Unpopular Opinion

That's my take, but it's perhaps slightly more complicated. Here's Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic, who just wrote a whole article about it. He's a good journalist, a bit woke-adjacent, which should give him some credibility around here:

What’s left out of much of the discussion is that Musk is supremely, almost cosmically, awkward and stilted. All close observers of Musk—and I am one—know this. [...]

Musk’s X has given a megaphone to bigots and restored the accounts of banned racists. I’ve argued that Musk has turned X into a white-supremacist website. Musk himself has spent recent weeks enthusiastically endorsing Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD. Members of the party have had documented ties to neo-Nazis; in 2018, the co-leader of the AfD downplayed the significance of the Holocaust and the crimes of the Nazi regime. Musk has endorsed posts about the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. Even those inside the MAGA movement have voiced concerns about Musk. This month, the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon called Musk “a truly evil guy, a very bad guy.” He used the word racist to describe Musk and others in Trump’s Silicon Valley inner circle who have South African heritage: “Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”

All of this informs how one might interpret Musk on the stage today. Above all else, Musk is a troll, an edgelord. He delights in “triggering” his ideological enemies, which includes the media. And his gesture—whatever the intent—has done just that. In a way, the uproar online over Musk is reminiscent of an incident in the first months of the first Trump administration, when two pro-Trump influencers were photographed in the White House press room making the “OK” hand gesture. The photo was interpreted by some media members as a white-power symbol. Reporters and organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League traced it back to racist message boards like 4chan’s /pol/ board. Eventually, however, the gestures appeared to be part of an attempt, by 4chan, to trick the mainstream media into overreacting and turning the handiwork of a few trolls into national news. The whole affair was exhausting and difficult to follow. A message board that trafficked in hate speech created a fake hate-speech symbol to try to trick the media into calling something racist. (The ADL, it is worth noting, has extended Musk the benefit of the doubt, issuing a statement that Musk made an “awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute,” and encouraged everyone to “give one another a bit of grace.”)

None of that is to suggest that Musk’s salute wasn’t genuine. A practiced troll consistently crosses redlines because they want to offend and trigger. They also swaddle their actions in enough detached irony and cynicism that allow them to relentlessly mock or harass anyone who dares take them seriously. There is every reason to take a right-wing troll at face value, and yet doing so often means giving them what they want: an intense reaction they can use against you.