Right-wing extremists, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis are celebrating an alarming gesture made by the world’s richest man.
At a post-inauguration rally Monday, Elon Musk thanked Donald Trump’s supporters with a gesture that resembled a Roman salute, first putting his palm to his chest and then extending a stiff right arm toward the crowd, at a slight elevation and with his palm down. It wasn’t a one-off. He later repeated the gesture.
Musk’s sway in the new administration is hard to overstate. The billionaire spent hundreds of millions to get Trump elected, and has been sitting shotgun for much of the transition period helping Trump shape his cabinet and incoming administration. Trump has tasked Musk to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a quasi-governmental effort to eliminate hundreds of billions in federal spending. And in his inauguration speech, Trump also embraced Musk’s life goal of colonizing Mars — as part of America’s “manifest destiny.”
Regardless of whether the South Africa-born Musk intended the salute as a “Sieg Heil” salute favored by the followers of Adolf Hitler in World War II, as some online commentators have suggested, it was eagerly received that way by extremists online.
Christopher Pohlhaus, the leader of the notorious neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe, posted the clip of Musk’s salute on Telegram with a lightning-bolt emoji (evocative of the Nazi SS) and the caption: “I don’t care if this was a mistake. I’m going to enjoy the tears over it.”
Another neo-Nazi leader, Christopher Hood, who founded the New England race-separatist movement NSC-131, also posted the clip to Telegram with the emojis ⁉️and 😁.
Andrew Torba is the founder of the far-right Christian Nationalist social media platform Gab, which pioneered AI-powered Nazi chatbots. He shared the clip on his account with the caption: “Incredible things are happening already lmao.”
Far-right author Keith Woods, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a “self-described ethno-nationalist and antisemite,” shared the clip in a post on X, writing: “Ok maybe woke really is dead.”
Thomas Sewell, an Australia-based neo-Nazi, whose Telegram avatar is a picture of himself throwing a Roman salute, posted the video of Musk calling it a “Donald Trump White Power moment.”
The Proud Boys Ohio chapter posted to a clip of the Musk video to its Telegram channel with the text, “Hail Trump!”
A chapter of the white nationalist group White Lives Matter posted a note of appreciation on Telegram, along with a picture of a banner drop the group had previously executed at a freeway overpass reading: “Elon Musk Stop White Genocide.” The Telegram caption read, “Thanks for (sometimes) hearing us, Elon. The White Flame will rise again.”
Alternative explanations for the gesture are plausible. Musk is socially awkward, and he may have been stiffly trying to throw love to the crowd for helping put Trump back in office. “My heart goes out to you,” he said after he did the gesture a second time.
However, Musk has allied himself with far-right movements in Europe, including the extremist German party AfD. After purchasing Twitter, which he renamed X, he welcomed long-banned white nationalists back to the platform in the name of free speech. And his X account is sometimes hard to distinguish from far-right extremists. In late 2023 he went on a so-called “apology tour” to Israel after responding to a post about an antisemitic conspiracy theory on X with the words “the actual truth.” He often posts Pepe frogs, and other images and memes associated with the alt-right, including recently temporarily adopting the handle “Kekius Maximus.”
