By Dennis Kneale
Horrors. Did Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and the fiercest, most famous supporter of President Trump, really offer up a “Heil Hitler!” salute onstage at the Trump rally after inauguration last Tuesday?
Of course he didn’t. This man wore a dog tag around his neck for over a year in honor of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. He met twice with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called for the annihilation of the terrorist group. Musk has said he is, if anything, pro-Jewish, with a Jewish name (in Hebrew, “Elon” means “oak tree”).
At the rally, Musk expressed his love for the crowd by putting his right hand over his heart and then thrusting it outward, palm to the audience. Cue contrived controversy and phony outrage from much of the media (see CNN anchor Erin Burnett, here) and dimwit Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the vacuous social media star who pretends to represent the Bronx in Congress (here).
On Musk’s X platform, defenders posted a battery of past photos of Democrats who have made a similar arm-extended gesture: President Obama, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, and even AOC herself. The media made nothing of this because Democrats aren’t the Nazis—President Trump and his supporters are, to hear the Left tell it.
Now it is Elon’s turn. The overdone anger over a gesture is a sign of how lost are the media and the Dems now that Trump has reoccupied the White House. In days, he has imposed vast changes so fast and far-ranging that they don’t know what to oppose first.
So many outrages in so little time: the border crackdown, the roundup of criminals in sanctuary cities, the new power to deport foreign-born students who protest for Hamas, ending D.E.I. and Affirmative Action across the federal government, blocking men who say they are women from competing in women’s sports, ordering federal workers back to the office five days a week, and still more.
When in doubt, return to what worked in the past: play the Nazi card. President Biden, the Democrats, and their media lapdogs all played this card again and again against Donald Trump. The silliness of this was revealed when MSNBC’s married-to-each-other anchors, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Have they no shame? Their show’s ratings took a steep tumble in the ensuing weeks.
Even before he started backing President Trump, Musk was a larger-than-life target for critics. This latest conflict illustrates Lesson 3 the Eleven Lessons of Elon, laid out in my new book, “The Leadership Genius of Elon Musk,” published by HarperCollins on Tuesday.
Lesson 3 says, “The highest nail gets pounded first. Strap on a helmet.” Elon does. His companies have come under scrutiny from government on some 20 different fronts, much of it after President Biden called for Musk to be investigated for buying Twitter.
But instead of shrinking from his critics and shutting up, Elon speaks up and lashes back. Thus illustrating Lesson 4 in “The Leadership Genius of Elon Musk”: “Tease your critics and torture your enemies.”
Thus, Elon responded to this fake flap with derision for his enemies in the media, posting on X: “It was astonishing how insanely hard legacy media tried to cancel me for saying ‘my heart goes out to you’ and moving my hand from my heart to the audience. In the end, this deception will just be another nail in the coffin of legacy media.”
And this: “Legacy media sucks next-level, especially in Europe.” When another post showed Musk’s friend Joe Rogan saying on his podcast that CNN uses a freeze-frame image of Rogan holding his hand overhead to make him look like a Nazi, Elon chimed in: “Standard practice for the lying legacy media.”
In the rough-and-tumble of social media, Elon Musk gives as good as he gets. Maybe more of us should stand up and make ourselves heard.
Dennis Kneale is host of the podcast “What’s Bugging Me” on Ricochet and author of “The Leadership Genius of Elon Musk,” published by HarperCollins on January 28, 2025.