What Elon Musk’s Salute Was All About

So was it a Hitler salute or wasn’t it?

Speaking at President Trump’s inauguration event this week, Elon Musk slapped his right hand on his chest before shooting his arm diagonally upward, palm facing down. He did it twice.

It looked a lot like the salute used in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. But almost immediately, a striking number of different interpretations began to circulate.

Some commentators called it a “Roman salute.” Others described it as a “heartfelt” expression of joy, or dismissed it as merely clumsy.

The website of the Anti-Defamation League, which campaigns against anti-Semitism, defines the Nazi salute as “raising an outstretched right arm with the palm down,” and ranks it as “the most common white supremacist hand sign in the world.”

But after Mr. Musk’s stiff-arm salute, the Anti-Defamation League called it “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.”

Andrea Stroppa, known as Mr. Musk’s emissary in Italy, posted on the social media platform X: “The Roman Empire is back, starting from the Roman salute.” He later deleted the post, saying that people were interpreting “the whole thing as a reference to Nazi-fascism.”