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It is a fact that billionaire Elon Musk delivered a speech on Monday after President Trump's inauguration. It is also a fact that during that speech, Musk twice made a straight-arm gesture. The debate over what he meant by that continues. As NPR's Shannon Bond reports, Musk benefits from the controversy, which he has now turned into a joke.
SHANNON BOND, BYLINE: Elon Musk was less than a minute into his speech at the Capitol One Arena on Monday when he thanked the crowd for their help electing President Trump.
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ELON MUSK: And I just want to say thank you for making it happen. Thank you.
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BOND: He then slapped his right hand over his heart and swung it out straight ahead, palm facing down. He turned around and repeated the motion.
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MUSK: My heart goes out to you.
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MUSK: It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.
BOND: What exactly Musk's gesture meant is still being debated. To many observers, it appeared to be a Nazi salute. Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker.
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HASAN PIKER: Did he just heil? What?
BOND: CNN anchor Kasie Hunt said viewers could judge for themselves what they saw.
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KASIE HUNT: It's not something that you typically see at American political rallies.
BOND: But others dismissed it as an awkward gesture, including the Anti-Defamation League, which calls itself a global leader in combating antisemitism and countering extremism. Right-wing influencer Dave Rubin said Musk was being smeared.
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DAVE RUBIN: He did not make a Nazi salute. It's completely ridiculous.
BOND: Musk didn't respond to a request for comment. On Monday night, he called the uproar Democratic, quote, "dirty tricks." Quote, "the everyone-is-Hitler attack is so tired," he wrote on his platform, X. But by Thursday morning, he had turned the incident into a joke, posting Nazi-themed puns to his more than 200 million followers.
SHANNON MCGREGOR: And that tactic is designed to sort of keep pushing the norm of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable - right? - this sort of edgelord type of humor.
BOND: Shannon McGregor is a communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She says Musk is steeped in an internet culture that some on the right have long embraced.
MCGREGOR: Pushing the norms to the point where the idea is, like, nothing matters, right? And if nothing matters, then there are no norms.
BOND: Setting aside what Musk meant by the gesture, McGregor says he benefits from the fact that audiences of different political persuasions see the event totally differently.
MCGREGOR: This, what I would say, not necessarily unambiguous gesture really has the hallmarks of what we call strategic ambiguity, which is something that's often employed by those on the right.
BOND: In the days following his speech, Musk slammed media coverage of the controversy. Quote, "the legacy media is pure propaganda," he posted on X on Tuesday. He repeated a phrase he used right after President Trump's victory, telling X users, quote, "you are the media now."
MCGREGOR: If you're on the right, this is sort of the bona fides - right? - of being attacked by the left, being attacked by the mainstream media, while at the same time normalizing something that is a really far-right gesture.
BOND: Andrew Torba, the founder of the far-right social platform Gab, praised Musk for the episode, posting that it, quote, "exposes the media's vulnerabilities, undermines their authority and advances our agenda all at once."
The debate over what Musk did and what he meant by it has energized far-right figures including Torba, says Melissa Ryan, who tracks right-wing extremism in her newsletter "Ctrl Alt-Right Delete."
MELISSA RYAN: They're thrilled, right? They're thrilled that the attention is on them.
BOND: She considers Musk himself a far-right figure, citing his past posts sharing conspiracy theories and his recent endorsement of an anti-immigrant political party in Germany. She has no doubt the gesture was a Nazi salute, despite what Musk and his allies say.
RYAN: The fact that we are discussing and debating it rather than calling it out, that is a net positive for them because they are trying to make their extreme ideology more mainstream.
BOND: And what was once considered unacceptable in public discourse is increasingly seen as normal. Shannon Bond, NPR 瓜神app. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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