Elon Musk did the Nazi salute on live TV to prove he could

It was a display of power, and a signal: the tech oligarchy is here, and it will do what it wants

Is Elon Musk a Nazi? Did the gesture that he performed in front of millions technically adhere to the standard performance of a Sieg Heil, or a Hitler salute, or a Nazi salute? Could this have been an “awkward” gesture of heartfelt enthusiasm? Did you know that the provenance of said salute was actually Roman, and first adopted by the French, then the fascists, then the Nazis, and so its historicity is really quite complex?

None of these questions matter. What matters is that the actual Nazis are cheering. What matters is that Musk, who is currently supporting Germany’s Nazi-sympathizing AfD party, went on the world’s biggest stage and made a gesture any teenager who has seen a movie about World War II knew would be interpreted as a Nazi salute.

What matters is that Musk, like Trump before him, knows or intuits that the media is incapable of processing such a gesture when it is made by such an “important” man. He knows or intuits that the New York Times will run headlines like

and that news channels will do their best to align their presentations to the most sympathetic interpretation of what occurred, to the point of editing out the salute entirely when they run it in their broadcasts.

He knows this because for now, Elon Musk and his cohort have won. The inauguration was one long festival of grotesqueries — a parade of tech oligarchs and sore winners grousing about American decline while launching meme coins and setting about dismantling the regulatory state. Four of the five richest men in the world, worth over $1 trillion, beaming in the front row, the fifth already firmly in Trump’s pocket.

“If he loses, I’m fucked,” Musk famously told Tucker Carlson, perhaps alluding to the many lawsuits and legal troubles he was facing. But Trump did not lose, and now Musk has never been more unfucked in his life. He has triumphed, and so who knows, and who cares? He can go on national television and give a Nazi salute and the national press will collapse in on itself, second-guessing, trying to play fair, even cowering preemptively from reporting on the truth of the moment at all.

The legacy media is dead, Musk is constantly saying on the massive platform he owns, send people links to X so they can see what’s really going on. What at first felt pathetic now appears to be an entirely successful effort to construct a novel vehicle for propaganda that obviates the need to consider the legacy press at all. In turn, a legacy press bled dry by big tech usurping its advertising revenue and dictating the terms of distribution, perhaps recognizing its deep vulnerability, responds by granting Musk the benefit of the doubt.

My former colleague Matt Pearce has written eloquently about “journalism’s fight for survival in a postliterate democracy” and we are observing the effects of that fight going badly in real time right now. That the men and men in charge of the companies most responsible for destroying journalism—Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Picchai, and Musk himself—were in the front row of the inauguration, clapping for Trump, on the same day Musk made his salute, is telling.

As far as they are concerned, they have won. Mark Zuckerberg won’t take any more liberal scolding, he’s firing fact-checkers and moderators, closing down his DEI programs, and opening his platform up for more hate speech, just like Musk did at Twitter, now X. Google’s AI can generate as much toxic slop as it wants, it’s hard to see any Trump agency cracking down if it instructs someone to eat a poisonous mushroom. And Jeff Bezos, the fourth tech titan in the front row seats, can tell his newspapers to spike op-eds supporting the other party, or editorial cartoons criticizing the big man.

The tech oligarchy is here, and so content in their strangulation of the media that they can be unashamed in their fealty. They can cheer in public and give Nazi salutes and what of it. Their institutional capture is complete. Even the Anti-defamation League will look at a Sieg Heil and say, “that’s fine.” Because the tech oligarchs know, from last go round, that, as Astra Taylor has pointed out, the opposition becoming outraged about their offenses will ultimately amount to little. There is no longer any power to be found in yelling, or working the refs, or appealing to norms, if there was any to begin with. Our protests online will be filed away into the nooks of the sprawling platforms they own.

Is Elon Musk a card-carrying Nazi? It doesn’t matter. The salute was a juvenile display of power, one that aptly reflects the stature of the fully ascended tech oligarchy. Musk is the richest man in the world, he is the first buddy; he can transcend any norm, any offense, watch him. Like Trump before him, he can tell everyone to eat shit, and while the media wonders if he meant it, he’s already pointing his attention and posts and cannon of obscene wealth in another direction. He owns the platform that dictates his own reality. He barely had to defend himself, he barely denied it. He’ll probably do it again. Who’s going to stop him?