Musk told Joe Rogan he lost respect for Barack Obama after the former president repeated the debunked “fine people” claim before the 2024 election.
Elon Musk said he “completely lost respect” for former US President Barack Obama after Obama repeated what Musk described as the false claim that President Donald Trump had called neo-Nazis “very fine people.”
Speaking on The Joe Rogan Experience on February 28, 2025, Musk said the media repeatedly presented Trump’s 2017 Charlottesville remarks without the portion in which Trump explicitly stated that he was not referring to neo-Nazis or white nationalists and that they should be “condemned totally.”
Musk said Obama repeated the allegation only days before the presidential election despite, in Musk’s view, knowing that the full context of Trump’s remarks showed it was false.