Two very public Nazi salutes without any attempt to deny it afterwards will certainly crater anyone's reputation. It's not really politics, but more a question of humanity, but then people don't become billionaires without having a contempt for others and a desire to underpay and mistreat everyone you come into contact with.
Fair enough, I see that online all the time. Here’s my take.
Raising your hand alone is a common gesture that pretty much everyone has done. Saying “my heart goes out to you” gives plausible deniability. But making the hand gesture while clicking your heels together and snapping to attention with a stern jaw-jutting look on your face is pretty unmistakably a nazi salute.
Elon has publicly denied it was a nazi salute, but any normal person would go a step further and also disavow neo nazi ideology in the same breath. But doing that would break the dog whistle effect.
Some people say he’s just trolling, and yes, Elon likes to troll. But trolling or not, it has the same effect if you don’t also renounce neo nazism. It normalizes and shows you are comfortable with it.
Can I prove he’s a neo nazi? No I haven’t gone through his wallet and found his membership card. But his support for the AfD and all his great-replacement-theory adjacent talk are strong signals.
No they haven't. You've likely been misled by seeing still images of their hand in that position, whereas if you see the video, then it's clearly nothing like a Nazi salute. Meanwhile, the video of Musk makes it incredibly clear that it's a Nazi salute and he has not denied that as far as I know.
His politics also seem to align very much with white supremacy and the far right.
That doesn't seem like a denial from Musk, but instead he's just accusing others, but the article doesn't include specific quotes.
From what I remember of the incident, he specifically didn't deny that they were Nazi salutes, but merely hinted that they may have been a Roman salute, though that's pretty much the same thing.
I can't recall any time that he's tried to distance himself from Nazis or their ideology.
Although the ADL didn't think that it was a Nazi salute, most other Jewish organisations thought that it was and Germany very much condemned it, so on balance reasonable people should conclude that it's generally thought of as a Nazi salute. Also, former ADL national director Abraham Foxman described the gesture as a "Heil Hitler Nazi salute".
Reasonable people can simply watch the video and see for themselves - it very much looked exactly like a Nazi salute to me.
Here's video of Musk performing his fascist salutes. He did it deliberately, he did it with gusto, he grunted with the effort, and he did it twice just to make sure:
He did deny it multiple times on Twitter/X. Probably your news source of choice is the one which omitted this fact.
I think it probably did look a bit that way and maybe he did it for engagement, maybe he intended to create controversy or maybe it was none of these things. In any case, it wasn't an actual Nazi salute.
