I had the thrill of contributing to the British Journalism Review for the first time. The piece was published in the latest edition of the journal. It covers Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, President Donald Trump and the media ecosystem bringing them all together. An excerpt is below:
Was it a Nazi salute? Was it just an effusive bang of the heart? Does the reality of what Elon Musk did at the Donald Trump inauguration rally in January even matter? Given Musk’s wealth and prominence, it very much does matter and, for what it’s worth, I think it clearly was a Nazi gesture. Whether Musk himself is a Nazi or just a 53-year-old internet troll remains an open question. The reality of the salute does not. As Dr Dave Rich wrote in his newsletter, Everyday Hate: “There is nothing about it you could change to make it more Nazi-like than it already was. Whether Elon Musk meant it that way is another question, but objectively, just looking at the action itself: it was a Nazi salute. Had he done it in Europe 80 years ago, nobody would have been in any doubt what it was.”
He might have made a very public trip to Auschwitz in January 2024, but the hurt such a gesture causes Jews is seemingly less important to Musk than causing controversy. The fairly weak defence he made of his actions comes from a man who has shown himself to have a… changeable… relationship with the truth.
Since his contentious takeover of Twitter, now X, in October 2022, Musk has become an almost ubiquitous presence in western media and now finds himself at the side of the US president. (At the time of writing, the two men and their egos have not fallen out. How long that lasts is anyone’s guess.) Musk clearly delights in that role as a presidential lieutenant, just as he delights in winding people up. He is assumed to be the person behind the “fork in the road” email sent to millions of federal US government employees in January 2025. The subject line and contents mirrored what he did at Twitter in 2022.
Read the full piece at the British Journalism Review.
