18 July 2024 , 20:33
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Sebastian Hotz, aka El Hotzo, was dropped from his radio show and provoked anger from Elon Musk after now-deleted posts on X
A 28-year-old German comedian has got into trouble with Donald Trump supporters and then Elon Musk after sending a series of tweets appearing to welcome the assassination attempt on the former US president.
Sebastian Hotz, who posts and performs as El Hotzo, lost his job with a public broadcaster this week for a series of tweets on X, Musk’s social media platform, after Trump narrowly escaped death, saying that the attempt had been like the last bus – “unfortunately, just missed”.
He also published a post saying it was “absolutely fantastic when fascists die”.
Hotz, who has more than 700,000 followers on X, deleted the original posts but screenshots of them were widely published on social media. “Absolutely no one forces anybody to sympathise with fascists – you can do without it without the slightest consequences,” he wrote soon after.
Incensed internet users condemned the characteristically flippant remarks, with Wolfgang Kubicki, one of the vice-presidents of the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, calling for a criminal investigation into the satirist.
The controversy prompted the Berlin-based public broadcaster RBB to cancel Hotz’s involvement in its radio show Theoretisch Cool, which he had co-hosted since 2022. “His remarks are not compatible with the values for which RBB stands,” its programme director, Katrin Günther, said.
“I am Germany’s cheekiest jobless person,” a defiant Hotz responded on X.
The row escalated further when the German YouTuber Naomi Seibt, seen as having close ties to the far right, accused El Hotzo of also wishing Musk dead based on a May 2022 post in which Hotz expressed enthusiasm for a tweet by the multibillionaire speculating about his own death under mysterious circumstances.
Musk then published a link to Seibt’s video on X, appealing to Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to take action. “Someone wishing death on the leading US Presidential candidate and myself is paid to do so by the German government. @Bundeskanzler, was ist das [what is that]?”
Critics noted that the US tech tycoon, who has endorsed Trump for president, appeared to believe that funding for German public radio and television – frequent targets of the populist right – came directly from the state and not via a user-paid licence fee. Scholz did not reply.
The baby-faced Hotz later wrote on Instagram, where he has 1.4 million followers, that Musk’s broadside had come while he was visiting his parents. “Just imagine: the richest man in the world tags the chancellor over a dumb tweet of yours but your mother tells you that you have to do the washing up today.”
Musk has repeatedly weighed in on German affairs in recent years, most recently this week in condemning Berlin’s move to ban a rightwing extremist magazine. “Crushing freedom of speech under a jackboot is what that government is doing,” he posted on X.
Before the controversy, Hotz was known for a seemingly endless stream of wry anecdotes about daily life posted on social media, bringing him a huge following during the Covid pandemic and eventually a job writing jokes for television star Jan Böhmermann’s popular satire programme ZDF Magazin Royale.
Hotz’s humour generally punches upwards, with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, Kubicki’s libertarian Free Democrats and investment bankers as frequent targets.
He won last year’s best cabaret performance prize in his home state, Bavaria, and released his bestselling debut novel, Mindset, which sends up cocky finance bros. His publisher, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, told the news agency DPA that it had no plans to cut ties with Hotz.
But on Thursday, the national public broadcaster ARD said it would drop a planned literature event that evening with the comedian “due to the current developments”.
The broadcaster ZDF said Hotz had only worked for it “temporarily as a freelancer”.