Elon Musk, the head of Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, said “it’s an outrageous thing to claim that I’m a Nazi” in a clip from an interview with Fox News that was released Friday, slamming how he’s been covered by the media. He also said that if his detractors could “press a button” and kill him, they would, but he is “difficult to kill.”
At Trump’s post-inauguration rally, Musk gave a straight-arm salute that many, including his estranged daughter, interpreted to be a Sieg Heil. Since he bought Twitter, now social platform X, he has restored white supremacist accounts that were previously banned. In March, as he was carrying out widespread firings of federal workers, he shared a post from an X account that said that Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zedong didn’t cause the deaths of millions of people. Instead, public workers did. After criticism, he removed the post.
Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Musk spoke virtually at a campaign event for a far-right German political party, Alternative für Deutschland. He said that Germans should not lose their culture to “multiculturalism.”
“Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents,” he said.
Musk has become increasingly unpopular as he slashes the federal government via DOGE, cutting agencies and programs. Tesla dealerships have been the location of protests, vandalism, and arson; the company’s cars have been given the name “swasticars.” In March, Musk said that he and the DOGE team were getting death threats on a daily basis.
“You grew up in South Africa,” Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law and Fox News host, said in the new interview. “You lived during a period of Apartheid. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of horrific things. So to be called a Nazi by people, to be made out to be this monster, that must be really hard for you.”
“It’s a relentless propaganda campaign, which obviously President Trump has experienced for a very long time,” Musk said. “Twenty years, maybe longer. And politics is a blood sport. So they’re going to come up with whatever attacks they can to destroy the public perception of someone.”
“Now, obviously,” he continued, “I’ve not harmed anyone in my life, so it’s an outrageous thing to claim that I’m a Nazi, because the issue with Nazis was not their mannerisms or their, you know, choice of dress, but the fact that they killed millions of people. That’s the issue. They’ve also called President Trump a Nazi, and there was one publication that said He’s … worse than Hitler, Stalin, and maybe Mao combined, but he also is not a violent person, and, in fact, has done a lot to prevent wars and stop wars, which is the very opposite of being a Nazi.”
“Ironic how that works out,” Lara Trump said.
“But it is disappointing how well propaganda works,” Musk said. “If you repeat a lie, you know, the sort of ‘he’s a Nazi’ line enough times, some people actually believe it, especially people that still believe the legacy news. So if they still think that what CNN says with the exception of Scott Jennings is true, then, you know, they call me an Nazi on CNN. So if someone believes CNN, then they would say, ‘Oh … that’s an Nazi.’ That’s because they said it on TV. The person on the TV said it. But they really are trying every angle to get me.”
In January, Elon Musk’s mother had encouraged him in a post on X to sue CNN after Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell argued with conservative panelist Scott Jennings about the straight-arm gesture. Rampell told him he should do the same gesture on television if it was not controversial.
“Why don’t you do it on TV right now? Why don’t you do it on TV right now if you think it’s so, so banal,” Rampell said. Jennings, of course, did not do the gesture.
In his interview with Lara Trump, Musk said he thinks some people want him dead.
“If they could press a button and kill me in reality, they would press that button immediately, but since I’m a little difficult to kill, they are doing character assassination instead,” he said.
It’s unclear who the “they” is he’s referring to, but it appears he’s getting paranoid.
