“Didn’t know you were famous,” the rapper Juliani, an old friend and musical collaborator, texted me from his studio in Nairobi.I didn’t have a clue what he was referring to, but then he forwarded me the link to a tweet by Elon Musk that included a screenshot of a 2019 Al Jazeera column of mine, “Abolishing whiteness has never been more urgent.” The original post was circulating on Twitter/X, courtesy of a white nationalist poster who obviously wasn’t too happy with the headline. Neither was Elon, who retweeted it with the comment, “It’s not okay to say this about any group!”Although the post was only a few hours old, it already had five million views. Over the next few days, it would swell to close to 20 million.“Elon, you’re six years late to the party, dude!” I texted Juliani back. “Where were you in 2019 when that piece was published?”
It’s not ok to say this about any group! https://t.co/PzofHZEOsf
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 1, 2025
As we all know, the Elon Musk of 2019 probably would not have retweeted this, or any posts by avowed white nationalists with a predilection for conspiracy theories about Jews, Blacks and the Great Replacement. He was too busy doing Mars documentaries and cementing Tesla’s reputation as the car and the company that would save humanity.But this is 2025, a few weeks after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, with Trump vowing to arrest anyone who smells of antifa on terrorism charges, and the soon-to-be world’s first trillionaire has just put the proverbial target on my back for his 200 million followers. A f …
