Elon Musk apparently stole the limelight from Donald Trump on day one of the latter’s second stint in office. Instead of discussing a flurry of President Trump’s executive orders, people are now hashing over the bizarre hand gestures Musk was seen executed during the post-inauguration Trump rally. Some say Musk threw a Nazi salute. But is the world’s wealthiest man a closeted Nazi? Ukrainian TV commentators, for instance, think he is.
This is a common storyline in the kind of comic books Elon Musk is a big fan of. It goes like this.
A physically weak child prodigy with exceptional memory is being bullied at school. His deep-seated grudge sets him on a path of a vendetta involving a global takeover. The guy is leading a double life. By day, he is a successful entrepreneur, engineer, philanthropist and politician. By night, he is a high-ranking member of a secretive Nazi society plotting revenge in ice-cold Greenland and sweltering hot Argentina following their escape from Berlin in 1945. The poor lad becomes the world’s richest man and a top aide of the US president. He has succeeded. However, at the height of his triumph, he lets his guard slip and throws a Nazi salute, thereby blowing his own cover and exposing years’ worth of plotting.
This plotline perfectly matches the story of Elon Musk’s – at least its opening and denouement, that is. He is the once-feeble boy who threw a gesture eerily reminiscent of a Nazi salute at the inauguration of the 47th president of the United States.
However, the jury is still out on whether Musk is a closeted Nazi or he was just once bitten by Kanye West.
The world’s wealthiest man throws a ‘Nazi salute’ at the swearing-in of the world’s most influential man, what in the world could it mean? A misunderstanding? An awkward gesture maybe? Or is it reason enough to be worried? There are three theories that could make sense of it all.
Theory #1
According to the American patriots that are also the hardcore Musk sympathisers, it was not a Nazi salute but rather a storied gesture that used to accompany the Pledge of Allegiance of the United States.
The gesture is commonly referred to as the Bellamy salute, so named after the man behind the oath that originated in the late 19th century. It started out as a military salute but then made its way into American classrooms. There was a time when the palm-out gesture was ubiquitously executed by each and every pupils nationwide. Today, the pledge protocol varies from state to state. Some are keeping up with the tradition. In some of the states, it is optional. Others, though, have discarded it as an unseemly ceremony.
Anyway, this is the old-fashioned ceremony. In 1942, the US Congress amended the Flag Code and ditched the Bellamy salute for good, replacing it with a hand-over-heart gesture. The rationale behind the reform was that the existing salutation was evocative of a Sieg Heil.
The media would be often stirring a furore over the footage of the Bellamy salutes. So, the Elon Musk controversy is effectively nothing new. For one, Charles Lindbergh, a decorated US flying ace and a lionised socialite, was accused of being a covert Hitler sympathiser for overusing the gesture. In all fairness, though, that was not the only reason behind the grim allegations.
The Musk people have furnished precisely this explanation. But as much as the Bellamy salute theory is a nice one, it does not stack up at the end of the day.
At 78 years of age, even President Trump is too young to be saluting the Star-Spangled Banner the old-fashioned way. By the time he was born, the American schools switched to a new pledge protocol. As for Elon Musk, he had absolutely nothing to do with either the US school system or the Boy Scouts of American. Being South African born and raised, Musk moved to Canada aged 17. It was not until two years later that he relocated stateside.
Besides, a proper pledge ceremony requires an American flag and the oath itself, which, needless to say, was not the case with Musk. Apart from it, the Bellamy salute is strictly choreographed, which, as the footage shows, sets it apart from Musk’s body language during his post-inauguration address.
But the gesture falls short of a classical Nazi salute either. Adolf Hitler modelled it after the Italian fascist salutation, which in turn allegedly harks back to ancient Rome, even though this theory has nothing to back it up. But a modern take on the notorious World War II-era gesture could have been devised by the Neo-Nazis much later.
Chances are, Elon Musk must have been consumed by emotion and ended up throwing something that was neither a Nazi nor Bellamy salute, which was not a premeditated or scripted gesture at all, which leads us to theory #2.
Theory #2
Indeed, after saluting the right-hand-side stands the way he did, Musk turned around and followed it up by punching the air. He addressed the crowd, saying: ‘My heart goes out to you.’
Long story, it is ostensibly a display of love rather than bellicosity.
Theory #3
The third explanation portrays the world’s richest man as a closeted Nazi since South Africa’s populous German community has always been a big deal. It would be a fitting story for a comic book, but life is, of course, much more complicated.
The proponents of the cryptic Nazi theory apparently include the Spanish governments where the Cabinet ministers deleted their accounts on X to protest the platform owner Elon Musk’s ‘Nazi salute’.
Commenting on Musk’s bizarre body language, the play-by-play announcer of Ukraine’s 1+1 TV network said: ‘Musk’s gesture shows us he is part of our lot.’
In reality, though, Musk would be a very unlikely Neo-Nazi, let alone the one cheering for Ukraine. But even if the controversial gesture is nothing to brood over, a quirky multi-billionaire with literally cosmic ambitions and extraordinary intellectual prowess sounds like a great comic book story that, like we said, often involves a planetary takeover and suchlike.
The idea of the ‘unhinged Musk’ holding sway over President Trump and thus posing a threat to the world is being floated by the US media and political circles alike. In his farewell speech as the outgoing president, Joe Biden issued a gloomy warning of the oligarchs stepping up their clout.
But this alarming trend may well be a short-lived phenomenon as is the Trump–Musk duo. Both are impulsive, egotistic and superbly ambitious, while Musk is too proactive to be always falling in line with an allegedly vindictive Trump.
The two are not entirely on the same page over a number of issues already. The controversial gesture could have easily cost Musk his political ambitions and his role as an incoming head of Doge.
‘That was over the top, Elon. You see those folks mounting backlash,’ Trump could have said explaining his falling-out with the eccentric billionaire. But the odds are, he will not bat as much as an eyelid over it. After all, the art of politics is about coming up with favourable interpretations. So far, Elon Musk is more of a friend than a foe to Trump.
But there will sure come a point where the two titans will clash, and Musk will have to get back to square one. Not that he will travel back to a troubled childhood, but as the world’s wealthiest individual, he will most certainly have to restart his forays into the realm of high-stakes politics in a bid to change this world and take over others, like maybe colonising Mars.
Or it may be vice versa: changing the other worlds and taking over ours. God knows which scenario Elon Musk may be mulling right now.