Elon Musk says he “wanted to punch” Kanye West

6 December, 2022

Elon Musk and Kanye West

Elon Musk has said that he wanted to punch Kanye West over the rapper’s recent anti-Semitic comments.

The new Twitter boss was participating in a live Q&A on Twitter Spaces last Saturday (December 3) about the “Twitter files” story when one of the hosts confronted him with a “blunt” question about approaching censorship and freedom of expression (via The Jerusalem Post).

Last week West tweeted an image containing a swastika inside a Star of David: a move that Musk ruled violated the platform’s policies “against incitement to violence”. West’s account was suspended on Friday (December 2).

On Thursday (December 1), US far-right conspiracy theory website Infowars published an interview that host Alex Jones held with West in which the latter praised Adolf Hitler and denied that the Holocaust happened nor that Hitler killed six million Jewish people.

Musk told those listening into the Q&A on Saturday: “I personally wanted to punch Kanye, so that was definitely inciting me to violence.”

Elon Musk
Elon Musk. CREDIT: Theo Wargo/Getty Images for TIME)

“I think it’s important that people know that it was my decision,” he added of Ye’s account suspension.

Musk said: “At some point you have to say what is incitement to violence because it is against the law in the US.

“Posting swastikas in what is obviously not a good way is an incitement of violence.”

Kanye West
Kanye West. Credit: MEGA/GC Images.

West said in the Infowars interview: “I like Hitler… I’m not trying to be shocking, I like Hitler. The Holocaust is not what happened, let’s look at the facts of that and Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities.”

Ye later added: “[Hitler] had a really cool outfit and he was a really good architect… and he didn’t kill six million Jews.”

You can see excerpted clips from the interview below.

“I tried my best,” Musk wrote in a since-deleted tweet related to the matter. “Despite that, he again violated our rule against incitement to violence. Account will be suspended.”

The Infowars interview, which also featured white supremacist and known Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes, was described by the Republican Jewish Coalition as a “horrific cesspool of dangerous, bigoted Jew hatred” (via Newsweek).

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as numerous other historical fact-checkers, around six million Jewish people were killed during the Holocaust between 1941 and 1945 during World War II in Europe.

In a 2011 song from his album with Jay-Z, ‘Watch The Throne’, West mentioned the event in his song ‘Who Gon Stop Me’. The opening line of the song delivered by West goes: “This is something like the Holocaust, millions of our people lost.”

In recent months the rapper has made various statements that have been criticised as anti-Semitic including saying he’s “going death con 3 [sic] On JEWISH PEOPLE”.

West has repeatedly denied that his remarks are racist such as saying that he doesn’t believe in the term “anti-Semitism” because he claims that it’s “not factual”.

However, in October he offered some sort of apology in an interview with Piers Morgan, saying: “I’m sorry for the people that I hurt with the ‘death con’… I feel like I caused hurt and confusion”.

Meanwhile, a petition that was started to remove West from streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music has reached more than 50,000 signatures.

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