Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Tesla and Twitter, has inserted himself into the controversy over “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams, who said on a YouTube livestream last week that Black people were “a hate group” and white people should “just get the hell away” from them.
Hundreds of newspapers, including USA Today, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and The New York Times international print edition, stopped running the syndicated comic strip in response.
Responding to an article about Mr. Adams’s rant, Mr. Musk tweeted on Sunday that “the media is racist.” He added, “For a *very* long time, US media was racist against nonwhite people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians.”
Mr. Musk and Mr. Adams did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Musk’s comments come during a rocky period for his businesses. Since he took over the social media network last year, he has laid off thousands of workers, including another 200 on Saturday night. Mr. Musk is also fighting a lawsuit by Tesla shareholders challenging his pay package and other suits that claim the carmaker’s self-driving software is dangerously overhyped.
Within months of his takeover of Twitter, slurs against Black Americans and other minority groups surged on the platform, researchers found. Mr. Musk has denied claims that hate speech on Twitter has increased under his ownership.
Twitter faced an exodus of advertisers after Mr. Musk signaled that he would loosen Twitter’s content moderation rules. Mr. Musk has called himself a “free speech absolutist” and offered “amnesty” to thousands of suspended users last year.
