Elon Musk Gets Most Outrageous Ally Over His Nazi Salute

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.”

Donald Trump’s first phone call with a foreign leader on Wednesday was with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who made a hefty and incredibly unlikely pledge of investment. 

MBS told Trump on the call that the country hopes to expand trade and investments with the United States by $600 billion, reports Bloomberg, citing Saudi state media. MBS reportedly said that his country was eager to take advantage of investment opportunities the Trump administration is creating, saying that they could result in “unprecedented economic prosperity.”

But MBS’s investment pledge is a stratospheric amount, representing close to 55 percent of Saudi Arabia’s gross domestic product, and the country is currently posting fiscal deficits, due to its multiyear Vision 2030 plan, which seeks to diversify the country’s economy. Plus, the oil-rich nation has been hurt by falling oil prices. 

Journalist Gregg Carlstrom pointed out that $600 billion over four years is more than what Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has invested in the entire world to date. Not so coincidentally, Trump on Monday floated the idea of making Saudi Arabia his foreign visit as president this term, but only if the country was willing to buy $450 to $500 billion of American products. Trump made Saudi Arabia his first foreign visit in 2017 as well, reportedly also after an investment pledge from MBS at the time.  

MBS’s $600 billion pledge was almost certainly tabulated to please the new president and entice him into visiting. It’s another example of how Trump is making policy transactional. When it comes to Saudi Arabia, Trump’s business operation has already cut a deal to build a Trump Tower in Jeddah, and unlike in his first term, the Trump Organization will not be shying away from business deals with foreign companies this time around. It looks like Trump’s business relationship with Saudi Arabia is already overlapping with the new foreign policy of his presidency.

Donald Trump suggested that Joe Biden might regret not giving himself a presidential pardon.

During an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity Wednesday night, Trump was in the middle of complaining about Biden’s last-minute pardons for his family members and Trump critics when the president suggested that his predecessor could use the same protections.

“This guy went around giving everybody pardons. And you know, the funny thing—maybe the sad thing—is he didn’t give himself a pardon,” Trump said. “And if you look at it, it all had to do with him.”

Trump’s menacing comment indicates that he is keeping the door open for possible prosecution of Biden. It also seemed like the former president’s decision to leave himself vulnerable really bothered Trump.

“Joe Biden has very bad advisers. Somebody advised Joe Biden to give pardons to everybody but him,” Trump continued.

Trump was so worked up about it that when Hannity tried to change the subject to the economy, Trump argued with the interviewer to keep complaining about it. “I don’t care,” Trump snipped. “This is more important because right now the economy is gonna do great!”

Trump’s complaint about Biden pardoning “everybody” is also pretty hypocritical considering that one of Trump’s first actions in office was to enact sweeping pardons for some 1,500 rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, has vowed to go after a list of the president’s “deep state” political enemies, including Biden. Meanwhile, the president’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, has declined to say whether she was planning to prosecute people such as Jack Smith, Merrick Garland, or Liz Cheney, who tried to hold Trump accountable for his alleged crimes.

The Trump administration’s anti-DEI snitching plan is getting flooded with fake reports after it tried to strong-arm federal workers into ratting out their colleagues.

Federal employees received emails Wednesday reading: “We are taking steps to close all agency [diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility] offices and end all DEIA-related contracts in accordance with President Trump’s executive order.… These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination.”

Then came the draconian kicker: “We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024 to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances to DEIAtruth@opm.gov within 10 days. There will be no adverse consequences for timely reporting this information. However, failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.”

The threat was loud and clear: Report your so-called “DEI” employees or else. What exactly “DEIA or similar ideologies” means is up in the air, but the message was out there. And so was the email address of the DEIA snitching hotline.

Fake emails quickly started to roll in. ‘I don’t care, fuck these McCarthyite bastards,” one BlueSky user said, with an screenshot attached of an email to the hotline where he ironically reported Donald Trump and JD Vance for being “put in their positions solely because of their race and/or gender despite the fact that they are wholly unqualified for their jobs and, in some cases, have criminal records.”

“Anyone have a script to fire off a billion e-mails an hour??” another user asked in the replies.

“Anyone can email anything of any size even if it crashes the site,” one X user noted.

The scope and effectiveness of this latest phase of Trump’s anti-DEI crusade remains to be seen.

A Milwaukee weatherwoman who criticized Elon Musk’s inauguration salute has since been stripped of her professional responsibilities.

Sam Kuffel, 31, made two posts to her personal Instagram story in the wake of the inauguration, torching Musk for making a gesture that millions of people around the world recognized as a Nazi salute.

“Dude Nazi saluted twice. TWICE. During the inauguration,” read one of Kuffel’s posts. “You fuck with this and this man, I don’t fuck with you. Full stop.” In the second post, Kuffel shared a meme from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, in which one of the show’s characters is subtitled as saying, “Screw that old bitch. He’s a Nazi.”

But that was, apparently, too far for the meteorologist’s station, WDJT-TV (Channel 58), which notified staffers by email on Wednesday that the popular weather forecaster would no longer be employed by the network.

“Meteorologist Sam Kuffel is no longer employed at CBS58,” news director Jessie Garcia wrote in a staff memo obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “A search for a replacement is underway.”

The Anti-Defamation League, a hate-speech watchdog that considers pro-Palestinian activism to be antisemitic, sided with Musk amid the backlash, claiming that the Trump adviser had simply made an “awkward gesture.”

“This is a delicate moment. It’s a new day and yet so many are on edge. Our politics are inflamed, and social media only adds to the anxiety,” the ADL wrote in a statement on X Monday. “This is a new beginning. Let’s hope for healing and work toward unity in the months and years ahead.”

But not everyone agreed with that analysis of Musk’s double salute—least of all the Germans, who quickly pointed out that making such a gesture on the continent is plainly illegal.

“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. Musk, meanwhile, fanned the flames of the controversy by refusing to deny the allegations over dozens of posts as to whether he intended the gesture to resemble Hitler’s Sieg Heil salute.

The moment was only cluttered by Musk’s family history, which descends from Nazi sympathizers—at least according to his father, Errol Musk, who told the Podcast and Chill Network in November that the billionaire’s maternal grandparents supported Adolf Hitler and were members of the German Nazi Party in Canada before moving to South Africa in support of apartheid.