Tesla CEO and X majority owner Elon Musk wrote and then deleted a Sunday post on X that appeared to question why there weren’t more assassination threats made against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Musk, who has 197.8 million listed followers on X, posted the message shortly after a second apparent assassination attempt against Republican former President Donald Trump.
The post was prompted by an X user who asked, “Why they want to kill Donald Trump?”
Musk replied, “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” punctuating his sentence with a thinking face emoji.
Both Biden and Harris have received assassination threats while in office.
Musk immediately faced backlash for the post. But he stood by it and defended it for roughly 9 hours, before he deleted it.
Within an hour, Musk’s tweet had been viewed by at least 1.3 million users, while over 3,000 users had reposted it and at least 18,000 users had liked it.
Hours after the initial post was deleted, Musk penned two other X posts in which he claimed the original one was an ill-received joke.
“Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X,” Musk posted at 2:58 a.m. E.T. on Monday.
He followed up that post two minutes later: “Turns
