Elon Musk visited Israel Monday. He toured Kfar Aza, a kibbutz that Hamas attacked on Oct. 7, killing dozens, and was photographed alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two then recorded a conversation on X, the social media platform Musk owns, and where he has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories. Just this month, for example, Musk wrote, “You have just said the absolute truth” in response to a post that read:

Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.

This did not come up in Musk’s conversation with Netanyahu, a talk that consisted mostly of defending Israel’s methods of war in Gaza, which Musk vaguely promised to help rebuild. Nor did either man mention other Musk posts from earlier this year, like when he likened Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros to supervillain Magneto and said that Soros hated humanity, or when Musk blamed the Anti-Defamation League, which was founded to fight against the defamation of Jews, for advertisers leaving his social media platform.

It is tempting to look at these comments and compare them, for example, to head of the ADL Jonathan Greenblatt’s recent decision to praise Musk for his “leadership in fighting hate” after Musk said that using the terms “decolonization” and “from the river to the sea” would be considered violations of his platform’s terms of service. But there is another context in which to........

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