Elon Musk, the owner of social media platform X and luxury electric carmaker Tesla who at times has been accused of backing anti-Semitic posts, visited the memorial site of the former German concentration camp Auschwitz on Monday.
"It was incredlbly moving and deeply sad and tragic that humans can do this to other humans," Musk said in the Polish city of Kraków after the visit at a conference on online anti-Semitism organized by the European Jewish Association (EJA).
"It's good to have these memorials so this can never happen again. It hits you much more in the heart when you see it in person, I need a few days for it to sink in," Musk said.
Photos showed him on the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in then-occupied Poland. The notorious concentration camp is where the Nazis exterminated about 1.1 million people of whom 1 million were Jews, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.
His visit to Auschwitz was originally planned for Tuesday.
As the owner of X, Musk was criticized last November for describing a post containing an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory as the "actual truth" in a post on the platform.
He later spoke of a misunderstanding and apologized. Hate speech researchers also accused X of not taking sufficient action against anti-Semitic posts. Major advertisers such as Apple and Disney subsequently stopped their ads on the service.
In Kraków, Musk emphasized once again that the principle of freedom of expression is important to X. If someone posts a false claim, others can correct it immediately, he said. "The tireless search for the truth is the goal of X."
If social media and freedom of expression had existed at the time of Auschwitz, it would have been impossible to conceal this crime, Musk said.
