© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: People gather to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to California as he is scheduled to meet with entrepreneur Elon Musk, at union square in San Francisco, California, U.S. September 18, 2023. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File
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JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur accused by civil rights groups of amplifying anti-Jewish hatred on his X social media platform, will meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog in Israel on Monday, Channel 12 TV said on Sunday.
An Israeli source confirmed the visit by Musk, a billionaire who also runs Tesla (NASDAQ:) and SpaceX. Spokespeople for Tesla and X, formerly known as Twitter, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Musk’s visit coincides with a four-day truce in an Israeli war with Palestinian Hamas militants in Gaza.
Netanyahu met Musk in California on Sept. 18 and urged him to strike a balance between protecting free expression and fighting hate speech after weeks of controversy over antisemitic content on X.
Musk responded by saying he was against antisemitism and against anything that “promotes hate and conflict,” repeating his previous statements that X would not promote hate speech.
During that visit, before the war, about 200 people protested efforts by Netanyahu’s right-wing government to curb the powers of Israeli courts. They gathered outside Tesla’s California factory, where the meeting took place.
Then on Nov. 15 Musk agreed with a post on X that falsely claimed Jewish people were stoking hatred against white people, saying the user who referenced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory was speaking “the actual truth.”
The White House condemned what it called an “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate” that “runs against our core values as Americans.”
Major U.S. companies including Walt Disney (NYSE:), Warner Bros Discovery (NASDAQ:) and NBCUniversal parent Comcast (NASDAQ:) paused their advertisements on his social media site.
The “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory holds that Jewish people and leftists are engineering the ethnic and cultural replacement of white populations with non-white immigrants that will lead to a “white genocide.”
Antisemitism and Islamophobia have risen in the United States and worldwide, including during the now seven-week-old war between Israel and Hamas.
Following the outbreak of war, antisemitic incidents in the United States rose by nearly 400% from the year-earlier period, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization that fights antisemitism.
Musk has said X should be a platform for people to post diverse viewpoints, but the company will limit the distribution of certain posts that may violate its policies, calling the approach “freedom of speech, not reach.”
Musk is developing an artificial intelligence startup xAI, and Israel is considered a world leader in the field, thanks to burgeoning computing and robotics industries.
Israel’s almost $500 billion economy, previously on track for growth to top 3% this year with low unemployment, is now estimated at around 2% with slow growth expected in 2024 as long as the war continues. After an initial 6% tumble the outset of the war, the has gained 8% against the dollar and is now at pre-war levels. Helped mainly by local investors, stock prices have also recovered from a steep drop last month.
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