The five hosts of “The View” on ABC had many criticisms for Elon Musk, his antisemitic tweet and his behavior around it Thursday.
The quintet of women around the table considered Musk’s response to advertisers pulling ads from X following his antisemitic tweet. In the video, he uses adult language, but also acknowledges the poor choice he made.
“What fascinates me about Elon Musk is that a human being could simultaneously be brilliant in one sense, and then so irresponsible and reckless,” Alyssa Farah Griffin said. “You’ve got to give him credit that he contributed so much to fighting climate change, what he’s done with electric vehicles with Tesla. I toured SpaceX once with him, and I mean, it’s incredible.
She added, “He’s a brilliant person, but then he shares things on his X, formerly known as Twitter. He shared a conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi that a 12-year-old could have googled to know it was fake. It wasn’t a real website. It wasn’t true and was also a hateful bigoted thing to share. So I just think it shows that like, you can be brilliant in one sense and not in others”
Joy Behar called the billionaire’s behavior irresponsible and disgraceful, citing that 46,000 posts were published on X last month under the hashtag “#HitlerWasRight.”
Sara Haines added emotional intelligence as an aspect to consider when analyzing Musk.
“He’s also not very emotionally intelligent. He cannot control his own response and regulate his emotions, but when he said that the advertisers would be responsible for killing the company — he’s kind of disassociating with what caused the advertisers to step away,” Haines pointed out.
“He knows as a businessman that companies are responsible to not only their employees but their consumers,” she added. “And we live in a time of conscientious consumerism when people want to put the one power they have, which is their dollar, towards something that matters, whether it’s for good or against something bad.”
Griffin also criticized Musk for not having more awareness of his X platform in terms of the content of his message and who he broadcasted it to.
“Where I take major issue is, I appreciate that he kind of acknowledged how dumb the post was, but antisemitism since Oct. 7 alone has increased by 54%. It is on the rise globally. It’s on the rise in the U.S., and there are 15 million Jews worldwide,” she said. “He tweeted that to 160 million X followers, he needs to realize he’s going after a minority that is being targeted and it is so unacceptable.”