Elon Musk posted racist images of Elizabeth Warren after the Massachusetts senator called for President-elect Donald Trump to hold the billionaire to the ethics standards set for government officials.
Musk took to X Tuesday to post images that seemingly had been generated by artificial intelligence to make Warren appear in Native American attire. DNA results from 2018 showed that Warren likely has a Native American ancestor but that the overwhelming majority of her heritage is European.
One of the images showed Warren wearing a beaded headdress with bird feathers and a buckskin shirt with a leather fringe. Several other posts showed Warren in Native American attire while eating cake and smiling at the viewer.
Musk didn’t write anything to accompany the images apart from “Guess who this is?” and a crying laughing emoji.
The images shared by Musk are seemingly a reference to Trump’s nickname for the senator, “Pocahontas.”
The assistant director of the Native Nations Law & Policy Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, Lauren van Schilfgaarde, told HuffPost that the images shared by Musk are weighed down by problems, saying that AI images of Native Americans often end up being a mix of racist stereotypes.
“That’s deeply problematic,” she told the outlet. “Instead of recognizing Native peoples as distinct nations, they’re represented as one generic entity.”
But she noted that Musk responded to allegations of conflicts of interest and concerns about his presence in Trump’s orbit with “quintessential racism.”
“It shows he’s scared,” she added. “Responding to it in this fashion seems to suggest he needs to distract from the substance of her critique.”
Warren wrote in a letter to Trump Monday that he should place guardrails on Musk and that he needs to “resolve his conflicts of interest if he wishes to continue serving as a top adviser to [Trump] and [his] transition team.”
The senator said Musk should make his role as an advisor to Trump clearer and that he should follow the guidelines outlined in the transition ethics plan, which states that members of the transition team must “avoid both actual and apparent conflicts of interest.”
“Putting Mr. Musk in a position to influence billions of dollars of government contracts and regulatory enforcement without a stringent conflict of interest agreement in place is an invitation for corruption on a scale not seen in our lifetimes,” Warren wrote.
“As your Transition Team Ethics Plan makes clear, the role of government is not to line the pockets of the wealthiest Americans; a strong, enforceable ethics plan for the world’s richest man is a necessary first step for delivering on that promise,” she added.
