World's richest man called out for openly embracing notorious ‘Nazi psychopath’

Billionaire Elon Musk issued a call Thursday evening to free the law enforcement officer serving a 22-year sentence for murdering George Floyd, but in doing so was also accused of embracing a controversial far-right figure who has predicted the emergence of a new “superior” race of hyper-intelligent elites.

Posting on his social media platform X, Musk called for the release of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed Floyd in 2020 after kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. In the same online post, Musk shared a similar call issued by Nick Land, a controversial far-right British philosopher and key figure in the anti-democratic philosophy known as “Dark Enlightenment.”

“Elon is increasingly open about his relationship with Dark Enlightenment co-founder Nick Land who invented ‘hyper-racism’ – the idea that elites need to split off from humanity to form a new pure white race in space,” wrote writer and anti-disinformation activist Jim Stewartson in a post on X to his more than 155,000 followers.

Stewartson also sarcastically asked: “Golly, why would Nazi psychopath Nick Land want to free Derek Chauvin?”

Before his political turn, Land led a cult-like academic collective at Warwick called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, blending philosophy with cyberpunk, rave culture and the occult, until he suffered a breakdown and relocated to Shanghai. Dubbed the "father of accelerationism" for his theory that hyper-intelligent capitalism will eventually supersede and discard humanity, Land has more recently been linked by U.S. researchers to strains of white nationalist terrorism.

“‘Hyper-racism’ does sound like something Elon Musk would get into,” wrote Fred Lambert, journalist and editor-in-chief of Electrek. “Jokes aside, it [is] super worrying to see Musk following and interacting with guys like Land and [Curtis] Yarvin. These people are openly anti-democracy.”