"Don't say Hess to Nazi accusations" Musk makes fun of criticism with bizarre pun
The tech billionaire has already dismissed outrage at a Hitler salute-like gesture as a cheap ploy by his critics. Now he's going one better.
23.01.2025, 22:33
dpa
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- Tech billionaire Elon Musk has mocked criticism of him for making a gesture similar to a Hitler salute.
- On his platform X, he posted a provocative play on words with the names of influential Nazis.
- It is not the first malicious reaction to the outrage following his gesture.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk has mocked criticism of him for making a gesture similar to a Hitler salute. He posted a provocative play on words on his platform X: a series of sentences in which he replaced certain words with the names of influential Nazis who organized and carried out the persecution and murder of millions of Jews alongside Adolf Hitler: Rudolf Hess, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Göring. An example of a sentence in which he presumably replaced "yes" with the name Hess: "Don't say Hess to Nazi accusations." At the end he put an emoji laughing tears. It is not the first derisive reaction to the outrage following his gesture.
The chairman of the human rights organization Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, wrote on X about Musk's post, "We've said it hundreds of times and we'll say it again: the Holocaust was a uniquely evil event, and it is inappropriate and offensive to trivialize it. Elon Musk, the Holocaust is not a joke."
Following the furor over Musk's appearance after Trump's inauguration, the Anti-Defamation League had called for prudence in these troubled times and wrote about the entrepreneur's gesture: "It appears that Elon Musk made a clumsy gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had said that Musk was being unfairly slandered and was a friend of Israel. The entrepreneur is a close advisor to the new US President Donald Trump.