Tesla CEO and “first buddy” Elon Musk was hit with a wave of immediate outrage online and on cable news after he made a salute that many felt was fascist during his speech at the Capitol One Arena on Monday to celebrate President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
While getting extremely excited about the prospect of landing a man on Mars and planting an American flag, the X (formerly Twitter) owner pounded his chest and shot his right arm in an angular motion toward the sky, saying he felt it in his “heart.” He also turned his back to the audience and repeated the gesture towards the American flag hanging over the stage.
Hours later, Musk responded to the criticism of the gesutre in a post on X. “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The “everyone is Hitler” attack is so tired,” he tweeted while reposting a message from 2022 in which he declared that he was no longer a Democrat and as a result was awaiting a “dirty tricks campaign.”
“Standing ovation for Elon Musk. By far the biggest reception of the day,” CNN anchor Erin Burnett noted in the immediate aftermath. “You saw him come out with that odd-looking salute.”
“It was odd-looking,” Burnett reiterated, letting viewers know she would be showing another clip of the moment. Fellow anchor Kasie Hunt noted the gesture “was evocative of things that we have seen through history” and “not something you typically see at American rallies.”
Considering the strange spectacle and the similarities to a particularly controversial hand motion, it didn’t take long for critics of the Trump-backing billionaire and Doge chief to exclaim online what they thought the world’s richest man was doing at that moment.
“Yeah Elon gave a Sieg Heil,” one user posted on Bluesky, while others pointedly accused him of giving a “Nazi salute”.
“Our new co-president Elon Musk gives a Nazi salute on day one of Trump presidency,” Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett tweeted while sharing a clip of the gesture.
At the same time, while liberals and Maga detractors flooded social media with videos of Musk’s provocative wave to the crowd, there was nothing in Musk’s excitable pro-Trump speech that explicitly referenced fascism and Nazism — and it is almost certain that the tech mogul would deny that he was making that gesture during a celebration of the new president.
Indeed, many other observers suggested that Musk was instead performing a “Roman salute” that soldiers in the ancient empire would use to greet their commanders as a show of respect and loyalty. The Roman salute, however, was later adopted in some forms by fascist states — including Nazi Germany, as some noted. Additionally, right-wing extremists celebrated the alarming gesture. “I don’t care if this was a mistake. I’m going to enjoy the tears over it,” neo-Nazi leader Christopher Pollhaus wrote on Telegram.
Some journalists, meanwhile, just shared the strange moment online and allowed others to make up their minds as to what exactly Musk was doing. Supporters of the billionaire, on the other hand, insisted that Musk was being misrepresented and taken out of context.
“Elon Musk was excited and spread his hand to the crowd. Every leftist is going to try and characterize this as a Nazi salute,” one X user wrote, while another called on “Community Notes” to get involved and point out that he merely “was extending his heart to the crowd”.
“As a person with a *strong* track record of criticizing Elon Musk, I feel extremely confident asserting that this was not a Nazi salute. Elon Musk is a friend to the Jews,” Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon insisted. “This is a man with Aspergers exuberantly throwing his heart to the crowd. We don’t need to invent outrage.”
Musk later shared a clip of his entire speech on X, though the video — which he pulled from another user — curiously did not show the first salute he gave to the crowd. The footage was from Fox’s Live Now broadcast.
