Tech billionaire Elon Musk has rejected calls for national unity and has instead embraced increasingly inflammatory rhetoric in the days since conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has told his millions of online followers five times since Kirk’s death that they need to “fight or die” in what he describes as a deepening cultural and political conflict, even as most elected officials across the country have called for calm.
In addition to calling on his followers to fight, Musk has demanded the imprisonment of rapper Bobby Vylan for insulting Kirk after his death, called upon fellow tech executives to deplatform or fire other critics of Kirk and accused the media and educational institutions of “programming people to murder” — all part of a dark turn in Musk’s language since Kirk was shot.
Responding to the killing, a strain of activists and commentators on the far right has pushed for civil war, mass arrests or other forms of retribution.
At the White House, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller vowed vengeance Monday, and Musk, although he has been out of the White House since May, has pushed in the same direction.
Musk’s comments have come in posts on X, the social media app he owns, as well as in a livestreamed speech Saturday to a far-right rally in London. In the speech, he said “violence is coming” and called for the dissolution of the British Parliament and new elections.
Experts have warned that hypertoxic and violent language can sometimes influence people offline, including by encouraging acts of vigilante violence against those seen as disloyal, although there have been no reports of further violence since Kirk’s killing.
Musk didn’t immediately respond to a request for an interview Monday about his recent posts.
On Monday, the office of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer denounced Musk’s weekend speech, calling it “dangerous and inflammatory language” that threatened “violence and intimidation on our streets.”
Musk, as the owner of X and its most-followed account, has an enormous megaphone. He’s also the world’s wealthiest person, after Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison briefly unseated him last week.
Musk’s political future has been a question mark since he left the Trump administration more than three months ago, quitting his full-time role with President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. He has feuded off and on with Trump. And while he has at times said he plans to start his own political party in the United States, his language in the meantime has fixated on extreme ideas and civilizational conflict.
In the days before Kirk’s shooting, Musk had posted several times about changing racial demographics, expressing concern that there weren’t more white people around the world and about birth rates in majority-white countries.
“White people are a rapidly diminishing minority of global population,” Musk posted on Sept. 6. In a follow-up post, he added, “no one seems to care.”
Last month, Musk also urged people to “fight” in comments about immigration and cultural conflict in the United Kingdom and Ireland, where he has long pushed for a crackdown on refugees and migrants.
“It’s now or never. Fight, fight, fight!” he posted on Aug. 29. He followed up the next day with an additional thought: “Fight or die is what it comes down to.”
Musk has a record of using what experts call white supremacist dog whistles, such as predicting “civil war” in Europe over immigration, a prophecy that few believed at the time and that hasn’t come to pass. He has also smeared Haitians as cannibals and stoked unfounded claims about a genocide of white people in his native South Africa.
Musk also embraced violent imagery when he was in government, wielding a literal chainsaw as his emblem for cutting government spending and regulations and boasting that he fed the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper.” The dismantling of USAID could lead to 14 million deaths over five years, according to one analysis.
But the shooting of Kirk on a Utah college campus Wednesday appeared to underscore for Musk what he views as an existential risk. He has used a variation of the “fight or die” language five times since the shooting: four times on X, where he has 226 million followers, and again in his livestreamed speech to the London far-right rally.
It’s not always clear whom Musk believes he is fighting or whom he believes his followers should fight. In one of the recent instances when he posted “fight or die,” Musk was responding to a pseudonymous account that had written about “fighting the woke mind virus.”
In another instance Saturday, Musk criticized a social media user who had endorsed violence. That person had written on Facebook that members of the far right “deserve to die,” prompting Musk to comment Saturday on X, “We must fight back or be murdered.”
Musk seemed to rule out the possibility of national calm.
“Peace is not possible with people who revel in murder,” he posted Saturday.
The Kirk shooting has also prompted Musk to reverse his long-stated opposition to what conservatives have long derided as “cancel culture.” In August 2023, Musk pledged on X to pay the legal bills for people who said they were unfairly treated by their employers for “posting or liking something on this platform,” but in the past several days he has urged severe consequences for anyone celebrating Kirk’s death.
On Friday, Musk pushed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to look into reports that some of his employees had been criticizing Kirk after his death. Microsoft said later in the day on X: “Comments celebrating violence against anyone are unacceptable and do not align with our values.” A company spokesperson had no additional comment Monday.
On Saturday, Musk posted a list of people — including teachers and nurses — who, according to another user, had said “vile things” about Kirk’s death.
On Monday, Musk targeted Hasan Piker, a leftist streamer with 2.9 million followers on Twitch who has partly blamed Kirk for his own death. Musk shared a complaint about Piker’s comments on X and publicly tagged Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and executive chair — who is relevant to the topic because Amazon owns Twitch, Piker’s preferred platform. Musk had earlier posted that Piker should be banned from Twitch.
A spokesperson for Amazon had no immediate comment Monday.
Musk separately endorsed a post from a member of Congress who said those celebrating Kirk’s death “must be thrown out of civil society.” He shared the post with a “100” emoji.