Early on Thursday morning, Elon Musk, who has led the efforts of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to purge tens of thousands of government workers on behalf of President Donald Trump, amplified a defense of Adolf Hitler on his social media platform, X. “Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people,” reads the post from a pseudonymous user, shared in a screenshot posted by a far-right account Musk follows. “Their public sector workers did.”
It should go without saying that the Nazis carried out the Holocaust that killed millions of Jews and others at the direction of Hitler and party leadership. But for Musk, an ahistorical view on World War II that happens to demonize the kind of labor he’s fighting in Washington is simply too convenient to pass up. The president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the largest trade union of public sector employees in the U.S., wasn’t having it.
“America’s public service workers — our nurses, teachers, firefighters, librarians — chose making our communities safe, healthy and strong over getting rich,” said AFSCME’s Lee Saunders in a statement on Thursday. “They are not, as the world’s richest man implies, genocidal murderers. Elon Musk and the billionaires in this administration have no idea what real people go through every day. That’s why he’s so willing to take a chainsaw to people’s jobs, Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare.”
Some of Musk’s critics have described him as a Nazi, and though he’s denied it, since he seized power upon Trump’s return to the White House, it seems he has only leaned into that characterization. Whereas before he had reinstated previously banned white nationalists on his website and dabbled in some of their racist conspiracy theories, he attracted far more outrage for a raised-arm salute at an inauguration event in January that was indistinguishable from a “Sieg Hiel” gesture. When faced with backlash, he posted a series of puns on the names of infamous Nazis, including “Some people will Goebbels anything down!” and “His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler!”
His subsequent denials of Nazi inclinations were not altogether convincing. In an interview with influential podcaster Joe Rogan, Musk protested that one cannot be a Nazi unless they are “committing genocide” or “invading Poland.” (Of course, many of today’s self-avowed Nazis have accomplished neither.) He went on to downplay the lasting impact of the Holocaust in a virtual appearance to support Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which has connections to neo-Nazis, telling them, “Children should not feel guilty for the sins of their parents — let alone their great-grandparents.”
It is comments like these that have helped to fuel a boycott movement against Musk’s auto manufacturer, Tesla, with some referring to the company’s electric vehicles as “swasticars.” While the Tesla Takedown campaign has peacefully picketed Tesla dealerships, a few locations have been targeted for suspected arsons or vandalism, including spray-painted swastikas on cars and property.
While Musk’s politics and public commentary have been incendiary since he began to marinate in an ecosystem of far-right misinformation upon acquiring Twitter in 2022, and he delights in his role as internet antagonist, it’s not clear what he hopes to achieve with his repeated Nazi allusions and revisionism. It was little over a year ago that, faced with accusations of allowing and even boosting antisemitic content on his platform, he visited Israel and the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland, where the Nazis exterminated over a million people. Gidon Lev, a Holocaust survivor who met Musk there, said in a later interview that he “was not impressed because [Musk] didn’t make the least attempt to make any personal connections,” and he felt like he was used as “decoration” for Musk’s photo-op.
Musk, for his part, remarked that the chilling past marked by Auschwitz “hits you much more in the heart when you see it in person.” It was the obvious thing to say during this public relations tour, intended as damage control to staunch the tide of advertisers leaving Twitter over his content moderation failures and own extremism. But apparently, that feeling has faded with time — if it ever existed.
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