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Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is scheduled next week to visit the site of the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland next week as part of an event to discuss antisemitism, the European Jewish Association said Thursday.
The two-day event scheduled to start Monday is meant to highlight the “disconcerting surge of anti-Semitism in Europe that has been escalating” since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack in Israel, the European Jewish Association said on its website. Musk will be at Auschwitz and attend other events in Krakow, according to association spokesman Nir Natan.
An agenda for the event shows Musk scheduled to appear at a symposium in Krakow for a discussion Monday with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. Participants are scheduled to visit Auschwitz on Tuesday.
Shapiro has appeared publicly before with Musk on the subject of antisemitism. In a largely sympathetic Sept. 28 discussion broadcast on X, Musk said he went to a Hebrew preschool in South Africa and described himself as “aspirationally Jewish.”
Musk recently has faced criticism over the spread of antisemitic content on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk purchased and took private in 2022. The Anti-Defamation League reported that antisemitic content surged more than 900 percent on X in the weeks after the Israel-Gaza conflict erupted Oct. 7, with Musk using his own account to amplify antisemitic tropes. The White House criticized him for “abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate,” while a number of major advertisers fled the platform.
Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League over the report. But he has also embarked on a series of media appearances in which he rebuked the Hamas militants for murdering innocent civilians. He toured a kibbutz with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in late November and shown a video documenting atrocities against Jews on Oct. 7.
Musk did not immediately respond to an email request for comment Thursday.