Elon Musk—the world’s wealthiest man and oldest teenage boy—is showing his ass on Twitter again.
In a tweet in the early hours of Thursday, Musk posted a meme that unfavorably compared Canada’s democratically elected prime minister Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler to make some deeply confused point about the anti-vaccine-mandate trucker protests and cryptocurrency.
Musk’s post, which showed the Nazi leader alongside the caption “Stop comparing me to Justin Trudeau. I had a budget,” was in reply to a report about Canada ordering financial firms to stop trading with crypto wallets that are funding chaotic vaccine protests in Ottawa.
Not only was Musk’s meme lazy, offensive, and attention-seeking, it was also completely wrong and out-of-date. Trudeau’s government passed a budget last summer, admittedly after two years of not doing so.
Musk was seemingly angered by an article from Coindesk that reported police in Canada had identified and frozen trading on 34 crypto wallets linked to the anti-vaccine trucker-led protests. Earlier this week, Trudeau became the first Canadian leader to invoke the nation’s Emergencies Act, giving him more powers to break up the trucker protests.
Musk, 50, previously said that he’s taken his COVID-19 vaccines, but has repeatedly railed against mandates, calling them an “erosion of freedom.” Earlier in the pandemic, he made another Nazi reference by complaining that lockdowns were “fascist” and “breaking people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong and not why they came to America.”
Just last month, the Tesla CEO voiced his backing for the trucker protests, writing in a tweet: “Canadian truckers rule.” He also posted a tweet making fun of people who compare anyone they disagree with to Hitler.