When tech billionaire Elon Musk appeared to perform a Nazi salute to a Republican crowd honouring United States President Donald Trump’s inauguration, social media lit up with accusations that he was a fascist.
When he addressed a political rally of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the German city of Halle, those suspicions seemed confirmed.
“There’s too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move on from that,” he said, from a giant video screen.
The crowd cheered when he said, “It’s OK to be proud to be German. It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”
And they cheered even more loudly when he accused the ruling Social Democrats of taking a “totalitarian approach” to their beliefs, and finished with “Freedom of speech is the foundation of democracy.”
Party leader Alice Weidel grinned broadly from the podium and clapped.
Is Elon Musk a Nazi? Nazis seem to think so. Christian nationalists, white supremacists and avowed neo-Nazis in the US all hailed Musk’s salute as a historic comeback for their cause.
Musk’s public preoccupations on X, his messaging platform, are certainly libertarian. He fulminates against over-regulation and government waste and obsesses over freeing the potential of the market and of individuals.
He is incensed with what he sees as uncontrolled immigration and cultural cohesion. He seems to believe everyone should stay where they were born – though he himself emigrated from South Africa to Canada in 1988.
As a corollary, he insists on binary gender roles as a means of reversing demographic decline in developed economies.
And he constantly plays on the theme of free speech, insisting that democratic societies are hypocritical in claiming to defend it.
Controversially, he did on one occasion in 2023 endorse an anti-Semitic post on X.
The post read in part, “Jewish communties (sic) have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
Musk replied then, “You have said the actual truth.”
Does all this make him a Nazi?
“No, he is not [a Nazi],” said Jean-Yves Camus, co-director of the Observatory of Political Radicalism at the Jean Jaures Foundation in Paris. He believes Musk and Trump are self-serving rather than ideological.
“The sort of regime they want to achieve is like an autocracy, the rule of law by one man, with no boundaries. They have no boundaries,” he told Al Jazeera.
“I believe he is ideologically unmoored,” agreed Constantinos Filis, who directs the Institute of Global Affairs at the American College of Greece.
“I don’t see coherent political thought,” said Filis. “His thoughts stem from his business interests and various floating ideas. I mean, what considered opinion of Germany or the AfD leads Musk to declare he will save the planet?”
Filis was referring to Musk’s comment in Halle, “This election coming up in Germany is incredibly important. It could decide the entire fate of Europe, maybe the fate of the world.”
If Musk isn’t a real Nazi, why do far-right party leaders like Weidel and the UK’s Reform Party leader Nigel Farage clamour for his support?
“It’s clear they want his money… and through X, Musk gives them a space to express themselves,” said Filis. “Through fake accounts he may also be giving them the appearance of support from people who may not exist.”
Musk also plays well to the base. “The anti-systemic crowd… see a successful businessman who appears to have made it as an outsider. That is what Musk sells, that he is successful and goes against the system,” said Filis.
If Musk isn’t ideological, why does he bother to woo the far right? It isn’t cheap. He paid a reported $277m into Trump’s re-election campaign, and Twitter, renamed X, cost him $44bn.
Yet the keys to his success did not come from the far right, Make America Great Again politics of Donald Trump.
A $465m loan that kept Tesla afloat came from the Department of Energy in 2009 under former US President Barack Obama, and a $1.6bn contract from NASA that similarly saved his rocket company Space-X from closure after three launch failures came in 2008 under George W Bush, a Republican president who has denounced MAGA politics.
Some believe Musk’s politics are entirely cynical.
“He seems to have done a cost-benefit analysis of the money he can make by supporting the anti-systemic crowd versus the others,” said Filis. “Besides, in a country where institutions work, a businessman has small profit margins. In an unruly society where capitalism is unbridled, he obviously has much more to gain.”
Musk’s interest in Europe may simply be to wreak havoc on its economic and industrial policy, believed Filis.
“He may see competitors he wants to eliminate. The German auto industry is not now at its best, but it can present a challenge to Tesla.”
If Musk was instrumental in helping Trump get elected, can he pull the same off in Europe?
Camus believes right-wing nationalism is actually working against Musk in France. “Some [parties] are so nationalist they are beginning to ask: What President Trump does is maybe good for the US, but is it good for us?” he said.
“This is why [far-right National Rally leader] Marine le Pen did not attend the [Trump] inauguration. Because how can she go to an average French city and explain to voters in the working class that President Trump is putting tariffs on French goods, so that’s one thousand jobs less for us? No way.”
