Elon Musk, Islamophobe
Mehdi on the world's richest man just proudly copping to his anti-Muslim bigotry – and why it's so dangerous. Plus: a (rare) defeat for Donald Trump in his war on journalists.
On this day in 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that President Richard Nixon had to hand over the incriminating Watergate tapes, rejecting his claim of absolute executive privilege.
Good morning! Mehdi here. So I watched ‘The Odyssey,’ and it was fun and deep and long but what stood out to me most was… the frickin’ creepy horror-film trailer masquerading as a family ice-cream ad that they aired before the movie began.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Elon Musk says outrageous things about Muslims in a mainstream media interview and… no one seems to care. The Trump administration backed down in its latest fight against the press, while the president has issued sweeping new tariffs that nobody wants.
‘Are You Anti-Muslim?’
There are many words that could be used to describe Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire and one of Donald Trump’s biggest financial backers.
Authoritarian. Narcissist. Hypocrite. Sadist. Snowflake. Racist.
But there is one label that somehow still escapes him, despite years of evidence for it staring us in the face: Islamophobe.
That omission is remarkable. Musk has spent years amplifying some of the most virulent anti-Muslim voices in the English-speaking world. He has funded and amplified Britain’s most notorious anti-Muslim thug, Tommy Robinson. In early 2025, he was “boosting disinformation and divisive rhetoric on X about Muslim grooming gangs in the UK, posting almost 200 times,” according to Wired, in the space of a few days. In recent weeks, he has been praising and promoting the unabashedly anti-Muslim, anti-migrant film ‘Citizen Vigilante.’
And yet, for all the justified scrutiny on Musk’s politics, his businesses, and his support for far-right parties, his Islamophobia has rarely been treated as the scandal it plainly is. That says as much about our mainstream media as it does about Elon Musk himself.
Credit, then, to Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of the Economist, who managed to secure a sit-down interview with the world’s first trillionaire and not only raised his boosting of ‘Citizen Vigilante’ (“it glorified the murdering of a Muslim immigrant family, I honestly think that it is irresponsible for you to put that up on X”) but also asked him, rather bluntly: “Are you anti-Muslim?”