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 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 shared 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.
