Errol Musk can’t “see anything wrong” with the controversial hand gesture that his billionaire son Elon Musk made at a post-inauguration rally, claiming it was a “universal salute.”
In an interview Tuesday night with Chris Cuomo on NewNation, the elder Musk burst out laughing when asked what he made of the suggestion that his son’s gesture, which he made twice, was a “Nazi salute.”
“It’s absolute nonsense, absolute rubbish,” Musk replied. “It’s a universal, er, salute, or as you said, you know, throwing his heart out, I suppose.”
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Cuomo asked Errol how people should judge such behavior from his son.
“What behavior?” Errol Musk said. “The behavior was fine. I can’t see anything wrong with that behavior.”
Musk also addressed whether Elon’s maternal grandparents influenced his son’s political thoughts.
In a separate interview in November, Errol revealed that his son Elon’s maternal grandparents were Hitler-supporting members of the Canadian Nazi Party who moved to South Africa because they strongly approved of the racist apartheid regime.
Errol said this did not have a bearing on his son’s political beliefs, and that his son grew up helping with his election campaigns as a candidate for an anti-apartheid party.
“Do you assign any of the lineage on the maternal side, to your son. That he’s like his maternal grandfather?” Cuomo asked.
“No, not at all,” Errol Musk replied. “The maternal grandfather passed away when Elon was one-year-old. So that’s crazy.”
The Anti-Defamation League faced some backlash after it defended Musk over his salute, which it said appeared to be just “an awkward gesture.”
Musk’s estranged daughter, Vivian Wilson, weighed in with a post on Threads on Tuesday, writing, “I’m just gonna say let’s call a spade a f---ing spade.”
New York University history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert in fascism, wrote on X that the gesture was a “Nazi salute – and a very belligerent one too."
Elon Musk has increasingly voiced far-right political thoughts and boosted parties that support those views in recent months.
In December, he endorsed the far-right German party AfD and hosted a cosy video chat with its leader Alice Weidel.
After his purchase of Twitter, he reinstated banned accounts from far-right individuals including the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Patrick Casey, the former head of white nationalist group Identity Evropa, and Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi publisher of white supremacist website The Daily Stormer, under the guise of supporting “free speech.”
Musk has also previously posted on X accusing a South African political party of “openly pushing for genocide of white people.”
Read it at NewsNation
