Storm on Musk for a tweet against Fauci and the Lgbtq+ community: “He is a far-right activist”

In just 24 hours Elon Musk wrote two tweets that put a strain on the limits of that “freedom of speech” so dear to the entrepreneur. Let’s see them.

The first attack is directed at the LGBTQ+ community and at Anthony Fauci, one of the world’s most authoritative infectious disease experts, as well as President Biden’s chief medical adviser.

Musk’s tweet is a play on words that has received a million likes. The way it is constructed, with a clear reference to the pronouns used in English-speaking countries by transgender and non-binary people (“my pronouns are they / them”), underlines the entrepreneur’s impatience with a way that respects interlocutor or the interlocutor as it does not force you to choose between the masculine third person singular pronoun “he” (he) and the feminine one “she” (she).

“Forcing others to use your pronouns when they don’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor polite,” Musk wrote in response to Scott Kelly, a former NASA astronaut who urged the entrepreneur to respect the Lgbtq+ community and not to “promote hatred towards people who are already marginalized and at risk of violence”.

With the same Tweet, Musk called for Fauci to be prosecuted for his role in managing the Covid-19 pandemic in America, in particular for the measures put in place to counter the spread of the virus, deemed too severe by the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX . On this issue too, Musk has been heavily criticized. Peter Hoetz, an American scientist and virologist, wrote to the entrepreneur that “Fauci has done nothing but serve his country. Musk should know that at least 200,000 Americans have lost their lives to anti-science rhetoric and misinformation.”

The strongest criticism of the entrepreneur perhaps came from The Atlantic, an authoritative US magazine which published an article entitled “Elon Musk is an extreme right-wing activist”, which states that the tweet on pronouns and on Fauci summarizes “everything you need to know about Musk”. “In five words – writes journalist Charlie Warzel – Musk manages to make fun of transgender and non-binary people, to show his contempt for public health officials and to send a signal to far-right trolls”.

Musk’s second attack, which occurred in the last few hours, is aimed at the former Twitter security chief, Yoel Roth, who left the company after the entrepreneur’s arrival. Roth is among the former employees of the social network accused – through the Twitter Files desired and promoted by Musk himself – of questionably handling the suspension of Donald Trump’s account following the riots of January 6, 2021, the day in which supporters of the former president stormed the US Congress.

The entrepreneur published an excerpt from Roth’s dissertation, written several years ago. “It seems that Yoel here is arguing that children can access Internet services for adults” speculated the entrepreneur, commenting on some sentences of Roth’s thesis. “Gay Data” – the title of Roth’s 2016 thesis at the University of Pennsylvania – talks about Grindr, the social networking popular among the Lgbtq+ community.

Following Musk’s tweet, Roth received numerous death threats.

Last December 9, Musk wrote that members of the Twitter security council have committed “a crime” because “for years they have refused to take action against child exploitation” that allegedly took place through the platform. Musk’s statement was answered by Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and long-time CEO of the company. “This is false,” Dorsey wrote.