‘Kill all Jews’: Sesame Street’s Elmo posts antisemitic rant after X account hacked

Sesame Workshop, which runs the account, was quick to confirm it had been taken over by malicious cybercriminals in a statement to Fox.

As well as Jew-hating comments, the hacker also accused US President Donald Trump of being Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “puppet”.

And, in reference to the alleged list naming the associates of disgraced financier and convicted paedophile, the existence of which is a common conspiracy theory in far-right online circles, they called on Trump to “release the files” and called him a “child f***er”.

Some far-right conspiracy theorists have claimed without basis that the list is the subject of a cover up, orchestrated by well-known Jewish figures like Netanyahu, though there is no evidence that such a document even exists and the antisemitic claim that Jews exert undue control over the world’s governments has no basis in fact.

The hacker then tried to use Elmo’s account to advertise a cryptocurrency company before they were kicked off the account.

Sesame Workshop said in a statement: “Elmo’s X account was compromised today by an unknown hacker who posted disgusting messages, including antisemitic and racist posts.

“We are working to restore full control of the account.”

It comes just days after the social media platform was at the centre of another antisemitism row when its in-house AI bot, Grok, started posting neo-Nazi messages in response to user questions.

The bot began referring to itself as “Mechahitler” and suggested that the Nazi leader would be best suited to “deal with the problem” of what it called “anti-white hate”.

It later denied making the comments but said that adjustments made on the orders of X owner Elon Musk to “fix” it after, he claimed, it had been “manipulated by leftist indoctrination” had “dialled back the PC filters”.

A spokesperson for the platform’s associated AI company said: “We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts.

"Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.”