The Anti-Defamation League Is Finally Sick of Elon Musk’s Nazi Jokes

After a year-long truce between Elon Musk, owner of the extremism-saturated X (formerly Twitter), and the Anti-Defamation League, an organization meant to combat antisemitism and other kinds of bigotry, it seems the billionaire and the advocacy group are on the outs once again.

Musk and the ADL had first taken shots at each other during a spat in 2023, with the nonprofit saying X had allowed an explosion of hate speech under Musk’s watch, and the billionaire countering that they were trying to smear him while stifling free speech. He even amplified a hashtag, #BanTheADL, that white supremacists used to call for the removal of the organization from the website, and blamed the ADL for a precipitous drop in ad revenue as brands ditched the app because of the rise in harmful content that it and other watchdogs had warned about.

But following Hamas‘ Oct. 7 attack on Israel that year, Musk and ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt came to an agreement about the need to restrict language on the platform associated with the Palestinian liberation movement. Musk also made symbolic visits to Israel and Auschwitz that seemed to further smooth things over.

A detente lasted until just after President Donald Trump‘s second inauguration this month. Even when Musk faced outrage for making a gesture at the event that white nationalists recognized (and celebrated) as a Nazi salute, the ADL urged people to give the billionaire — who has allowed pro-Nazi accounts to flourish on his platform — a pass. “This is a delicate moment,” read a post on Monday from the group’s official X account. “It seems that [Musk] made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge. In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath.”

But Musk made little attempt to allay concerns that he had thrown a “Sieg Heil” at a lectern bearing the United States presidential seal. Indeed, he seemed to enjoy the controversy, and continued to stoke it on Thursday with a series of Nazi-related puns. “Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations!” he wrote in a post on X that also included the line “Some people will Goebbels anything down!” as well as the baffling non-sequitur “His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler!” (X CEO Linda Yaccarino responded to all this with a laugh-crying emoji.)

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The World War II wordplay was evidently a bridge too far for Greenblatt after the ADL had gone to bat for Musk in a statement on the inauguration salute that was widely seen as an abdication of the nonprofit’s exact purpose. “We’ve said it hundreds of times before and we will say it again: the Holocaust was a singularly evil event, and it is inappropriate and offensive to make light of it,” he wrote in a post on X that quoted Musk’s, telling the world’s richest man that “the Holocaust is not a joke.” The ADL itself quote Greenblatt’s post and added, “Making inappropriate and highly offensive jokes that trivialize the Holocaust only serve to minimize the evil and inhumanity of Nazi crimes, denigrate the suffering of both victims and survivors and insult the memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Shoah.” (The ADL did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.)

These remarks spurred further criticism from various corners. Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish group that had taken the ADL to task for excusing Musk’s inflammatory gesture, wrote in their own X post: “The ADL will condemn Elon Musk’s awful, tasteless Holocaust puns… but thinks his Nazi salutes celebrating Trump’s inauguration are fine? They’re missing the big picture here.” Jewish political cartoonist Eli Valley went further, sharing an illustration of Greenblatt with his arm around a saluting Hitler and saying, “The salute is fine! Just don’t make jokes!”

Musk has yet to acknowledge the chiding from Greenblatt or the ADL, so it’s too early to say whether they will resume the sort of public bickering we saw in 2023. Still, he appeared to believe he had accomplished something with his trolling. When right-wing political commentator Dave Rubin replied to his Nazi puns with the comment “Humor is the fascist way to defeat these people,” Musk agreed, “They can’t stand being mocked,” using a laugh-crying emoji. It was not immediately clear who the pair meant by “they” or “these people.”