You, and most who believe that, are ignoring the part where he said something like, "My heart goes out to you!" as he threw his hand from his heart out to the people in the crowd.
it ends up reading to me as an afterthought or half-hearted attempt to explain away the salute. a salute which was given with a grimace and a violent force, twice; it doesn't match the warmth of a message of 'my heart goes out to you.'
when you say 'my heart goes out to you' your hands typically stay on your heart ( which he seemed to know to do then ) or move very slightly directly out, not diagonally and up.
If I use a word to describe you, and you took it as an insult, but later found out the word was a compliment, is my description of you still an insult?
If someone who increasingly looks like a nazi sympathizer does a nazi salute and says 'my heart goes out to you,' it's still a nazi salute.
not to mention the out and out white supremacists thought that's what it was.
i would probably view this more charitably in his favor if he just apologized or clarified like a mature person. instead he doubles down on 'corrupt' media, calls to defund wikipedia, and makes juvenile nazi jokes.
No one is ignoring that, and it's bizarre seeing people defend Musk in such a ridiculous fashion.
The plausible deniability angle would hit a little better if Musk hadn't also been endorsing a number of Nazi-adjacent parties and views, pushed literal white nationalist views repeatedly (which he has been doing for years -- he isn't concerned about birth rates, he is literally only worried about white birth rates while he runs his creepy birthing farm down in Texas, and that's aside from his endless "empathy is our weakness" attacks on migrants), and most recently literally excused Hitler on the basis that really it's the public servants who are to blame.
It's quite incredible really. If the guy wasn't already absolutely soaked with extremely far right rhetoric and beliefs -- save the absurd "oh he's a centrist" nonsense that zero people believe if they have any functioning grey matter at all -- it might have been excusable as something that just looked concerning.
