It was just two posts on Twitter that turned El Hotzo from a celebrated internet clown into the center of a scandal. Who is the man that even Elon Musk is suddenly attacking?
Just a few lines were enough. A few lines that made the full-time outraged and professional moralists foam at the mouth. “The last bus – Donald Trump: Unfortunately, I just missed it.” Followed by the sentence: “I think it’s absolutely fantastic when fascists die.” A slip-up, no doubt, and tasteless at that. Suddenly a man who had actually been something of everybody’s darling up until that point was in the crossfire of criticism: Sebastian Hotz, known on the internet only as “El Hotzo.”
For several years, the 28-year-old has been posting small observations, socially critical anecdotes and jokes on social networks every day. Almost 700,000 users follow him on X, formerly Twitter, and 1.4 million on Instagram. His humor earned him jobs as a gag writer for Jan Böhmermann’s “ZDF Magazin Royale” and radio presenter for RBB. But now this seemingly harmless young man, who lets his fan base share in his everyday life with small banalities, has become a political issue. X owner Elon Musk even called on Chancellor Olaf Scholz to take a stand on “El Hotzo’s” Trump posts. What happened?
“El Hotzo” Sebastian Hotz: Escaping the average life with the joke cannon
Hotz was born in Forchheim in 1996 and grew up in a village between Bamberg and Bayreuth. His Franconian accent can still be heard today. After graduating from high school, he completed a dual business studies course at Siemens in Erlangen and Nuremberg. Everything boiled down to a calm, middle-class life. Years later, he still describes in social media posts how this work had shaped him – in a negative sense. Even then, he was active on Twitter. Until he was banned in 2018 for insulting the band “The Bosshoss”. The ban was “completely justified,” he later explained to “Spiegel”. He still stands by his criticism of the music, but his choice of words was “so mediocre.”
He escapes the dreariness of the office world to Bielefeld and begins a master’s degree in “History, Economics and Philosophy of Science” in a different field, far away from Excel spreadsheets and nine-to-five jobs in open-plan offices. Because of the Twitter ban, he begins to post his thoughts, jokes and anecdotes more frequently on Instagram. More and more users become aware of him. Hotz gives them fodder. Lots of fodder. He posts between ten and 20 posts a day. Most of them are nutshell observations that almost everyone can relate to: “You can do as many things as you like ‘Overnight Oats’ Say what you want, in the end you eat a 12 hour old cereal” is just one example.
When it comes to political gags, he steps up
The first lockdown during the Corona pandemic in 2020 was his big breakthrough. Hotz continued to do what he had been doing for months: He published funny observations, coupled with posts that were sometimes critical of capitalism. But now they reached millions of people in a very short space of time. “I can’t make too many jokes about Corona profiteers,” Hotz told “Spiegel”. “After all, I am one too.”
When his jokes have a political background, he doesn’t aim at minorities, he kicks at the top: The FDP, AfD, investment banks and millionaires get their fair share. “The German dominant culture is to donate €50 to social projects at Christmas and for the rest of the year to vote for a party that wants to scrap these projects.”
His reach and his humor caught on in the Corona era. TV writers became aware of him. He became a freelance gag writer for Jan Böhmermann’s “ZDF Magazin Royale”. Later he started a podcast with “aspekte” presenter Salwa Houmsi, became a radio presenter on RBB’s Radio Fritz, won the Bavarian Cabaret Prize 2023 and wrote his first book “Mindset”.
Elon Musk comments on Trump postings
Working for the public broadcasters makes him vulnerable after his comment on the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Someone who wishes the death of the former president of the USA should not work for license fee-funded institutions, it was said in numerous comments. The RBB bowed to the criticism and announced that it had ended its collaboration with Hotz.
But the story doesn’t end there. Even X owner Elon Musk commented on the case on his platform, aggressively asking Chancellor Scholz: “Someone who wishes death on the leading US presidential candidate and me is being paid by the German government to do so? @Chancellor, what is that?”
Once again, Musk is sharing misinformation. He has fallen for the right-wing YouTuber Naomi Seibt, who, like many others in her political camp, spreads the myth of “state broadcasting.” The government does not pay for public broadcasters, but that seems irrelevant to Musk.
Meanwhile, Hotz took aim at the scandal in a few of his own posts. Among other things, he wrote: “I am Germany’s cheekiest unemployed person.” It remains to be seen whether the tasteless joke will have further consequences for Hotz. Vice President of the Bundestag Wolfgang Kubicki (FDP), for example, pointed out that publicly approving of criminal acts is a criminal offense. Either way, El Hotzo will surely find a way to make a joke out of it.
Sources: ,
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
