Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk had a unique response to the backlash he received after making a gesture some claimed was a Nazi salute at U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration rally on Jan. 20.
“Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations! Some people will Goebbels anything down! Stop Gőring your enemies! His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler! Bet you did nazi that coming,” he wrote on Thursday.
Jewish leaders and organizations immediately criticized his post on X.
“We’ve said it hundreds of times before, and we will say it again: The Holocaust was a singularly evil event, and it is inappropriate and offensive to make light of it,” wrote Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. “Elon Musk, the Holocaust is not a joke.”
The ADL’s official X account echoed Greenblatt’s sentiment, writing: “Making inappropriate and highly offensive jokes that trivialize the Holocaust only serve to minimize the evil and inhumanity of Nazi crimes, denigrate the suffering of both victims and survivors and insult the memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Shoah.”
Sacha Roytman, CEO of the Combat Antisemitism Movement, stated that Musk’s post is “the exact definition of Holocaust trivialization.”
“My great-grandfathers were murdered by Goebbels’ propaganda; they lost their homes because of Goring’s campaign and were gassed because of Himmler,” he continued.
Ted Deutch, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, wrote that “wordplay about Nazis isn’t funny. It isn’t clever. And it’s dangerous.”
He added that Musk’s post was “absolutely the wrong response” to the Nazi-salute accusations.
“Nazi-themed ‘jokes’ are offensive and harmful,” Deutch wrote. “Don’t belittle the seriousness of the Holocaust; you give cover to those who seek to do the same.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Musk, saying he was “being falsely smeared.”
“Elon is a great friend of Israel” who has “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,” Netanyahu wrote.
