Elon Musk doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt

Since Donald Trump’s rise to power, some liberals have developed a bad habit of seeing secret Nazi imagery everywhere on the right.

Be it Laura Ingraham allegedly sieg-heiling at the 2016 Republican National Convention, a Justice Brett Kavanaugh clerk being called a covert white supremacist in 2018 because of her resting hand position, or concerns that the furniture at a 2021 conservative conference was arranged in the shape of a Nazi division’s emblem, these charges almost always end up looking kind of absurd.

So when I say that Elon Musk gave a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration on Monday, I am doing so only because I can see no other plausible interpretation of his gesture.

I watched the footage from as many angles as I could find. He stuck his arm straight out, palm down, and pointed it toward the crowd in a gesture of tribute. He put his hand on his heart first, a variant of the Adolf Hitler salute popularized in American History X — a critical film about neo-Nazism that some on the far-right have reclaimed as a celebration. And he did it twice.

If that’s what you saw — well, I’m with you. And it’s what neo-Nazis themselves saw; Nick Fuentes, the Hitler admirer who dined with Trump in 2022, described Musk’s gesture as “a straight-up sieg heil, like loving Hitler energy.”

But maybe you saw things differently. 

Maybe, like the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle, you are inclined to give Musk the benefit of the doubt — suggesting that he was merely trying to mime his heart going out to the crowd. Maybe you’re skeptical of viral video clips on principle, a reasonable attitude given how easy they are to edit deceptively. Maybe you think we ultimately can’t know what’s in someone’s heart, and it’s not worth trying to guess — especially given Musk’s dismissal of the charges.

But whatever you believe was in Musk’s heart on Monday, you can see why many of us would be leery of giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Musk has a long and extensive track record of extreme-right politics, flirtations with antisemitism, and juvenile trolling. This assessment does not hinge entirely on one gesture but on the totality of his public behavior. Just a few years ago, someone this radical wouldn’t be anywhere near a presidential inauguration.

Musk’s presence there, and his ability to avoid even a hint of contrition for doing something that emboldens America’s neo-Nazis, is a sign of a deeper rot. 

Since Trump has risen to power, Americans’ shared notion of public morals — the idea that there are certain standards for conduct that shouldn’t be transgressed — have been blown to bits. Some of those standards, like strong prohibitions on doing anything that even resembles an endorsement of Nazism, are some of our most important bulwarks against a return to the worst political moments in modern humanity’s long collective history. 

And that, more than anything else, is why what Musk did — both from that stage and long before — matters. Even if leaders and elites have abandoned any pretensions to a moral code, we as citizens still need to insist on it. Instead, even institutions created to banish bigotry and contain cruelty are bending the knee.

We don’t need a Hitler salute to know who Elon Musk is

It’s true that Elon Musk has done some things, like visiting Auschwitz, that one wouldn’t expect from someone who would heil Hitler in public. But when you look at his public record in totality, the pattern is unmistakable — and disturbing.

After purchasing Twitter in 2022, Musk personally intervened to restore Fuentes and others like him, who had been banned by the platform’s previous owners. Two 2023 data analyses found that the amount of antisemitic content on Twitter, now X, doubled after Musk’s purchase. A 2024 NBC investigation reported that Musk’s choices allowed antisemitism and neo-Nazism to “flourish” on the platform, identifying hundreds of neo-Nazi accounts gaining in influence under Musk’s new policies.

While his initial justification was that these views are easier to combat when debated publicly, it quickly became clear that he actually agreed with some of what they had to say.

The most infamous example came when Musk replied approvingly to a nakedly antisemitic tweet. The original poster accused Jews of pushing “dialectical hatred against whites,” adding that he was “deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.”

Musk told this person that “you have said the actual truth.” He then went on to attack the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish anti-hate group, for “unjustly attack[ing] the majority of the West.” He ultimately apologized and visited Auschwitz to demonstrate that he had learned.

Yet there are plenty of other examples afterward of Musk interacting with or promoting antisemitic or neo-Nazi content. 

He, for example, amplified a post accusing Jews of supporting censorship. He praised two separate Tucker Carlson interviews with troubling content — one featuring a Hitler apologist and the other airing conspiracy theories about Israeli control over US foreign policy. And he once accused the billionaire Holocaust survivor George Soros of “hating humanity,” comparing Soros to Magneto — the Jewish X-Men villain whose hatred of humanity arose from his experience in a death camp. 

In the past few weeks, Musk has used his platform on X to repeatedly and loudly advance Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. The AfD is extreme even by the standards of the European far-right: Some of its members tried to storm the German parliament in 2020, January 6-style, while a former AfD member of parliament was arrested in 2022 for plotting an actual coup. The party is virulently opposed to immigration; its leader Alice Weidel recently called for “remigration” — a mass deportation campaign that could potentially target even legal residents of minority backgrounds. Another leading party figure, Björn Höcke, has called for an end to German guilt over Nazism and used a Nazi slogan in one of his speeches.

The International Auschwitz Committee, a German anti-hate group founded by Holocaust survivors, has repeatedly warned about the party’s dangers.

“With every year of its existence, the AfD has become increasingly cynical and extreme. As a result, it has contributed to a huge level of radicalisation in language and in the extreme far right as a whole in Germany,” Christoph Heubner, the committee’s executive vice president, said in a 2023 press release. “MPs and representatives of the AfD repeatedly trigger disconcerting memories in the survivors of the German concentration and extermination camps with their speeches and public performances.”

So do the many examples of Musk supporting neo-Nazis and promoting their ideas make him a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi, one who simply revealed his true colors at Trump’s inauguration? We can’t tell what’s in his heart, of course, but I think there’s a likely explanation.

We know that Elon Musk has genuinely far-right politics and that he marinades in an online information environment rife with conspiracy theories. We also know that he delights in trolling.

He is willing to pursue these interests even in ways that damage his business. Think about X’s plummeting ad revenues after Musk platformed extremists. Or how he triggered an SEC lawsuit after vowing to take Tesla private at $420 a share (weed jokes, they’re hilarious). Or how, in the midst of a fight with Twitter’s corporate landlord, he repainted the sign to read “Titter” (boob jokes, they’re hilarious).

Elon Musk is many things: a brilliant entrepreneur, the world’s richest man, and a genuinely dangerous political extremist. But he also has a juvenile sense of humor and an adolescent love of transgressing against liberal America’s taboos. He is human South Park.

Such a person could sincerely hold Nazi beliefs. But he could just as easily find joy in making an obvious Nazi gesture on a national stage and then denying it, knowing full well that there would be no serious cost to his actions. 

A Thursday morning tweet containing a series of Nazi puns relating to the salute controversy — “Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations,” “Some people will Goebbels anything down” — makes this all too easy to imagine.

Musk, manners, and the execrable “vibe shift”

It used to be that something like what Musk pulled — a gesture that perfectly mimicked a Nazi salute, intentionally or not — would necessitate some kind of apology. Something along the lines of “Of course I didn’t mean to heil Hitler, and I’m sorry for the hurt this caused to the victims of Nazism and their descendants.”

That’s not what Musk has done. Since Monday, he has gone on the offensive — calling the media propagandists and trying to shift to a debate over liberals’ position on Israel. There’s no contrition, no sense of embarrassment: just utter and complete shamelessness.

This is, of course, one of the defining traits of the Trump era of politics. But what’s striking is that, since Trump’s reelection, the institutions that are supposed to push back on this have kissed the ring.

Take the ADL, which had previously done so much to expose the rise of extremism after Musk’s purchase of Twitter and called him out for flirtations with white supremacy. It got so heated that Musk blamed the ADL directly for X’s loss in revenue and repeatedly threatened to sue them.

The ADL has retained a very low tolerance for public displays of antisemitism since then. After the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, it has been quite clearly overzealous in that regard, pursuing pro-Palestinian college students for behavior far less troubling (like handing out anti-Zionist flyers) than what Musk just did.

Yet after the inauguration, the group issued a statement basically giving Musk a hall pass for performing “an awkward gesture.” It did so, in large part, because we are in the midst of “a new beginning” for American politics in which “all sides should give one another a bit of grace.”

Even though the ADL found some spine on Thursday and criticized Musk for the Nazi jokes, the initial statement was capitulation of a particularly notable kind. It was a response to the much-heralded “vibe shift,” a sense that culture has shifted in Trump’s direction after his victory and that the rest of society needs to accommodate his faction. That it’s now realized it went too far, and is going after him for the much lesser offense of making Nazi leaders’ names into puns, does not diminish the severity of its original mistake.

You can see this mindset at work in another exchange about Musk. When Congress member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused Musk of doing a “Nazi salute,” leading right-wing activist Chris Rufo responded by saying that the time for such allegations is over.

“They still think if they shout ‘racist’ and ‘Nazi’ loud enough, the entire society will bend to their narcissism and manipulation. No. It’s not 2020 anymore,” he said. 

Both the ADL and Rufo, in very different ways, are showing why we shouldn’t give Musk’s boorish behavior a pass.

The truth is that Musk has a public record of sympathy for odious views, and has shown zero contrition about making a gesture that looked exactly like a Nazi salute. Criticizing him for it is not uncivil or impolite; it is a way to assert that there are real moral standards, certain lines that shouldn’t be crossed by people in positions of power. 

The Trump era “vibe shift” isn’t merely a move to the right. It’s a move away from accountability and toward a culture where people get away with meanness, cruelty, and gratuitous insults against the vulnerable. As an anonymous banker put it: “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”

At moments like these, collectively insisting on standards is all the more important. One of those standards is that you should not be able to get away with performing a Nazi gesture, intentionally or not, without apologizing like you mean it. Another is that someone with Musk’s record of promoting far-right ideas and approvingly conversing with neo-Nazis should never have been on the inaugural stage to begin with. This is one of the bulwarks we have, as a society, to prevent honest-to-goodness Nazism from reentering the zone of political acceptability. 

Yet Musk and Trump have made blurring those moral lines part of their life’s work. I fear we are all about to suffer the consequences — to live in a world where it becomes even more acceptable to openly perform nastiness and extremism. We may enter the world prophesied by philosopher Richard Rorty in 1998, where a far-right backlash brings “all the sadism” we once considered “unacceptable” in public life “flooding back.”

If that indeed comes to pass, the future of American politics is one in which Musk’s ugly display on Monday ends up looking like a dance recital.