Elon Musk Takes Flirtation With Pizzagate to the Next Level

There was never any evidence that Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory claiming prominent Democrats were running a satanic pedophilic operation out of a D.C. pizza parlor, was real. No supposed victims ever came forward, and the basement of Comet Ping Pong — where conspiracy theorists claimed everything went down — didn’t even exist. Yet nearly a decade after the crazed theory was put to bed, Elon Musk is shoving it back into the public consciousness.

The X (formerly Twitter) owner boasts more than 164 million followers on the platform, and last week he dipped his toe into the conspiracy theory, responding “weird” to a post attempting to link the progressive watchdog Media Matters to it.

On Tuesday, Musk escalated his engagement with Pizzagate. “Does seem at least a little suspicious,” he wrote on X alongside a meme showing The Office character Michael Scott claiming “Pizzagate is real.”

The meme referenced the arrest and conviction of James Gordon Meek, a former ABC News journalist, on child pornography charges. Musk responded to his own tweet with an article on Meek’s guilty plea to the charges in July. While the crimes Meek committed are very real, Musk and other conspiracy theorists’ characterization of him as the chief debunker of the theory is false. According to Reuters, Meeks never wrote an investigative piece or debunking of Pizzagate while at ABC News, and viral headlines linking him to the theory were fabricated.

Musk deleted the entire thread later on Tuesday.

Hours before posting the meme amplifying the debunked theory, Musk wrote on X that “the public will increasingly come to realize that X is the best source of truth, causing our user numbers to rise as they abandon the less accurate sources of information.”

One can’t necessarily speak to user numbers, but a demographic that is actively fleeing the platform is Musk’s advertisers.

Earlier this month, Musk endorsed a claim by a user that Jewish people were promoting “dialectical hatred against whites.” Shortly after, Media Matters published a study about X placing ads for major companies alongside posts featuring neo-Nazi and antisemitic rhetoric. In response, advertisers like Apple, Disney, IBM, Sony, Paramount, and Warner Brothers Discovery have since pulled their ads from the platform.

In an apparent attempt at penitence, Mus made a trip to Israel on Monday during which he toured a kibbutz destroyed in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack against the country in the company of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Following the tour, Musk stated in an interview on Twitter Spaces that “we need to do everything possible to stop the hate.” X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino also stated in response to the controversy that “there’s no place for it anywhere in the world,” for discrimination and antisemitism.

But extremists are celebrating Musk’s conspiratorial turn. On QAnon forums, users are celebrating. “Elon Musk is doing exactly what anons wished for all these years: He’s making pizzagate mainstream news,” one wrote.

“If this isn’t winning, then I don’t know what is,” the user added.

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