After the latest apparent assassination attempt on presidential candidate Donald Trump, billionaire Elon Musk posted — and later deleted — an unhinged X-formerly-Twitter post pondering why no one has yet tried to murder President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris.

Musk has been one of Trump's loudest and most significant backers in the 2024 presidential election cycle. Not too long after the apparent assassination attempt on one of the former president's golf courses, the SpaceX CEO shared a conspiratorial post from a popular X user who took to the Musk-owned platform to ask why "they" — with no clarification as to whom the bogeyman of "they" might be — "want to kill Donald Trump?"

The user offered no evidence that the would-be assassination was part of a larger network of collusion (at this point, federal officials have arrested only one man in connection to the attempted attack on Trump's life.) Regardless, Musk responded with a conspiratorial musing of his own.

"And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala," Musk wrote in the post, which also lacked any evidence of larger forces at play. He also added an aspirational thinking emoji.

The statement was met with swift backlash from both sides of the political aisle, which is — or at least should be — unsurprising. On top of being the richest man on Earth, Musk has billion-dollar government contracts, some of which are for the military. For such a powerful and influential figure to hit publish on a post that not only boosts baseless conspiracy theories but could stand to incite political violence on its own is obviously and absolutely reckless.

"A reminder that Elon Musk is a contractor for [the Department of Defense] and the US [government] and has said things that would have gotten anyone kicked out of the military," anti-Trump conservative Republican and former congressman Adam Kinzinger, who is a veteran, wrote alongside a screenshot of Musk's inflammatory statement. "He needs to stop, or the [government] needs to treat him equally to everyone else."

After the wave of pushback rolled in, Musk deleted the comment — but not before it had garnered millions of views.

Musk defended the divisive statement as a "joke" that was funnier in person.

"Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don't know the context and the delivery is plain text," the Tesla CEO lamented in a later X post.

It isn't the first time Musk has publicly engaged in conspiracies about political violence.

In October 2022, he promoted baseless falsehoods about a violent attack on former House Speaker Nany Pelosi's husband that took place in their California home, citing a discredited website while insisting that there may have been "more than meets the eye" to the incident.

And more recently, the billionaire played a significant role in boosting completely false claims that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Ohio, which have led to escalating threats against people, schools, and government buildings in the area.

In short, Musk's self-alleged "joke" fits into a larger pattern of inflammatory posting that promotes baseless conspiracies and encourages political violence. You'd think he'd have learned better by now — but we wouldn't put our money on the redpilled billionaire climbing out of the misinformation gutters anytime soon.

More on Musk's media diet: Elon Musk Repeatedly Promoted "Conservative" Outlet That Was Secretly Being Funded by Moscow, According to DOJ Indictment


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