Elon Musk attended the “Exploring New Frontiers of Innovation: A Dialogue between Mark Reed and Elon Musk” session on the third day of the 2024 Cannes International Festival of Creativity in Cannes, France on June 19, 2024.
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Tesla CEO and X majority shareholder Elon Musk wrote and then deleted a post on Sunday postal X seemed to question why there weren’t more assassination threats against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Musk, who has 197.8 million followers on X, posted the message shortly after a second apparent assassination attempt on Republican former President Donald Trump.
The post was started by an X user who asked: “Why do they want to kill Donald Trump?”
Musk responded, “Nobody even tried to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” punctuating his sentence with a skeptical-looking emoji.
Musk faced immediate backlash for the post. But he keep at it and defended approx. 9 hoursbefore he deleted it.
Musk’s tweet was viewed by at least 1.3 million users, retweeted by more than 3,000 users, and liked by at least 18,000 users.
Hours after the first post was deleted, Musk wrote two more X posts, claiming the original post was an unwanted joke.
“Well, one lesson I learned is that just because I said something to a group of people and they laughed, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be as funny as a post on X,” Musk said release 2:58 a.m. ET Monday morning.
he follow up Two minutes later, the post read: “It turns out that jokes aren’t as funny if people don’t understand the context and are delivered plain text.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on Musk’s post.
An X Press Relations spokesman did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment on Sunday, nor did Musk himself.
The White House condemned Musk’s comments in a statement on Monday.
“As President Biden and Vice President Harris said after yesterday’s disturbing news, ‘There is no place for political violence or any violence in our country,’ and we all must do our part.” force to ensure this incident does not lead to more violence,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said. “Violence should only be condemned and never encouraged or joked about. Such comments are irresponsible.”
On Sunday, the FBI said the incident appeared to be an assassination attempt and that Trump was not injured.
The former president was rushed to the airport shortly before 2 p.m. ET after the Secret Service opened fire on a gunman with a rifle who was 300 to 500 yards away as Trump golfed at a West Palm Beach club. Safe place.
The suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, made his first court appearance on Monday.
Musk Agree Trump in July, just hours after the Republican presidential nominee survived his first assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania.
The billionaire entrepreneur and the former president are now allies, a sharp contrast from their public feud two years ago.
Musk said he helped create and fund the pro-Trump political action committee America PAC.
Trump, in turn, has endorsed some of Musk’s policy ideas, including a proposal to create a Government Efficiency Council to rein in federal spending. Musk has repeatedly volunteered to lead such a committee, and Trump has so far not ruled out the possibility.
—CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed reporting from San Francisco.
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