Elon Musk called the media racist after a cartoonist he regularly engages with on Twitter faced blowback for encouraging white Americans to avoid Black people.

While discussing a Rasmussen Reports poll in which almost half of Black respondents disagreed with or were unsure about the statement that it’s OK to be white, Scott Adams, creator of the long-running Dilbert comic strip, said during his YouTube show last week that his best advice for white Americans “is to get the hell away from Black people.”

Newspaper publishers, including Gannett Co.’s USA Today Network, denounced the comments and said they’ll no longer publish Adams’ cartoons, which satirize office culture.

Musk waded into the controversy, first by responding to Adams, who quote-tweeted a Washington Post columnist encouraged by the newspaper dropping Dilbert. “What exactly are they complaining about?” Musk asked in a post he later deleted.

When another account on the social network Musk owns spoke out against coverage of Adams, Musk replied: “The media is racist.”

“For a *very* long time, U.S. media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians,” Musk said in another post. “Same thing happened with elite colleges & high schools in America. Maybe they can try not being racist.”

Musk unsettled many Black users of Twitter Inc. last year by repeatedly saying past management had gone too far in moderating content on the platform, and had infringed on free speech as a result. Shortly after taking over the company, he made fun of #StayWoke T-shirts he found at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters that dated back to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Tesla Inc. is facing a lawsuit by the California Civil Rights Department that accuses the company of engaging in a pattern of racial harassment and bias at its electric-vehicle factory. Tesla published a blog post responding to the allegations before the agency filed suit in February 2022.

In June, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued a cause finding against Tesla that closely parallels California’s allegations, according to the company. Tesla said last month that it was in the process of setting up a mandatory mediation with the federal agency.

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