It has been dismissed as an awkward gesture and criticized as a Nazi-styled salute. But whatever billionaire Elon Musk’s intentions while giving a post-inauguration speech in Washington, the move has sparked debate and recriminations.
In a speech Monday at Capital One Arena, Musk thanked President Donald Trump’s supporters by clasping his hand against his chest before raising it, flat-palmed, in the air. “My heart goes out to you,” he said.
It gave rise to international concern Tuesday, with politicians and extremist experts expressing alarm that such a gesture from one of Trump’s closest advisers might signal broader aims within the administration.
Some cited Musk’s propensity for promoting
antisemitic language and benig on his highly trafficked
X account. Others looked to videos and images of the movement for answers. “That was a Nazi salute,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University who studies fascism said on X, “and a very belligerent one too.”
Musk dismissed the claims Tuesday, attributing them to news outlets advancing partisan bias. “The legacy media is pure propaganda,” he said on X, the social media platform he owns. “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks,” Musk wrote Monday evening, characterizing the attacks as political barbs. “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”
Others described the gesture as a display of enthusiasm from a man known for making odd or erratic movements during public events. The
Anti-Defamation League described Musk’s movement as “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.”
Elon Musk “literally said 'my heart goes out to you’ as he made the gesture from his heart to the people,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said on X.
The controversy reverberated through Congress on Tuesday, as lawmakers weighed in. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) asked Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) — Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations — in her confirmation hearing if one of the president’s “most visible” advisers did “two Heil Hitler salutes?” Stefanik denied that Musk had made the gesture.
When asked about Musk at World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz did not directly address the incident. “We have the freedom of speech in Europe and in Germany. Everyone can say what he wants, even if he is a billionaire,” Scholz said. “What we do not accept is if this is supporting extreme right positions.” (Musk last month
voiced his support for Alternative for Germany, a far-right German political party that has been classified by German intelligence as a suspected extremist organization.)
The gesture elicited strong reactions from the president’s political opponents, who argued that the movement was an unwelcome preview of alliances for Trump’s second administration.
“Elon Musk doing Nazi salutes” indicates that “Trump and Musk are showing that they’re not just unfit to lead but antithetical to our basic values as Americans,” Alex Floyd, a rapid response director for the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.
Musk and the White House did not immediately return requests for comment.
Musk has long used his personal X account to share antisemitic
conspiracy theories, often downplaying resulting criticisms with humor.
He has posted memes of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon used by some as a signal of white nationalism, on his X feed and amplified racist conspiracy theories during the ongoing
Los Angeles wildfires. In response to a 2023 X post accusing Jewish people of pushing “hatred” against White people, Musk said, “You have said the actual truth.” (Musk later apologized, saying it was the “dumbest” social media post he’s ever made.)
Some right-wing personalities interpreted the gesture as a dog whistle professing that extremist beliefs would be welcome in the White House. “Holy crap … did @elonmusk just Heil Hitler at the Trump Inauguration Rally in Washington D.C. …” Evan Kilgore, a right wing political commentator, said on X. “This is incredible.” Andrew Tate, a controversial influencer, wrote “we’re so back” in response to a clip of the gesture.
Videos and photos of Musk’s gesture ricocheted across Telegram channels popular with far-right extremists, including white nationalists and neo-Nazis, with captions including: “Ok maybe woke really is dead.”
In a Telegram channel for a neo-Nazi and white supremacist hate group, a user juxtaposed an image of Musk’s hand gesture with an image of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) taking a knee to honor the life of George Floyd. “AMERICA IN 2020,” read the caption under the Pelosi photo. “AMERICA IN 2025,” read a line under Musk’s salute.
Neo-Nazis were “thrilled” at Musk’s gesture, said Melissa Ryan, author of the Ctrl Alt Right Delete newsletter, which tracks online extremism.
“They have no doubt it was a Nazi salute,” said Ryan, a founding partner of
Inviolable Group, which helps advocacy and nonprofit groups build resilience against online attacks from extremists. She added that many have been emboldened by the gesture, interpreting it as a message from Musk that “they’re back in power. They’re going to have carte blanche to do what they want.”
Other X users minimized the gesture, arguing that it was a benign arm movement shoehorned into an incorrect narrative, said Freddy Cruz, a program manager at Western States Center, an Oregon-based anti-extremism watchdog.
Musk
reposted photos Tuesday of Democratic leaders, including former president Barack Obama and former vice president
Kamala Harris, with their arms raised, implying that they have made the same gesture. But the photos and videos did not reflect Musk’s specific gesture, which involved placing a hand on his heart before forcefully slicing his hand up — twice.
“There’s actively this move to provide cover for Elon Musk,” Freddy Cruz said. “A lot of these are just a series of unfortunate events for a lot of his loyal base and a lot of his followers, which is interesting given how a lot of the far-right leaders are celebrating this.”
Interpreting Musk’s gesture as spur of the moment excitement is odd given his pattern of behavior, said Joan Donovan, founder of the Critical internet Studies Institute, a public interest nonprofit that is studying how extremists are responding to the current political moment. “He loves to embody memes. He loves to be the meme,” she said.
In Germany, where the Nazi salute is outlawed as a remnant of the country’s genocidal past, the salute drew strong reactions. During the Third Reich, government employees were required, and all citizens pressured, to use the “Hitlergruss,” as it’s called in German, to greet one another and express loyalty to the regime that killed 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.
Under Germany’s criminal code, anyone who uses Nazi slogans or gestures — including the salute — can be fined or face up to three years in prison.
Karl Lauterbach, Germany’s health minister,
said Musk’s gesture was worrisome considering the billionaire’s “proximity to right-wing populists in the fascist tradition.”
Zeit Online, the digital version of the Germany’s centrist liberal weekly paper Die Zeit, left no room for the interpretation of Musk’s gesture in an
article on its site: “A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute.”
Despite the online debates on whether it was — or was not — a Nazi salute, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who
runs the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, said Musk’s intent is not as important as how the gesture is being interpreted. White supremacists and neo-Nazis are animated by it, she said, and see it as the acceptance of their hateful views into the mainstream.
“It’s received by people on the white supremacist fringe and neo-Nazis as a legitimation, a normalization … a direct validation of their beliefs,” she said. “That’s the part that is troubling, how it gets received, even if we’ll never know what the meaning was.”
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