Neil Young has announced he is boycotting X, formerly Twitter, amid the ongoing outcry against an antisemitic tweet made by the company’s owner Elon Musk.
Writing on his website, Young said: “We are stopping all use of X that we can control. For reasons that should be obvious to the richest man on Earth, we are taking this action against his company.” He shared an image of Musk with the caption: “Tesla should fly flags of love – not hate.”
Last week Musk agreed with an antisemitic statement posted to X, describing a tweet by user @breakingbaht as “the actual truth” which read: “Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” and which claimed “western Jewish populations” were disliked by minority groups “flooding their country”.
Musk was widely condemned, with Apple, IBM and Disney among the major US companies to pause advertising on the platform. A White House statement said: “We condemn this abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans.”
Musk rejected the claims he is antisemitic, calling them “bogus … I wish only the best for humanity and a prosperous and exciting future for all.”
Young added a plea for peace amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, writing: “We do need to start over in the present and release our terrible connections to the past. As bad as they are, they need to be forgotten so we can be free to move on in life together, all humanity, focused on saving our planet for future generations of all people.”
His X boycott is added to his ongoing boycott of Spotify, which he opposed in January 2022, alleging the company’s Joe Rogan podcast spread misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines. Young said: “I want all my music off their platform … They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”
