Elon Musk has sparked outrage over a one-handed gesture he made during Donald Trump’s inauguration speech.
Musk thanked the crowd for “making it happen,” before placing his right hand over his heart and then extending the same hand in the air straight in front of him. Then he turned and repeated the action for those sitting behind him.
Many on Xu, the social platform he owns, compared the gesture to a Nazi salute.
In response, Musk posted on X: “Honestly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is so tired.”
Musk, the world’s richest man and a close ally of President Trump, was speaking at the Capital One Arena in Washington DC when he made the gesture.
“My heart is with you. Thanks to you, the future of civilization is secured,” he said after a second one-handed salute.
There was an immediate reaction on social networks.
Claire Aubin, a historian who specializes in Nazism in the United States, said Musk’s gesture was a “sieg heil,” or Nazi salute.
“My professional opinion is you’re fine, you should believe your eyes,” she posted on X, referring to those who believed the gesture was an overt reference to the Nazis.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University, said: “A historian of fascism here. It was a Nazi salute and a very belligerent one at that.”
Andrea Stroppa, a close confidant of Musk who has connected him with far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgio Meloni, was reported by Italian media to have posted Musk’s video with the headline: “The Roman Empire returns starting with the Roman salute.”
The Roman salute was widely used in Italy by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist party, before later being adopted by Adolf Hitler in Germany.
Stroppa later deleted his post, according to Italian media. He later announced that “the gesture, which some have mistaken for a Nazi salute, is simply Elon, who has autism, expressing his feelings by saying, ‘I want to give you my heart,'” he said.
“That’s exactly what he said into the microphone. ELON DOESN’T LIKE EXTREMISTS!”
This gesture comes at a time when Musk’s politics have shifted increasingly to the right. He recently made statements of support for Germany’s far-right party AfD and Britain’s anti-immigration party Reform UK.
But some defended him, including the Anti-Defamation League, an organization set up to fight anti-Semitism.
“It appears that Elon Musk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm rather than a Nazi salute,” the group posted on X.
Musk has become one of Trump’s close allies and was tapped to co-head what the president has called the Department of Government Efficiency.
