Open letter to any Shtetl-Optimized readers who know Elon

Did Elon Musk make a Nazi salute? Well, not exactly. As far as I can tell, the truth is that he recklessly and repeatedly made a hand gesture that the world’s millions of Nazi sympathizers eagerly misinterpreted as a Nazi salute. He then (the worse part) declined to clarify or apologize in any way, opting instead for laugh emojis.

I hasten to add: just like with Trump’s Charlottesville dogwhistles, I find it ludicrous to imagine that Elon has any secret desire to reopen the gas chambers or whatever—and not only because of Elon’s many pro-Zionist and philosemitic actions, statements, and connections. That isn’t the issue, so don’t pretend I think it is.

Crucially, though, “not being a literal Nazi” isn’t fully exculpatory. I don’t want the overlords of the planet treating these matters as jokes. I want them to feel the crushing weight of history, exactly like I would feel it in their shoes.

Regardless of my distaste for everything that happened to reach this point, Elon is now in a unique position to nudge Trump in the direction of liberality and enlightenment on various issues.  And while I doubt Elon finds time to read Shtetl-Optimized between his CEOing, DOGEing, tweeting, and video game speedruns, I know for certain that there are multiple readers of this blog to whom Elon has listened in the past—and those people are now in a unique position too!

A public “clarification” from Elon—not an apology, not an admission of guilt, but just an acknowledgment that he knows why sleeping dragons like Nazism shouldn’t be poked for shits and giggles, that he’ll try to be careful in the future—would be a non-negligible positive update for me about the future of the world.

I understand exactly why he doesn’t want to do it: because he doesn’t want to grant any legitimacy to what he sees as the biased narrative of a legacy media that despises him. But granting some legitimacy to that narrative is precisely what I, a classically liberal Jewish scientist who bears the battle scars of attempted woke cancellation, am asking him to do. I’m asking him to acknowledge that he’s now by any measure one of the most powerful people on the planet, that with great power comes great responsibility, and that fascism is a well-known failure mode for powerful rightists, just like Communism is a well-known failure mode for leftists. I’m asking for reassurance that he takes that failure mode seriously, just like he correctly takes human extinction and catastrophic AI risk seriously.

Anyway, I figured it was worth a try, given how much I really believe might hinge on how Elon chooses to handle this. I don’t want to be kicking myself, for the rest of my life, that I had a chance to intervene in the critical moment and didn’t.