Silicon Valley Icon Keith Rabois Doubles Down on Claim That Elon Musk’s X Has Prevented Second Holocaust
“OMG you are even worse than I assumed,” he told VICE News. “you obviously lack any knowledge of history.”
Famed investor and executive Keith Rabois defended his recent assertion that X, the platform previously known as Twitter, has “almost surely” prevented a second Holocaust as “self-evident” in an exchange with VICE News. He was unable or unwilling to provide specifics.
Rabois is a general partner at Founders Fund, the venture-capital firm the oligarch Peter Thiel co-founded in 2005. He was an undergraduate crony of Thiel’s at Stanford, and the two worked with Musk at PayPal in the early aughts. Rabois went on to success as chief operating officer at Square; he resigned following sexual-harassment claims, which he denied and called a shakedown. His biography credits him with early investments in firms such as Palantir, Airbnb, and Lyft.
Last week, shortly after Musk visited Israel following his endorsement of the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews seek to replace the white populations of rich countries with people from developing countries, Rabois, who has been voluminously posting about the Israel-Hamas war of late, wrote, “Without X, we would almost surely be confronting another Holocaust now. So thank you @elonmusk.” on X.
Seeking clarity on the bold, unfalsifiable claim, VICE News emailed Rabois to ask which group or state has the capacity to carry out the industrial-scale murder of millions of Jews and how X has prevented it doing so.
“self-evident claim, not bold,” Rabois wrote in response to a follow-up email. (His replies are reproduced here verbatim.) “If people were dependent on the news from outlets like the NYT BBC or the Washington Post they would be utterly ignorant of the atrocities. One of the biggest reasons Hitler was able to get away with murder (and Stalin too) was the complicity of the media. Fortunately, regular citizens can report the truth and bypass these gatekeepers who are mostly interested in serving as stenographers for the terrorists vs journalists.”
VICE News provided examples of New York Times, BBC, and Washington Post coverage of the sort Rabois claimed didn’t exist, noting it would be trivially easy to find dozens more such examples from each outlet, and again asked which group or state both wants to and has the industrial capacity to carry out a second Holocaust, and what X has done to prevent that.
“OMG you are even worse than I assumed,” Rabois wrote. “you obviously lack any knowledge of history.”
“you obviously are so distorted can’t even perform basic diligence,” he wrote in a follow-up email sent from a different email account one minute later.
In response to another email asking for clarification about who could and would carry out a second Holocaust and how X was preventing it, and suggesting that a loose invocation of the systematic murder of millions of Jews might, if not clarified, be taken as betraying a staggering ignorance of what the Holocaust actually was, Rabois wrote, “Without X, American support for Israel would be dangerously low because the atrocities would have been hidden or sanitized. Or utterly manufactured like the NYT and BBC reports of an Israeli bombing of a hospital or absurd counts of civilian deaths. American support is indispensable.”
“This is precisely why nobody cooperates w Vice,” he wrote in a follow-up email sent one minute later.
The Washington Post did not respond to an inquiry from VICE News about Rabois’ criticisms. A New York Times spokesperson wrote, “The allegation is completely wrong and uninformed, as even a cursory examination of our report would make clear.”
A BBC spokesperson sent along a dozen links to BBC coverage of the war and wrote, “The BBC has reported extensively on the October 7th attacks by Hamas across all its news programming and platforms. This includes investigations into how the massacre unfolded, on-the-ground reporting from the scene of the attacks, speaking with the families of victims and the hostages, as well as ongoing reporting and analysis of the story inside Israel and Gaza.
“No one could be in any doubt of what happened on October 7th and its devastating impact on the people of Israel from watching, reading or listening to BBC coverage. We continue to report on the ongoing conflict to the highest editorial standards—bringing people the facts of what is going on inside Israel and Gaza.”
The influential Rabois has long been lauded for his contrarianism, which is ostensibly what is behind his business success and is closely studied by entrepreneurs hoping to get his support in turning their businesses into the next Airbnb or Lyft. His strident defenses of Musk and his various business ventures—last week he claimed he’d “just ordered a Cybertruck”—come as Musk seeks credibility as a champion against antisemitism despite consistently posting in support of antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Rabois has not responded to an email from VICE News seeking clarity on how X in particular can be credited with the American public’s support of Israel, which is robust and longstanding, or whether he can identify a group or state that has both the desire and capacity to carry out an industrial-scale genocide but has been prevented from doing so by specific actions on the part of X.
