Tesla CEO and “first buddy” Elon Musk drew a ton of immediate outrage online and on cable news after he made an “odd-looking” gesture during his speech at the Capitol One Arena on Monday to celebrate president Donald Trump’s inauguration.
After getting extremely excited about the prospect of landing a man on Mars and planting an American flag, the X/Twitter owner pounded his chest and shot his right arm in an angular motion toward the sky. He also turned his back on the audience and repeated the gesture towards the back of the stage.
“Standing ovation for Elon Musk. By far the biggest reception of the day,” CNN anchor Erin Burnett noted. “You saw him come out with that odd-looking salute.”
“It was odd-looking,” Burnett reiterated, pointing out that they would show viewers a screenshot of the moment.
Considering the strange spectacle and the similarities to a particular other 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.
Some journalists, meanwhile, just shared the odd moment online and allowed others to make up their minds on 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.”
The Independent has reached out to Musk and X for comment.
The frenzy over Musk’s salute parallels that of another Trump acolyte who set the internet on fire when she made a similar gesture at the Republican National Convention in 2016. During her speech in Cleveland that year, Fox News star Laura Ingraham unleashed a rallying cry for Trump as he was set to accept the GOP nomination for president.
“I want to say this very plainly: We should all—even all you boys with wounded feelings and bruised egos, we love you—but you must honor your pledge to support Donald Trump now,” she exclaimed, followed by her immediately shooting her right hand up in an angular fashion. Much like Musk is now, she was accused of performing a fascist salute, and edited clips of her speech quickly became a meme.
“I do not think it is fair to say Laura Ingraham capped off her remarks at the Republican National Convention by giving a Nazi salute,” Slate writer Josh Voorhees wrote at the time. “However, I do think it is fair to say that Laura Ingraham capped off her remarks at the Republican National Convention with a hand gesture that, intentionally or not, clearly resembled a Nazi salute.”
