Tesla billionaire Elon Musk is facing backlash online after spouting off via X about what he considered a lack of recent news coverage of a shooting spree in Philadelphia that left eight students injured.
“Seems to be hardly any coverage of this mass shooting,” Musk, who owns the social media platform, said in a post on Tuesday that received 16.7 million views.
“The legacy media is racist against Asians & Whites, so only prints crime involving those races,” Musk wrote.
The shooting he referred to occurred on the afternoon of March 6 as several students waited for a public bus, WTXF reported.
Philadelphia police and the United States Marshals Service captured three suspects and continue to search for a fourth, according to the Philadelphia-based news outlet.
Each of the captured suspects, as well as the one authorities are looking for, are Black males, as seen in mugshots posted by WPVI.
Musk made the comments while reposting an X post from a right-wing gadfly who wrote, “The mass shooting of school students failed to generate wall-to-wall national media coverage.”
Philadelphia reporter Victoria Brownworth was among those who fired back at Musk about the supposed lack of news coverage of the shooting that injured seven teen boys and a teen girl.
“I’m a Philadelphia [reporter] who reported on this story on [X] in real time last Wednesday as a mass shooting,” Brownworth retorted. “I have reported on it repeatedly as new details of the story have evolved. You seem not to know that Philadelphia is a majority Black city and that this story was reported on the national news because you only watch Fox.”
The websites of NBC News, ABC News, the New York Post and CNN did appear to cover the shooting within the past week.
Author Boyce Watkins responded to Musk’s post, saying that while he agrees with Tesla’s CEO on most issues that “legacy media is heavily biased and overly liberal,” he’s worried as a Black man whether Musk, a South African who grew up during apartheid, has distorted his perspective on “a lot” of issues.
Musk, who’s from Pretoria, hasn’t publicly spoken often about how being raised in the racist, segregated system in South Africa might have affected him, The New York Times reported, and he ignored their requests for comment on his childhood for a 2022 story.
“I love your genius when you’re building rockets and saving the planet – I also love when you’re promoting free speech. But when you get into the act of vilifying Black people, I get concerned,” Watkins wrote on X.
“One good exercise would be this: For every negative post you make about Black people, make a positive one. I don’t think you have to act as though all Black people are perfect, just make sure you don’t use your wealth, power and platform to strip us of our humanity,” Watkins suggested.
Another X user replied to Watkins’ response, saying, “Apartheid Elon is Apartheid Elon. No one should be surprised.”
