Elon Musk suggested on Monday that the corruption trial of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was orchestrated by the “deep state.”
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the co-head of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, made the remark on X, which he owns. He wrote: “the deep state is everywhere,” quoting and reposting a tweet by conservative Mark Levin. The tweet contained a URL to a documentary about Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial.
The term “deep state” refers to bureaucracies, especially within the executive branch of government, that exercises power regardless of the policies of elected politicians who are nominally in charge of those bureaucracies.
Netanyahu has consistently denied the allegations against him and denounced the charges against him as political persecution by judicial means.
Musk has vowed to use DOGE to slash many federal government jobs and has complained in the past of overregulation by federal and other authorities.
Netanyahu is facing bribery and breach-of-trust charges in three cases, labeled 1000, 2000 and 4000. The latter is the most serious, and the only one featuring bribery charges.
The members of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, as well as its coalition partners and some opposition politicians, have dismissed the trial as a partisan attempt at overthrowing the government via ex-parliamentary means. Opposition leaders have cited it as proof of Netanyahu’s alleged corruption and called on him to resign.
