Elon Musk launched into a foul-mouthed X tirade directed at a student who called him out for allegedly spreading disinformation.
“Elon Musk is rapidly becoming the largest spreader of disinformation in human history, hijacking political debates in the process,” wrote Joni Askola, a Finnish graduate student and activist for defense of Ukraine. “The EU must take action!”
“F u retard,” came Musk’s response, containing a slur used against people who have mental disabilities. He then replied saying “yes” to another person who said: “We could have avoided a lot of disasters by simply telling leftist retards to stfu.”
Musk appears to have made a conscious choice to reintroduce the word into right-wing parlance of late, often using it on his X platform.
An analysis of his X posts and replies shows that he has used the term or a variant of it 15 times since Dec. 20, having never used it before that.
This is despite his Dec. 29 plea for more “positivity” on the platform. “Please post a bit more positive, beautiful or informative content on this platform,” he said.
That post came just days after he used his new favorite slur against Americans during a wild meltdown over H-1B visas.
In a weird few days for the DOGE co-star, he agreed with a post that used the slur to say Americans could not exclusively fill the U.S. tech workforce and urged detractors to “take a big step back and F— YOURSELF in the face.”
Musk has been using the slur a lot. / Reuters/Brian Snyder
The word is also a favorite of right-wing mouthpiece Laura Loomer, despite her current spat with Musk. She has used it five times since May, most notably against musician Macklemore after he signaled support for Palestine.
Musk does sometimes spread fake news on his own platform, most notably in August last year when he shared a fake Telegraph article claiming his new foe British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was considering sending far-right rioters to “emergency detainment camps” in the Falklands, an island off Argentina controlled by the U.K.
France 24 described him as a disinformation “super-spreader.” The site reported that in the first three weeks of October alone, the billionaire published at least 28 fake news stories on his X account, which were seen nearly 540 million times.
But perhaps Musk is just stressed that his best friend Donald Trump is reportedly tiring of him. “Trump does complain a bit to people about how Musk is around a lot,” New York Times journalist and “Trump whisperer” Maggie Haberman told tech reporter Kara Swisher during the latest episode of Swisher’s podcast, On.
