Tim Steller's column: Musk's fascist salute fits his character, alarming new era

Updated with new information since the inauguration 

With everything going on, it may seem pointless to try to discern the intent of Elon Musk's "awkward gesture" at the presidential inauguration. 

President Donald Trump is trying to drastically narrow birthright citizenship, he's eliminating federal discrimination measures and affirmative action, and he has shut down activities at our federal health agencies. These are bigger deals in the practical realm. 

Symbolically, though, there could hardly be a more meaningful gesture than the world's richest man, also a right-hand man to the president, snapping a Nazi salute at a lectern bearing the American presidential seal. The message is, frankly, scary — it suggests that the blend of corporate supremacy and totalitarian government that surged to power in Europe in the 1930s could be arriving on our shores.

Normally I don't write about national subjects unless they pertain directly to the Tucson area or Arizona, but I've had a growing fascination with Musk and the tech billionaires, now entering full maturity as our new American oligarchy. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Musk and others are lockstep with the new administration, wielding massive power together in the political, business and information realms. 

Already they are accumulating political wins such as a new executive order liberalizing regulation of artificial intelligence, and another setting the stage for taxpayers to pay for a stockpile of cryptocurrency, a gift to that industry. 

So after Musk snapped out that Nazi-style salute, I prepared a Facebook post about why it makes sense that Musk would deliberately do so. Not that I should need to. People can believe their own eyes — nobody makes that gesture by accident, definitely not twice in succession. And we should believe people when they show us who they are, not twist ourselves into pretzels to justify their behavior. 

Still, many people have busied themselves excusing the powerful Musk. It was the formerly credible Anti-Defamation League that concluded with no good reason, “It seems that Elon Musk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute."

In truth, it makes much more sense that Musk would have made a Nazi salute, and not just because the gesture looked identical. 

1. Apartheid roots

The argument starts in South Africa, where Musk was born in 1971, deep in the apartheid era. Kids don’t choose where they grow up anymore than they choose their parents, but the atmosphere they grow up in, just like the parents they have, affects who they become.

Apartheid South Africa was an atmosphere where whites ruled and blacks were alternately ridiculed for stupidity and feared for violence. This order was considered ordained by nature. As South African writer Gavin Evans put it, "In apartheid South Africa, the idea that each race had its own character, personality traits and intellectual potential was part of the justification for the system of white rule."

Musk's Anglo social sphere was more progressive than the especially racist Boer subculture, the New York Times reported, but it was still organized by racial segregation and hierarchy.

Musk fled the country to his mother's native Canada at age 17, before mandatory service in South Africa's military. 

He appears to have carried the country's racial indoctrination within him.

2. Online discrimination

Musk adopted the prevailing liberal politics of Silicon Valley up until recent years, but they were changing in the runup to his purchase of Twitter in 2022. For example, he became a "pro-natalist," siring 12 children himself and advocating for Americans — especially people like him, it seemed — to have more babies. 

His Twitter purchase, and the policy changes Musk implemented, unleashed a surge of racist and anti-Semitic posts.

One study found that anti-Semitic posts doubled in the three months after Musk bought the platform. But it wasn't just others who were making the posts — Musk himself indulged, repeatedly embracing racist and discriminatory concepts, comments and conspiracy theories. 

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

In 2023, when Dilbert creator Scott Adams said that white people should “stay the hell away from Black people” and called blacks “a hate group,” Musk defended Adams.

In January, 2024, Musk published a series of tweets suggesting that students at historically Black colleges are not smart enough to become airline pilots and pose a safety risk to passengers.

Late last year he was one of the few people who paid for a subscription to an anti-black account spreading pro-apartheid messages about South Africa.

The main theme of Musk's turn toward racist posts has been the embrace and spreading of race science, the belief that biological differences between the races makes blacks, especially, inferior. This was also an essential part of Nazi ideology and common in white South African society.

Musk also veered into anti-Semitism himself in November 2023. Responding to a post that said, “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” Musk said: “You have said the actual truth.”

The intense backlash led Musk to apologize, something he's never done over his anti-black posts. He even went to Israel on an apology tour, where he was confronted with the fact that X under Musk is a cesspool of antisemitism

3. Opposing immigration

Musk has also been supporting foreign anti-immigrant activists and groups. He’s supported Tommy Robinson, an English anti-immigrant activist, who has been repeatedly jailed for violence, financial crimes and, most recently for violating a court order by repeating lies about a Muslim boy who was videotaped being beaten up at an English school.

Earlier this month, Musk tweeted "FREE TOMMY ROBINSON NOW," and Robinson says Musk is helping pay his legal bills. Even Reform UK, the anti-immigration political party led by Nigel Farage, has distanced itself from Robinson.

Musk also has supported Germany's Allianz fur Deutschland party, the right-wing, anti-immigration party that has been making strong gains especially in eastern Germany. This is a party that straddles the democratic and totalitarian right wing, posing a threat to the democratic system from within and attracting Germany’s neo-Nazis, while also drawing a broader mass of non-Nazi Germans who oppose immigration.

The party has inspired anti-immigrant violence, and a top party leader was imprisoned for repeating a Nazi slogan that is illegal in Germany. The same leader, Bjorn Hocke, also called criticized the existence of a Holocaust memorial in the heart of Berlin.

Musk spoke remotely to an Allianz fur Deutschland party meeting on Saturday, Jan. 25, and argued that Germany should "move beyond" past guilt, an apparent reference to the Nazi era. 

4. Trolling edgelord

While Musk has taken earnest positions supporting race science and opposing immigration, he also revels in trolling the liberal left, a common delight of the online political right. In fact, maintaining a veneer of deniability while saying something outrageous is a hallmark tactic of this faction. 

When liberals like me get angered over such a provocation, they then taunt us for being anti-speech scolds who can't take a joke. This allows them to send a message to others who think like them while maintaining an ironic distance.

On Jan. 27, Musk returned to another example of this, posting positively about Sulla, a Roman dictator who slaughtered thousands of political enemies and seized their land, for the first time. In June last year, Musk posted "Perhaps we just need a modern day Sulla," and on Monday, he posted a Sulla quote in Latin, meaning "No one provokes me and gets away with it."

What's key in these situations is not to indulge the play-acting. If people make a racist statement, that makes them racist, even if they say they're joking. If they make a Nazi salute, that makes them a Nazi, even if they claim it was unintentional.

As writer Noah Berlatsky put it this week, being an "edgelord troll is by no means at odds with promoting Nazi ideology or embracing fascism. On the contrary, using Nazi symbols to demonstrate contempt for norms and to signal dominance over the left and marginalized people is precisely how Nazis use those symbols. It’s what those symbols are for."

5. Trust your eyes

In truth, Musk's salute was not at all an "awkward gesture." It was straightforward and clear. And it's a bad sign that we should take seriously.