Stacie Scott
Dave Bateman, the software entrepreneur who made antisemitic statements this week in an email reportedly sent to several dozen people, has a history of spewing offensive and bizarre commentary and conspiracies online.
“Fau Chi and the Woohoo Han lab have almost killed as many people as Hitler; and they are just getting started,” he wrote in October, referring to President Biden’s chief medical advisor, Anthony Fauci.
He separately ranted against the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy in November, appending the text with an image of a member of the Rothschild family—a frequent subject of antisemitic conspiracy theories—and claimed that a COVID-19 antiviral treatment, Remdesivir, is owned by George Soros, the billionaire Jewish philanthropist.
Some of Batemen’s more provocative comments featured intentional misspellings, perhaps to elude Facebook moderators, who had previously removed some of his anti-vaccine rhetoric.
Bateman, 43, is a cofounder of Entrata, a property-management software firm that raised $507 million in July at a valuation likely well above $1 billion. At the time, he was the company’s majority owner, according to Forbes.
He handed over the reins as CEO last summer, opting to steer Entrata as chairman. As a result of this week’s flare-up, he resigned from that role, too, at the behest of the company’s board.
Bateman’s soon-to-be infamous email started out in poor judgment, with the subject line “Genocide.” Things only got worse from there.
“Don’t get the illness and don’t get vaccinated…I believe the pandemic and systematic extermination of billions of people will lead to an effort to consolidate all the countries in the world under a single flag with totalitarian rule,” he wrote.
Bateman added: “I believe the Jews are behind this. For 300 years the Jews have been trying to infiltrate the Catholic Church and place a Jew covertly at the top.”
Entrata’s CEO, Adam Edmunds, denounced the email in a statement posted to his Twitter account, writing that he and the company “condemn antisemitism in any and all forms.”
Bateman could not immediately be reached for comment. He acknowledged to local outlet Fox 13 that he had written the email but denied holding anti-Semitic beliefs. “I have nothing but love for the Jewish people,” he said. “Some of my closest friends are Jews.”
Bateman’s Facebook page is filled with hundreds of forceful pronouncements on subjects ranging from psychedelics to circumcision to certain practices of the Mormon Church (he attended Brigham Young University and worked as a missionary in Honduras in the late 1990s).
Some of the posts have leaned conspiratorial. “Locked down some horse de-wormer in Mexico tonight. Tonight’s gonna be lit,” he wrote in October, holding a crumpled box of Ivermectin, an antiparasitic medication used for humans and animals that many anti-vaccine activists have falsely championed as a COVID treatment.
Bateman also alleged that Google’s “censorship” was “spooky” when the search engine’s top result for “officers killed 2020 [Black Lives Matter] riots” was a fact-checking article about violence at the protests.
Previously, he linked to an article that made dubious innuendos about “the list of Clinton associates who’ve died mysteriously.” Bateman also fashioned himself as a provocateur on Twitter; his account has been suspended.
A resident of Puerto Rico, Bateman’s odd behavior made him a “pariah” in the Utah tech community even before this week, Forbes reports.
His history of controversy stretches back several years. He was accused of making “sexist” comments at a 2019 conference, and the year prior, he caused a stir after alleging that a Utah state senator tried to extort him by offering a female employee $1 million to level “false sexual harassment claims” against him.
The police shut down that allegation and determined that no crime had been committed.
Bateman seems to consider himself a free-thinker more than a conspiracist. “Anything from the media will constantly divide us. We have to shut it off and shut it out somehow. Or listen to it understanding how they are trying to manipulate us,” he wrote in November.
“God save our country. And if not, let it collapse gently and be rebuilt anew by brilliant people willing to engineer a better system absent their own self interests.”