Tesla CEO Elon Musk has spent 2026 turning his X feed into a problem no investor relations team can fix. His posts have escalated from trolling into open white nationalism, and this week his AI company sued the state of Minnesota to block a law targeting nonconsensual sexual deepfakes.
The board of a public company would have fired the CEO for just a fraction of the stuff Musk is posting these days. However, Tesla is not a normal company. Shareholders have given full control to Musk and now, they have to live with it.
A mild interview lit the fuse
A lot of the latest escalation traces back to one sit-down.
On July 23, The Economist’s editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, interviewed Musk. It wasn’t a hit job. There was no Epstein question. She calmly pushed back on his claims about Europe, telling him “London is a much safer city than any city in the United States” and that violent crime in the UK is coming down. She pointed out that he’d painted the UK as “overrun with terrifying Muslim immigrants,” with “rape on every corner,” despite not having visited in years.
In the same conversation, Musk admitted he’d overdone it: “I think I got a little too involved in politics. I got carried away, frankly.” Tesla executives had already conceded on an earnings call that “political sentiment” was weighing on the brand.
When she noted that plenty of people loathe him, Musk shrugged it off: “Maybe some people do loathe me. And that’s probably true. I don’t care.” He argued that he believes more people love him because 250 million people follow him on X – even though independent studies show most of these accounts are bots or inactive. And many people who follow him don’t necessarily like him or agree with him.
His own AI fact-checked the ‘Hitler was a socialist’ post
Start with the one his own product debunked.
Musk posted that “Hitler was a socialist, therefore all socialists are Hitler.” It’s sitting at 111 million views with a community note attached.
Grok, the AI built by Musk’s own xAI, corrected him on his own platform: the Nazi Party used “National Socialist” as propaganda, and Hitler rejected Marxist socialism. When your own chatbot is fact-checking you in public, that’s a new one.
The framing isn’t an accident. Painting the Nazis as socialists is a long-running attempt to launder fascism onto the left. They weren’t socialists. They were fascists who jailed and killed actual socialists.
Musk is literally promoting old Nazi propaganda to serve his purpose.
The Odyssey fight is really about race
Then there’s Homer.
Musk has spent months attacking director Christopher Nolan over his adaptation of The Odyssey, after a casting rumor that Nolan cast Lupita Nyong’o, a Black actress, in the film. In May, Musk flatly called Nolan “an anti-White racist.” In July he wrote that Nolan “desecrated Homer and groveled on his knees just to meet the woke rules required to win an Oscar. What a worm.”
His fix: “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”
The Odyssey is a myth. It has a cyclops, a witch who turns men into pigs, and a six-headed sea monster. There’s nothing to be “historically accurate” about. The word “historically” isn’t doing scholarly work here. It’s doing racial work.
Remigration, weighted votes, and a ‘100’ for white nationalism
The politics aren’t subtle anymore. Musk is now openly white nationalist and he is supporting clear fascist ideology.
On July 25, two days after the interview, Musk replied to a “remigration” post with “Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor.” “Remigration” is the far-right euphemism for mass deportation by ethnicity. The post has 3.1 million views. Back in January, he replied with a “💯” to a post arguing “white solidarity is the only way to survive.”
The same day, he replied “Yes” to a post calling to deport “Somalian punks who harass mothers at a playground.” That post was defending Shiloh Hendrix, the Minnesota woman convicted a day earlier of disorderly conduct for hurling racial slurs at a Black, autistic 8-year-old on a playground. Musk sided with her, and endorsed mass deportation in the same breath.
There’s something worrying when Musk sees a video of a woman calling a young child the n-word and takes the side of the woman.
He’s also gone after New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, writing that Mamdani “has built nothing. He is a taker, never a maker.” That’s the maker-versus-taker framing, aimed at a Muslim elected official, with 8.5 million views.
He went as far as comparing Mamdani to the 9-11 terrorists.
On July 29, Musk called Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke “a national treasure of Canada,” right as Lütke was defending a plan to strip pensioners of the vote and hand wealthy taxpayers up to five votes each. The CEO of Tesla, cheering on a tech CEO who wants to weight democracy by income – a clear facist and anti-democracy idea. Let that sit.
Now xAI is suing over a deepfake law
Here’s the newest one, and it’s the ugliest.
On July 28, Musk’s xAI sued Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison in federal court to block HF 1606, the country’s first law targeting AI “nudification,” the apps and models that generate nonconsensual nude or sexual images of real people. The law takes effect August 1 and carries civil penalties of $500,000 per image.
xAI’s argument is that the law is overbroad, content-based, and unconstitutional under the First Amendment, and that it creates strict liability with no safe harbor for platforms that do try to block the abuse.
The bill’s sponsors say nudification victims are “overwhelmingly women and children.” And xAI is the same company that Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Musk’s own children, sued weeks ago over sexual images generated by Grok. Of every company in America, xAI chose to be the first to march into court to knock this law down, rather than push to fix it. That’s the part no First Amendment brief cleans up.
He said he got carried away, but he’s reviving his PAC instead.
Musk’s “I got carried away” line was supposed to signal a step back. It lasted about a week. On July 29, Axios reported that Musk is reviving America PAC to fund Republican turnout for the November midterms, run by his political adviser Chris Young, with door-knocking, digital ads, and direct mail. He spent more than $260 million through the same PAC in 2024.
So the guy who just admitted he overdid it is loading up to do it all over again, at scale, right as the posts get uglier. This isn’t winding down. It’s the warm-up.
Electrek’s Take
People’s memory are short. It’s almost as if they already forgot what happened with Tesla in early-mid 2025 when Musk was all-in in DOGE. The backlash was massive.
He is about to jump right back into politics with both feet and I fear the same thing will happen or worse.
The numbers already show it. A study we covered pegged Musk’s politics at over a million lost US sales, Tesla’s brand loyalty collapsed once he “got political”, and the stock just shed $140 billion in a single day after a brutal Q2 last week.
Now, in 2026, with Musk openly supporting white nationalism, reimigration, and facists idealogies, something that wasn’t as clear to everyone during the last election cycle, he is likely to put a bigger target on Tesla’s back in the mid-terms.
It’s getting scary.
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