Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi is under fire for saying that the murder and bonesaw dismemberment of Washington Post opinion writer Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government was a “mistake.”

The remark has given new life to the #BoycottUber hashtag, which was trending on Twitter Monday with more than 12,000 people tweeting about it.

Khosrowshahi made the comments earlier this week in an Axios interview that aired Sunday. When he was asked about the vicious killing of Khashoggi by the government that is also Uber’s biggest investor, the Uber CEO downplayed the violence, suggesting that bygones be bygones.

“I think that government said that they made a mistake,” Khashoggi said in response to a question about the head of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund maintaining a seat on Uber’s board.

He compared Khashoggi’s murder to Uber’s accidental killing of a homeless woman in Arizona with its self-driving car last year.

“We’ve made mistakes too, right, with self-driving, and we stopped driving and we’re recovering from that mistake,” Khosrowshahi said. “So I think that people make mistakes, it doesn’t mean that they can never be forgiven. I think they have taken it seriously.”

When reporter Dan Primack countered that the CIA has suggested Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman directly ordered the assassination, Khosrowshahi said that he “hadn’t read” that part of the CIA report.

Khosrowshahi, who replaced Uber founder Travis Kalanick in 2017, also suggested that Uber was defenseless to police who invests in it because of its public status.

“I think from a Saudi perspective, they’re just like any other shareholder,” he said. “They’re a big investor, just as you could be a big investor as well.”

Axios said that following the interview, Khosrowshahi contacted the reporters to “express regret” for the language he had used in the interview, and sent them a follow-up statement.

“I said something in the moment that I do not believe,” the statement read. “When it comes to Jamal Khashoggi, his murder was reprehensible and should not be forgotten or excused.”

The comments quickly drew a fierce backlash on Twitter.

“If one of @Uber‘s main investors kills someone it doesn’t really matter. A representative of a murderous regime can still keep a board seat.,” Washington Post Global Opinions editor tweeted. “When you’re rich, your crimes become ‘mistakes.’”

“A mistake is accidentally not replacing the toilet paper if you’re the last to use it,” another user wrote. “A mistake is not brutally murdering by hacking a journalist who opposed his government.”

On Monday, Khosrowshahi tried to walk back the comments.

“There’s no forgiving or forgetting what happened to Jamal Khashoggi & I was wrong to call it a ‘mistake’,” he wrote on Twitter. “ As I told @danprimack after our interview, I said something in the moment I don’t believe. Our investors have long known my views here & I’m sorry I wasn’t as clear on Axios.”

But Khosrowshahi’s apology hasn’t mollified critics.

“A gaffe is when you say something you believe but aren’t supposed to say out loud. You said what you really believed,” communications expert Bruce Lambert tweeted. “Viewers glimpsed who you actually are. There’s no walking that back. Now, go back and lose a billion dollars a month for your investors. That’s your strength.”

“You can’t criticize the Saudis because they bailed uber out and are likely to do so again,” another person wrote. “As long as he is on your board, it proves you care more about money than people.”