Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and U.S. President Donald Trump’s confidant, has been stirring an awful lot of unease lately.
In the past two weeks, he has praised the extreme right-wing Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), raised his hand in a gesture that looked ominously like a stiff-arm Nazi salute, made light of notorious Nazi war criminals, and claimed that Germany focuses far too much on its “past guilt.”
To no one’s surprise, Musk’s disturbing and disruptive comments have triggered shock waves of indignation, anger and puzzlement. Being incredibly rich, with a net worth of about $400 billion, he seems insulated from and oblivious to the outrage he creates.
Trump, impressed by his fabulous wealth and ownership of such high-flying companies as the X Corp., Tesla, SpaceX and Open AI, has placed Musk in charge of the new Department of Government Efficiency, which was formed to reduce the size of the bloated federal work force.
This is a very big job with immense responsibilities, yet Musk seems to have plenty of spare time to indulge in extracurricular activities, which do not exactly burnish his image or reputation.
He has praised the AfD repeatedly, interviewed its candidate for German chancellor on the social media site X, and addressed a party conference by video link, claiming the AfD has the support of the Trump administration.
Musk’s apparent infatuation with the AfD should be worrisome in light of the fact that intelligence agencies in Germany have formally classified parts of it as extremist. Last year, one of its leaders was convicted of using banned Nazi language. Several years ago, one of its most prominent members compared the Holocaust memorial in central Berlin to a wall of shame. And one of its former parliamentarians has been implicated in plots to overthrow the German government.
The AfD is not a party that a representative of a mainstream American political party, the Republicans, should endorse. Yet Trump has remained deafeningly silent in the face of Musk’s endorsement of the AfD, which is polling relatively well in advance of the general election in Germany next month.
So when Musk, at a rally following Trump’s inaugural, raised his arm twice in a salute that looked remarkably like the infamous Nazi salute, questions were raised about his beliefs and motives.
The Anti-Defamation League gave him the benefit of the doubt, saying his salute was a nothing more than a sign of exuberance in the heat of a moment.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rushed to his defence, saying that Musk had been “falsely smeared,” and that he was “a great friend of Israel” who had visited the country after the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas terrorists.
Musk repaid Netanyahu by publishing a distasteful and inappropriate post on X: “Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations. Some people will Goebbels anything down! Goring your enemies! His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler. Bet you did nazi that coming.” To which he added a laughing face emoji.
As it should have, Musk’s juvenile jingle annoyed the anti-Defamation League. Its chief executive officer, Jonathan Greenblatt, rightly described it as “offensive” and reminded him that the Holocaust “is not a joke.”
Greenblatt’s rejoinder had no effect whatsoever on Musk, a loose cannon who sparked an outcry last year when, on X, he appeared to endorse a comment by an antisemitic user who accused Jews of hating white people. Musk subsequently apologized, calling it the “dumbest” post he had ever written
Addressing an AfD rally by video two days before the 80th anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz Birkenau, Musk told its supporters that “there is too much focus on past guilt (in Germany), and we need to move beyond that.”
Musk, who visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland in 2024, added that “children should not feel guilty for the sins of their parents, their great-grandparents even.”
This was obviously a reference to atrocities committed by German Nazis during the Holocaust.
Musk’s remarks are, to say the least, completely out of order.
“Contrary to Elon Musk’s advice, the remembrance and acknowledgement of (Germany’s) dark past should be central in shaping German society,” said Dani Dayan, the chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial/museum in Jerusalem. “Failing to do so is an insult to the victims of Nazism and a clear danger to the democratic future of Germany.”
Ripping into Musk, Greenblatt said that Holocaust remembrance is not about “guilting or shaming” Germany, but about “education, commemoration, historical responsibility and fulfilling the promise of Never Again.”
Successive governments in Germany since the end of World War II have embraced and internalized this philosophy. Yet Musk, for reasons only best known to himself, rails against it.
Musk is a savvy businessman, but he is sometimes a discredit to himself.