With Election Day on the horizon, Elon Musk is leaning into violent and vulgar rhetoric.
Musk, one of the world’s richest men, posted a video to X on Sunday in which a gladiator with President Donald Trump’s face briefly sword fights with and kicks a warrior with Vice President Kamala Harris’ face — a video whose creator appears to be aligned with neo-Nazism.
Before that, on Friday, Elon Musk’s super PAC, America PAC, published a video to X calling Harris the “C-word” before going on to call her a “Communist.” The advertisement was deleted from America PAC’s X account Monday.
Together the posts add to what had already been heated rhetoric from Musk that has featured a near-constant stream of misleading or outright false claims around the election that have drawn the ire of election officials. While most of those claims have been posted to X, the social media platform he owns, he more recently has begun doing in-person events where he has also repeated debunked conspiracy theories and made joking statements about an interest in assassinating Harris.
Musk and America PAC did not respond to requests for comment.
The sword-fighting video, which has drawn more than 22 million views, opens with a voiceover of Musk saying at a recent rally in Pennsylvania “this election I think is going to decide the fate of America and the fate of western civilization.” The video then shows a series of scenes depicting Trump as a gladiator, speeches from wrestler Hulk Hogan and various images of flags and rockets.
The video shared by America PAC and Musk is watermarked with the creator’s online handle. The creator has taken credit for the video and others like it, and has also posted numerous images and statements on his social media that appear to align with neo-Nazi ideology, including several images where he appears to be giving a Nazi salute, and a video in which he holds up the Imperial German Flag, which the Anti-Defamation League says has become popular among German neo-Nazis. In other posts, he glorified Nazi soldiers and wrote "White men will save the world." The creator of the video did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
An NBC News report published in April found that antisemitism and neo-Nazism on the platform have surged under Musk’s ownership of X.
And in an advertisement published Friday, America PAC repeatedly emphasized that Harris is a “C-word” — alluding to a vulgar term for women — before going on to call her a “Communist.”
“Kamala Harris is a ‘C-word.’ You heard that right, a big old ‘C-word,’” the America PAC video says. “She’s a tax-hiking, regulation-loving, gun-grabbing, Communist. And the worst part, she’s proud of it. Kamala Harris, the ‘C-word’ America simply can’t afford.”
America PAC has spent nearly $140,000 on political ads endorsing Trump’s campaign or attacking Democrats, according to the nonprofit OpenSecrets. Musk has given his super PAC nearly $75 million, according to a campaign finance filing.
Musk has previously faced scrutiny for how he’s talked about Harris. In September, after a second assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, Musk received backlash after making several jokes regarding Harris, including a now-deleted X post in which he wrote that “no one is even trying to assassinate” President Joe Biden or Harris. After deleting the post, Musk made another, writing, “Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text.”
Over the summer, Musk also shared a parody campaign advertisement for Harris in which a voice-over made to sound like the vice president calls Biden senile and herself “the ultimate diversity hire.”
America PAC’s video calling Harris a Communist comes amid a back-and-forth between the presidential candidates over the claim that Trump is a fascist. In a CNN town hall last week, Harris called Trump “a fascist” following reports from his former chief of staff John Kelly that Trump had praised Hitler during his time in office.
The same day as Harris’ town hall, Trump posted on X that “Comrade Kamala Harris sees that she is losing, and losing badly, especially after stealing the Race from Crooked Joe Biden, so now she is increasingly raising her rhetoric, going so far as to call me Adolf Hitler, and anything else that comes to her warped mind.”
