Topline
Just hours after billionaire X owner Elon Musk reinstated the account of self-proclaimed white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his platform, the hard-right Gen-Z activist on Saturday slammed the Anti-Defamation League after it was criticized by Musk.
Key Facts
The Anti-Defamation League, which describes Fuentes as a “white supremacist leader” who has “united disparate groups within what was until recently known as the alt right,” issued a warning Friday morning amid speculation of Fuentes’ return to the platform, saying in a post: “We are concerned that white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes may be officially welcomed back on X.”
Musk replied to that post Saturday afternoon, arguing the “ADL is still fighting yesterday’s battles,” to which Fuentes responded: “ADL lost, Patriots won.”
Since returning to Twitter, now known as X, last night, Fuentes has also replied to a post from notorious social media star Andrew Tate—who faces allegations of sex trafficking in Romania—with Fuentes appearing to stand in solidarity with Tate, writing, “One struggle.”
Fuentes and Musk have sparred with the ADL in recent years, with Musk threatening a lawsuit against the organization last September, claiming the group hurt X’s advertising revenue over critical statements to advertisers, and ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt criticizing Fuentes’ comments praising Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Twitter suspended Fuentes in December 2021 for “repeated violations,” which made it one of many platforms to ban him, behind Reddit, Spotify, TikTok and YouTube, which Fuentes blasted at the time as a “concerted effort by leftists, conservative inc gatekeepers and silicon valley censors to silence” him.
Fuentes’ account was initially restored last January, after Musk took over the platform now called X, though the platform suspended the account once again just days later after facing widespread criticism.
Fuentes broke into the public eye during his freshman year at Boston University when he said he received death threats for attending the racist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a driver rammed his car into a group of counter-protesters, injuring nearly three dozen people and killing one.
Fuentes went on to found the hard-right America First Political Action Conference in 2020 in a bid to distance himself from the Conservative Political Action Coalition, and in 2021 referred to the Jan. 6 Capitol riots as “awesome.”
Key Background
Musk, a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, vowed to reinstate previously suspended Twitter accounts after closing on his $44 billion purchase for the platform in October 2022, sparking widespread concern his lax content moderation policies could lead to a proliferation of online hate speech. Since taking over the platform, Musk has brought back a slew of controversial accounts, including former President Donald Trump, rapper Kanye West, Trump advisor Steve Bannon, as well as MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, former Trump lawyer Lin Wood and rapper Azealia Banks, whose accounts had all been suspended. In November, just over a year after Musk’s takeover, left-wing watchdog Media Matters for America released a scathing report that found advertisements from a group of major companies on X appeared next to pro-Nazi posts. Multiple advertisers, including Apple, Disney and IBM, pulled their ads from Twitter in the aftermath of that report, and after Musk appeared to promote another antisemitic post. X filed a defamation lawsuit against the watchdog group weeks after the report was released, claiming Media Matters manipulated the site’s algorithms to create a “false impression” of how ads are displayed for users.
Surprising Fact
Fuentes has also crossed paths with Trump, who reportedly hosted him at a meal in November 2022 at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye West, though Trump later claimed the meal was “quick” and “uneventful,” and claimed in a Fox News interview that Fuentes was not invited but simply one of West’s guests. Last March, West also distanced himself from Fuentes, firing him from his longshot 2024 presidential campaign and replacing him with hard-right activist and former Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos (West later ended his campaign).
Forbes Valuation
We estimate Musk, who also heads electric vehicle maker Tesla and rocket manufacturer SpaceX, has a net worth of approximately $198.4 billion, making him the world’s third-richest person, only behind LVMH magnate Bernard Arnault ($212.5 billion) and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ($203.8 billion).
