Report: Musk Tweeted Baseless Conspiracy Theory

Now-deleted Musk Tweet

Three days after completing a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, Elon Musk on Sunday morning used his new platform to spread a bizarre, anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi in San Francisco that had been published by a fringe Southern California website, according to The S-F Chronicle.

Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla and the richest person in the world, according to Forbes, posted the tweet — which was deleted later Sunday morning after generating intense reaction online — while facing scrutiny over his plan to roll back the monitoring of content on the social media site. He was responding to a tweet by Hillary Clinton.

The former secretary of state — apparently referring to the arrest of a suspect in the attack on Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband who had professed conspiratorial, far-right views — wrote Saturday morning, “The Republican Party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories. It is shocking, but not surprising, that violence is the result. As citizens, we must hold them accountable for their words and the actions that follow.”

Musk responded Sunday at 5:15 a.m. Pacific time with a tweet that said, “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” and posted a link to a baseless, anti-LGBTQ article in the Santa Monica Observer. By 10:30 a.m. Sunday, the message and link had been retweeted more than 30,000 times and liked more than 110,000 times, before being deleted less than an hour later.

Last year, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Santa Monica Observer was “notorious for publishing false news,” and once claimed “that Hillary Clinton had died and that a body double had been sent to debate Donald Trump.”

Paul Pelosi was attacked in the couple’s Pacific Heights home early Friday morning. Authorities believe 42-year-old East Bay resident David DePape forced entry into the home looking for Nancy Pelosi, who has been a central target of far-right conspiracy theories such as the QAnon mass delusion.