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Hooray, Elon Musk is a trillionaire. You catch that last week? It was all over the news, with splashy headlines proclaiming that X-boy is the first human to enter the four-comma club. Of course, much of his wealth is on paper and tied to the inflated value of SpaceX, which went public on Friday. Most notably, the main media stories about Musk reaching this milestone sidestepped an important fact: The guy is a racist conspiracy monger.

The accounts of Musk’s newfound trillionaireness in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal neglected to mention that the world’s richest man is a dangerous purveyor of paranoia and hate.

As many are hailing Musk’s entry into this league of one, it’s a good time to review his record as an alt-right extremist who’s amplified and promoted noxious, dangerous, and false ideas. So let’s go for a non-comprehensive jog down memory lane—sticking only to recent years.

In October 2022, after Paul Pelosi, the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was brutally assaulted at their San Francisco home, Musk spread an article from an obscure website that claimed the assailant was a male prostitute and the attack stemmed from a drunken dispute between Pelosi and this man. “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Musk posted on Twitter, which he had recently purchased. The site Musk referenced had reported during the 2016 election that Hillary Clinton was dead and had been replaced by a body double, and his post illustrated his penchant for recklessly echoing bullshit conspiracy theories.

In August 2023, after rebranding Twitter as X, Musk began harping on a bogus theme: White South Africans were the victims of genocide.

A few months later, Musk put up a post comparing Jewish........

© Mother Jones