Yes, it's good to be careful to not label as people as fascists unless they do things like, for example, literally do the Nazi salute while publicly addressing a crowd.
We all saw the Nazi salutes with our own eyes, the man and his ex girlfriend both follow and interact with avowed white supremacists and Nazis on his own platform.
The lie is coming from Musk and his cult of supporters.
Yes when he did not comment afterwards that it wasn't a Nazi salute, I decided to interpret it as one. It's not something that happened in isolation.
I allow for the possibility that in the moment he didn't mean for it to be that salute. Now if he's too weak to clarify it wasn't? Then he did a Nazi salute in all ways that count. Being an accidental Nazi is very much on topic for the text we're commenting on.
I mean, he built the world's leading online platform for anti-Semitism with his take on Twitter/X. All the classic anti-Semitic tropes are extremely common, people are being hounded with anti-Semitic slurs, etc. Flags on it are basically ignored. Elon Musk himself has even endorsed some anti-Semitic tweets. Concerns about all of that go back years (this is what sparked the ad boycot a few years back). I have a hard time seeing how anyone denying the pattern here is acting in good faith, especially since there's a significantly overlap with people who analyse critics of Israeli policy wrt. the Palestinians to the subatomic level for possible anti-Semitism.
> when he did not comment afterwards that it wasn't a Nazi salute
No reason for him to do that in the first place. It would set a precedent of having to defend himself every time people who dislike him deliberately malinterpret anything he does.
