Was it a Nazi salute? Was it just an effusive bang of the heart? Does the reality of what Elon Musk did at the Donald Trump inauguration rally in January even matter? Given Musk’s wealth and prominence, it very much does matter and, for what it’s worth, I think it clearly was a Nazi gesture. Whether Musk himself is a Nazi or just a 53-year-old internet troll remains an open question. The reality of the salute does not. As Dr Dave Rich wrote in his newsletter, Everyday Hate: “There is nothing about it you could change to make it more Nazi-like than it already was. Whether Elon Musk meant it that way is another question, but objectively, just looking at the action itself: it was a Nazi salute. Had he done it in Europe 80 years ago, nobody would have been in any doubt what it was.”
He might have made a very public trip to Auschwitz in January 2024, but the hurt such a gesture causes Jews is seemingly less important to Musk than causing controversy. The fairly weak defence he made of his actions comes from a man who has shown himself to have a… changeable… relationship with the truth.
Since his contentious takeover of Twitter, now X, in October 2022, Musk has become an almost ubiquitous presence in western media and now finds himself at the side of the US president. (At the time of writing, the two men and their egos have not fallen out. How long that lasts is anyone’s guess.) Musk clearly delights in that role as a presidential lieutenant, just as he delights in winding people up. He is assumed to be the person behind the “fork in the road” email sent to millions of federal US government employees in January 2025. The subject line and contents mirrored what he did at Twitter in 2022.
While the number of users, as well as the usefulness, of Twitter has decreased since that takeover, it remains a powerful echo chamber for the Trump-supporting right. Barely any consideration is given to truth or reality on there and Musk has the loudest voice of all, boosting the people and stories he deems worthy of his support. Early on in the second Trump administration, Musk and his allies took over the Office of Personnel Management and, as he put it at the start of February, “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper”. It’s the kind of chaotic approach that startup leaders love and many in the media used to marvel at. Now it represents an oligarchal convergence of media, technology and government bureaucracy.
Musk’s newfound status is the kind that comes from owning a global media platform. Similarly, his fellow tech titans all dutifully lined up behind Trump at his inauguration. Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder, Blue Origin, Washington Post owner), Sundar Pichai (Alphabet) and Tim Cook (Apple) all took prominent spots at the ceremony, as did Google founder Sergey Brin. There were places for OpenAI’s Sam Altman and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew as well.
These men are the media barons of our day, owning platforms that distribute information to millions, if not billions, of people. However, instead of holding power to account, they arrived in Washington from Silicon Valley to kiss the ring and see what their businesses could get from those moving into the White House.
Bezos is actually a media baron in the traditional understanding of the phrase too. He had been a largely benevolent owner of the Washington Post since 2013, but a huge row erupted when a pre-election endorsement of Kamala Harris was pulled from the paper at the last minute, apparently at his request. Writing in his own paper, Bezos argued that “what presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence”. However, we can be fairly sure his decision was largely about not upsetting Donald Trump. Bezos had to worry about this more than most media proprietors because he could not risk his other businesses, such as his space venture firm Blue Origin, being on the end of any Trumpian backlash. Democracy does indeed die in darkness.
“Fake news” might feel like a phrase from the previous Trump administration, but the 47th president has shown as little interest in honesty as the 45th did. The difference this time is that those tech bros are indulging him and his supporters, allowing nonsense to spread like wildfire. Take Meta. At the start of 2025, as the world was preparing for Trump’s return, Mark Zuckerberg, clad in a thick T-shirt and gold chain, announced that independent fact-checkers were out and user-generated community notes were in. It was all done in the name of free speech and improved accuracy, he insisted.
Zuckerberg’s move replicated what had previously happened at Twitter, where Musk stripped out such functionality and introduced user-created community notes instead. These bring together and average out information shared on the network to try to give users perspectives on comments and stories shared on there.
Speaking at a conference, Yoel Roth, formerly Twitter’s head of trust and safety, said: “I think community notes is an interesting concept. I think it has some areas where it’s successful. I think we’re seeing some interesting applications of the product. But there’s many other areas where it is not a robust solution for harm mitigation.”
Zuckerberg folds after Trump’s jail threat
That was back in 2023. Our information environment and media literacy levels have not exactly improved in the time since, yet Zuckerberg chose to go down the same path. And why did this happen? Because Trump had threatened Zuckerberg with imprisonment as he was annoyed that Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla had previously donated to Democrats. Trump was also banned from Meta apps after the January 6 2021 insurrection and allowed to return only in February 2023. In a coffee table book released in summer 2024, Trump wrote that Zuckerberg “steered [Facebook] against me”, adding: “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal, this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison.”
It is fair to assume that having repeated corrections to Trump’s constant flow of inaccurate statements across Meta’s platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and Threads, would have prompted the ire of the president. Like Bezos, this is something Zuckerberg was not prepared to risk. Once it was confirmed that Trump was heading back to the Oval Office,
Zuckerberg eliminated much of the infrastructure that would have allowed any kind of meaningful barrier to fake news to exists. (Sending $1million to Trump’s inauguration fund probably also helped in smoothing things over.)
Just prior to the factchecking changes being announced, Sir Nick Clegg said he would be spending “a few months handing over the reins” as Meta’s president of global affairs and taking on “new adventures” away from the company. The former Lib Dem leader was replaced by his deputy Joel Kaplan, a former aide to George W Bush and a more amenable figure to the Trump White House. Sir Nick, whatever critics might say, is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal in the classic sense of the term. There can be little doubt that he saw the direction of travel and decided he didn’t want to continue on the journey.
The bottom line is that neither Musk nor Zuckerberg has any interest in allowing their platforms to be useful homes for journalists and journalism. As well as the issues with the accuracy of content posted directly to the platform, X is now a hopeless place to share work, thanks to algorithmic changes encouraged by Musk. Zuckerberg long gave up pretending his company was interested in the news, or supporting the industry from which it has taken so much.
This does not just affect mainstream publications. It makes it much harder for independent journalists like me who are trying to develop newsletters, blogs and podcasts to get our work out and build an audience. This should be anathema to people who claim they care about the democratisation of information, but that is not the reality. There might be robust work from the best reporters around. People might want to read it. But these men do not care about accuracy and helping the public see such work, they care about monetisation. To a point, that is fair enough. They own private companies, after all. But the dominance of their platforms surely means they have some level of public duty too, something they now shirk by downgrading or removing all the systems designed to counter conspiracies on their platforms.
While there are plenty of reasons to dislike the Rupert Murdochs of this world, and lots of grounds to question the power he and others wield, such figures have at least always had journalism as a motive. They delight in investigating politicians, in skewering the pompous and the prominent. Musk, Zuckerberg and friends have no such motivation. They want “content”, “clicks”, and to be curtailed by as little regulation as possible.
This is the kind of environment that lets fake news flourish. Take, for instance, how Musk, in one of his late-night flurries, decided something nefarious had gone on around the Rochdale grooming gangs debacle. Look too at how misleading information about the horrific murder of three little girls in Southport was allowed to spread online, and the conspiracy theories that continued to rage after killer Axel Rudakubana’s sentencing. There were no checks and balances on the online platforms where these things propagated and spread because their owners don’t care about having them in place.
It is not just Facebook and X where there are issues either. You would not have to work very hard to disappear down a rabbit hole of rubbish and/or radicalisation on YouTube or TikTok. Those platforms work to serve you more of what you have already watched, meaning that, without much effort, viewers can be pushed towards ever more extreme content. This can include all sorts of conspiracies, and drive people towards dangerous, violent acts.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said as much in the aftermath of Rudakubana’s sentencing, noting: “Terrorism has changed. In the past, the predominant threat was highly organised groups with clear political intent… now, alongside that, we also see acts of extreme violence perpetrated by loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom, accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety.”
Just tweeting all day is a privilege of owning it
While writing my 2019 book Not Buying it, which looked at the issue of fake news, I became wary of dismissing everything not considered mainstream as “fake” or a “conspiracy theory”. Heterodox thinking can lead to progress. Journalists, in particular, must develop healthy levels of scepticism. Censorship is rarely a good answer either. Free speech is essential for thriving liberal democracies. In Breaking Twitter, Ben Mezrich documents how this is genuinely something that motivates Musk. He has “shared libertarian philosophies” with his friend and predecessor as Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, “especially around decentralized money and freedom of speech”.
Remembering this is crucial to understanding how Musk has run Twitter since getting his hands on it. As ever with him, there are conflicts and contradictions. Of course, he wants to maximise his power and wealth. However, he does also see himself as someone fighting for free speech and nothing less than the future of humanity.
Looking at his account does, though, suggest he might just have got a little too high on his own supply. The first week of February saw a deluge of tweets about the aforementioned defunding of USAID. There’s the customary “anti-woke” stuff too. Perhaps spending all your time tweeting is a privilege that comes with owning the company and being the richest man on the planet. It does not seem like a particularly productive use of time, though.
Reporting on all this is hard. Wired published a great story in February 2025 detailing how six male engineers – who, records suggested, were aged between 19 and 24 – had been granted access to sensitive government systems vis Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency organisation. This kind of work goes a long way to highlighting the abnormality of a situation that has seen an unelected citizen take over government infrastructure, something that really cannot be forgotten. Even the department name DOGE is a very online joke – Dogecoin is a particularly daft cryptocurrency.
Individual stories aside, there are plenty of lessons for journalists and media executives to learn from the Musk-induced chaos. One that, I think, both hacks and proprietors are already taking in is that owning your own work is essential. Turning reporting, photographs and videos over to Twitter, TikTok and Facebook is a losing game. It just gets submerged in the noise and put on an equal footing to random conspiracies and untrustworthy sources. While there is little choice to use those products as tools, they must remain just that. Don’t bet your business on them.
Crucially, we also need to take pride in our work. The tech bros might like to denigrate it as old-fashioned, but plenty of people can post an Instagram story, not many can report out a story. The only way journalism has any chance of cutting through is by constantly reiterating the value of our work. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and President Trump himself are not men used to taking no for an answer. They don’t just want to be rich; they want to be in control. It’s why they have built both technology companies and media companies. The rest of us need to keep toiling to make sure they are not the only ones dictating the narrative.