Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rushed to Elon Musk’s defense Thursday, claiming that the billionaire’s disturbing inauguration gesture—which millions of people around the world recognized as the Sieg Heil salute used by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party—was little more than a misunderstanding.
“Elon is a great friend of Israel,” Netanyahu wrote in a post on X claiming that the South African was being “falsely smeared.”
“He visited Israel after the October 7 massacre in which Hamas terrorists committed the worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” Netanyahu continued, explicitly thanking Musk. “He has since repeatedly and forcefully supported Israel’s right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists and regimes who seek to annihilate the one and only Jewish state.”
Individuals the world over have fiercely debated what Musk meant by giving the alarming salute (twice) on Monday. German journalists torched Musk for making the gesture, acknowledging that such an act would never be allowed in their country.
“Whoever on a political stage, making a political speech in front of a partly far-right audience, elongates his arm diagonally in the air both forcefully and repeatedly, is making a Hitler salute,” journalist Lenz Jacobsen wrote for the German paper Die Zeit in a piece titled “A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute.” “There’s no ‘probably’ or ‘similar to’ or ‘controversial’ about it. The gesture speaks for itself.”
Others argued that Musk’s increasingly far-right politics were a better target for the Nazi label, claiming that the rhetoric around the salute had gone too far. Meanwhile, Musk himself fanned the controversy by refusing to deny the allegations as to whether he meant his gesture to resemble Hitler’s salute.
Hitler-loving personalities on the far right of America’s political spectrum, though, weren’t confused about the meaning behind Musk’s actions whatsoever. Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist Hitler fan who has called for a “holy war” against Jews, referred to Musk’s salute as “straight up like ‘Sieg Heil,’” with “loving Hitler energy.”
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