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Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is on the verge of a record-setting initial public offering that could soon make him a trillionaire. But in recent months he’s been increasingly vocal about something else: rallying white people to stand up for their race.
“Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk wrote in January in a post on his social media site X that has garnered more than 17 million views and 150,000 likes. In a post in February that was liked by more than 365,000 accounts, Musk declared that “for the past decade or more in the West there has been relentless hate and toxic propaganda against anyone who is white, straight or male,” adding, “No more guilt trips. Enough.”
Musk’s X Feed has served as a megaphone for his conservative views over the years, especially since he emerged as one of Donald Trump’s most prominent supporters in the 2024 presidential campaign. But a Washington Post analysis found that Musk has recently seen a significant increase in the rate of online posts about race and his concerns about perceived threats to whiteness or what he calls “genocide” against white people.
Over the past seven months, 6 percent of Musk’s posts on X, 850 in all, have been about race, nearly triple the rate over the previous two years. More than half of those posts used the word “white.” An analysis by The Post showed that the billionaire posted about the race on X almost daily — 166 out of 197 days — from last October through mid-April.
In addition to claiming that white people are subject to relentless vitriol, Musk has suggested that race plays a detrimental role in recruitment, emphasized the role of white people in the abolition of slavery, and has also accused public figures and an AI tool that competes against his own chatbot, Grok, of racism against white and Asian people. He has been embroiled in political debate about his native South Africa, which he claims white people have been widely discriminated against in the post-apartheid era.
The billionaire has stepped up his use of racial rhetoric as he faces new business pressures.
His rocket maker SpaceX filed to go public earlier this year and he merged the space company with his artificial intelligence venture xAI, whose AI tools are less popular than rivals such as Google and Anthropic. He also steered Tesla, where auto sales have struggled in the past year, into an unprecedented and ambitious transformation into a robotics company.
Musk has long sent unfiltered thoughts to his followers, now with more than 238 million viewers on X. According to people who have studied the politics of caste, some of his recent views on caste have entered more extreme territory.
“As far as I can tell, Musk agrees with the standard talking points of white supremacy at this point,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, citing Musk’s claim that white people are a “dying minority.”
“You’re no more white supremacist than the stuff Musk is signing or pushing,” Berich said.
Musk, Tesla and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
The billionaire’s announcement about the race has drawn attention from one-time Musk supporters, who have argued in comments on the post and in their own online posts that his passions are distracting from the demands of his business and detrimental to his ambitions.
“Revion: Focus on autonomy and their next vehicle,” X, a popular Tesla fan account that has been critical of Musk, wrote in December, citing the competing electric automaker. “Elon: Focus on the percentage of white people in New Zealand.”
Musk’s recent posts about race could bolster his reputation as a divisive political figure, an association that hurt Tesla last year after Musk’s actions in the Trump administration sparked protests at storefronts and contributed to a drop in sales and its stock price.
Many of Musk’s posts on the race cut against public opinion. According to a Pew Research Center report last year, only 12 percent of Americans believe that whites face “a lot” of discrimination, the lowest percentage of any racial or ethnic group reflected in the survey. A Gallup poll last year found that 59 percent of Americans do not believe that racial minorities have the same job opportunities as white people, a proportion that Gallup has recorded steadily increasing since 2001.
Tesla shareholders have tried to distance Musk from political concerns. In November, they agreed to a potentially $1 trillion pay package for the CEO, an effort to motivate him to renew his focus on business after a tumultuous year that has seen support for Trump and his time overseeing the US DOGE service and drive to reduce the size of government. Musk later fell out with Trump and his political work failed to resonate with investors. He left the White House in May 2025.
SpaceX’s IPO, which financial analysts expect to attract record investment later this year, could be a new test of whether Musk’s political views limit his business opportunities. Some market analysts suspect they could put little drag on the rocket maker.
“I think there’s always been an Elon tax to own the Elon business,” said Shay Boller, chief market strategist at Futurum, a group that provides market research and advisory services, noting that investors should accept Musk’s controversial public statements to get potential upside from his business.
“I think the Elon tax spectrum is getting wider,” Boller said, as Musk’s comments have become more divisive. But many investors are focused on the value of Musk’s command rather than his public rhetoric, Boller added. “It’s bad to say but I think for some reason society tends to minimize such polarizing statements,” he said. “Capitalism trumps all morality.”
Some investors have decided that Musk’s statements about race have crossed a line.
In September, Musk posted on X to agree with a screenshot posted by another user that said white people faced a choice between being “conquered, enslaved, raped and massacred while being called ‘racist'” or “reclaiming our nations and our honor while being called ‘racist.’
“Yes,” Musk replied.
Fred Lambert, editor-in-chief of pro-electric vehicle site Electrek, later called the moment Musk’s “mask” “completely off” in a post on X. The Tesla investor sold his stake in 2024, citing the company’s efforts to cater to Musk rather than his mission.
“The whole situation baffles me … based on his recent statements about white people ‘reclaiming their nations’ there is no doubt he is a white nationalist,” Lambert said in new comments to the Post. “For the big organizations that support him and invest in his ventures – it’s money ahead of ethics.”
Ashley Jardina, associate professor of public policy and politics at the University of Virginia and author of the book “White Identity Politics,” called Musk’s posts “standard white supremacy.”
“It’s just becoming more and more socially acceptable to express racist attitudes overtly,” she said.
President Trump has helped change the norms around acceptable speech in particular, Jardina said.
Scenes that in the past invited public scrutiny and calls for him to step down as CEO of a major company for a figure of Musk’s stature, she said, have now been pushed into the mainstream. This in turn makes others more likely to adopt or promote similar positions, Jardina said.
“I think any time you have a major political figure or a celebrity using this kind of language without being approved for the microphone helps make it more socially acceptable,” she said.
“I think it’s effective to have other influential … people condemn it,” he added. “You don’t see much of Musk directing.”
The investment community’s tolerance of Musk’s ideas is part of a deeper pattern, Boller said — but it’s become a recognized cost of doing business. “Unfortunately, capitalism trumps emotions,” he said.
In one of Musk’s recent posts on X about race, the billionaire suggested that white people should be considered indigenous in the United States. “It makes no sense that all but Europeans can have a homeland,” he wrote. “It’s pretty funny when you think about it. Where did white people come from??”
Asked how long someone’s ancestors must have lived somewhere to be considered indigenous, Musk replied: “I think 250 years is plenty.”
Method: The Post analyzed 65,918 posts from Elon Musk’s X account between January 2023 and mid-April of this year. 5,146 retweets and 31,663 replies. Artificial intelligence model Cloud Haiku 4.5 was used to classify posts about race or racism, white people as a specific group, or European or majority-white countries potentially losing their character. The model was fed the text of Musk’s posts, text extracted using AI from any images and, when relevant, text or text from images in any posts to which Musk replied. It had an accuracy rate of 93 percent when manually evaluating this approach on a set of 400 posts.
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