trump also drew widespread backlash after posting a racist video to his Truth Social platform that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.Musk has repeatedly mocked those who have criticized his comments as far-right or racist, framing his views as common sense or simply reiterating facts and statistics.

His rhetoric reflects a widespread tactic among people on the far-right, experts say, when extremists attempt to defend their worldview of an in-group of white people against everyone else,“That reductionist worldview breaks down when people in your in-group say you’re full of it, that what you’re saying is wrong,” Braniff said,“So now the main requirement is to attack the dissenting in-group, to delegitimize them as race traitors and as woke,”As February began, Musk was still posting about race and immigration on a consistent basis,He replied to an anti-immigrant activist this week who claimed that Ireland’s civilization would end “because Irish men are afraid of being called racist and upsetting people from the 3rd world”.

“Such men are pathetic traitors,” Musk responded.