Elon Musk deleted a tweeted rant early Wednesday in which he defended the police officer who shot Michael Brown, an unarmed Black man, on Aug. 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri.
The incident was a "fiction," according to Musk, and the police officer was "exonerated."
Musk's Contentious Tweet
Based on Gizmodo's report, Musk's statement was purportedly triggered by the discovery of "Stay Woke" Twitter t-shirts created in the wake of the Ferguson uprising inside the company's San Francisco offices.
To be clear, Musk tweeted about the shirts to make fun of them, although his buddy and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey wore one to a 2016 session on the Black Lives Matter movement at the Code Conference, said Gizmodo.
"#StayWoke shirts stem from the Ferguson protests. Obama's own DOJ proved this & exonerated the cop. 'Hands up don't shoot' was made up. The whole thing was a fiction," Musk wrote in a Tweet early Wednesday, Nov. 23.
The tweet referenced the 2015 Department of Justice (DOJ) report on the shooting death of Michael Brown.
Early Wednesday, Musk removed the tweet that included his remark and retweeted the DOJ report without his usual editorializing.
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The Ferguson Protests
Protests erupted in the summer of 2014 after the shooting of Michael Brown and the reluctance of local authorities to arrest the police officer who shot him, Darren Wilson.
This helped bring national attention to the epidemic of police killings of unarmed Black people. The summer's assault on protests, which was heavily military, was brutal. And every one of those details was absolutely true.
"Hands up, don't shoot" was a rallying cry of the movement, but it was dissected by right-wing commentators who, like Musk today, wanted to exonerate the police officer.
US DOJ investigators disregarded statements from witnesses who said Brown was holding his hands up when he was shot.
Wilson fired at least six bullets at Brown, who he said was charging at him before he opened fire in self-defense.
Two Angles of the Story
The Justice Department published two reports on the Ferguson, Missouri police in 2015.
Musk tweeted the one regarding Michael Brown's death, but he did not tweet the second one, which said that the Ferguson Police Department has a systematic issue with consistently targeting Black individuals for the most trivial crimes.
Black residents of Ferguson, Missouri, made up 67% of the city's population in the early 2010s. Yet, they were the targets of 85% of traffic violations, 90% of citations, and 93% of arrests, according to statistics collected by the Ferguson Police Department.
What occurred in 2014 is not something any news outlet plans to revisit.
However, just like what Gizmodo said, it is noteworthy that Musk would like to open up old wounds from that summer.
Is Musk generating attention for his social media platform, which is losing advertisers at an alarming rate? Or is he simply signaling to his right-wing fans that he is fully integrated into their community?
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Trisha Kae Andrada
