Musk takes slash-and-burn style to Europe after bolstering Donald Trump

By Alex Wickham, Michael Nienaber, Joshua Green and Arne Delfs 

Having successfully worked to get his candidate elected in the US, Elon Musk is setting his sights on Europe.  

In a series of posts on his X platform in recent weeks, the billionaire backer of Donald Trump has honed in on Germany and the UK, criticised the respective governments, questioned laws they’ve enacted and cast doubt on their economic competence.

 

He’s personally insulted each country’s political leader, calling Chancellor Olaf Scholz a “fool,” Germany’s president a “tyrant” and accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer of being “complicit in the rape of Britain.” He’s embraced misinformation and conspiracy theories, skipping over the mainstream opposition to give his backing to the far-right as champions of “political realism.” 

 

It’s far from clear what his motivations may be in trashing relations with core US allies in fellow Group of Seven nations where he has significant business interests, still less his ability to effect the  change he demands. 

 

Yet it’s a dynamic that will be given a further airing on Thursday when Musk hosts a conversation on X with Alice Weidel, co-leader of Alternative for Germany, an anti-immigration, nationalist party that he’s endorsed ahead of federal elections on Feb. 23, despite it being shunned by all other political forces as extremist. The European Union has said it will monitor the event for any risks to election integrity. 

 

Musk’s interventions have caused predictable outrage mixed with bewilderment, uniting governments with oppositions in condemnation of his tactics. But with few good options, his targets are on the back foot as they weigh how to respond to a man who can’t seem to resist posting his thoughts, however unvarnished, and who has the ear of the incoming US president. 

 

“Musk is building his empire and he is testing how far he can go,” said Alexis Wichowski, a professor at Columbia University who specialises in technology, government and power. As the world’s richest person, his actions are probably not about making yet more money, but “increasing his power and using his influence to change the world,” she said. “Of course, this is a huge act of hubris and it takes a big ego. But Musk is convinced that he knows what’s best.”

 

In the UK, where Musk has called for a jailed far-right activist to be freed, prominent politicians of the right told their US Republican counterparts that he’s gone too far, according to people familiar with the communications. No British premier has ever faced comparable public hostility from such a senior voice in an American administration — albeit one whose role is informal — and Musk’s actions posed a clear risk to UK-US relations, a senior UK official said separately.

 

UK government officials working to drum up American investment in Britain are particularly worried. Every major US venture capitalist, private equity executive and investor follows Musk on X and many hold his business acumen in high regard, one said, noting that if his posts put even a slight doubt into investors’ minds about Britain as a place to put their money then it could cost the economy billions.

 

The question is whether he has an endgame beyond provocation, and what that might be. French President Emmanuel Macron used a foreign policy address on Jan. 6 to accuse him of attempting to foment a “reactionary alliance” across Europe.

 

Musk did not respond to emailed questions about what’s driving his posts.  

 

To Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, the SpaceX and Tesla Inc. CEO’s wealth and influence are valuable weapons that can be wielded to advance his own populist, MAGA-aligned political goals in Europe. 

 

“Money and information are the twin tactical nukes of modern politics — and he can deploy both at unprecedented scale,” Bannon said in an interview. 

 

Bannon has always claimed that Trump’s elevation to the presidency in 2016 was part of a global populist uprising that began with the UK vote to quit the European Union earlier that same year. After Trump’s victory, Bannon worked to cultivate European political influence, with mixed results. He allied himself with populist politicians, and tried to undermine European unity. Most quixotically, he briefly established what he called a “gladiator school” to train populist-nationalist activists in a 13th-century Italian monastery.

 

Despite his frequent antipathy toward Musk — he’s spent the past two weeks feuding with him over US immigration policy — Bannon backs his meddling in European politics because he now thinks that, with Trump’s reelection, the populist wave is sweeping in the other direction: from the US back to Europe. 

 

“I support his participation because the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Bannon said. 

 

In Musk’s case, the enemy is the center-left, in the shape of Starmer’s six-month-old Labour government in the UK, and Scholz’s outgoing Social Democratic-led administration in Germany. 

 

In a New Year’s op-ed in Die Welt newspaper in which he laid out his reasons for supporting Weidel’s AfD, as the party is known in German, Musk said his investments mean he’s “earned the right to speak candidly” about the political direction of Europe’s largest economy. 

 

But he’s gone much further, saying that only the AfD, which advocates for an exit from the EU and the euro, can “save Germany,” compounding the damage in the eyes of many voters by doubling down on his comments after an AfD sympathizer drove a car into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing six and wounding more than 200 others. 

 

In the UK, Musk has gone down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, claiming that “civil war is inevitable” and questioning Starmer’s actions in his past role as chief prosecutor during a child sex-abuse scandal. Where Musk had long flirted with Nigel Farage, one of the original proponents of Brexit, he’s now called for his replacement as Reform UK party leader for reasons that he has yet to spell out.

 

While Musk’s tilts against Farage give Starmer some relief from the constant criticism, Labour figures suspect much of Musk’s interest in the prime minister stems from his loathing of a group set up in 2018 by Starmer’s now chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, which aimed to campaign against online extremism. McSweeney soon left to pursue his political career, but the Center for Countering Digital Hate carried on pressuring social media companies like Twitter and then X to toughen their moderation practices, and became increasingly critical of Musk.

 

Starmer’s team still has no real plan of action. The premier sees a charm offensive to try to win Musk round as futile, a person familiar with the matter said. Yet he is reluctant to hit back either, since responding to Musk’s bait and getting drawn into regular spats would only worsen ties with Trump. The best hope is that Musk and Trump quickly fall out and Musk parts with the administration, the person said.   

 

Behind in the polls and burdened with poor personal ratings, Scholz would seem to have a more acute problem than Starmer, who doesn’t have to hold a general election until 2029. Yet the chancellor won plaudits for playing down Musk’s relevance and putting him in his place. “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multi-billionaires,” Scholz said on Dec. 20, shortly after Musk’s initial post backing the AfD. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right.”

 

With a federal election less than seven weeks off, AfD officials can’t quite believe their luck. They see Musk as an ideal figure to help Weidel counter the persistent anti-American undercurrent in her party, a sentiment that’s particularly strong in the eastern German states which retain strong sympathies for Russia and Vladimir Putin. 

 

He also offers possible inroads to the Trump camp, which have so far been dominated by European leaders like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orban of Hungary. European attendees at Trump’s inauguration this month will give an indication of where loyalties lie, on both sides.

 

Still, pollsters say Musk’s support is unlikely to help the  AfD electorally. Indeed, it might conceivably rebound on Tesla’s “gigafactory” located outside Berlin. Public support for a campaign to boycott Tesla picked up last summer when Musk came out in support of Trump, and those rumblings are again being heard in Germany. 

 

Critics say that as a multibillionaire with global business interests from satellite launches to artificial intelligence, he’s not simply offering opinions. They see his posts as part of a pattern of support for right-wing nationalist parties and individuals that pose a fundamental challenge to European unity.

 

German Vice Chancellor and Economy Minister Robert Habeck said that Musk’s money and “unbridled communication power” are not marshaled in support of the AfD out of ignorance. Rather, “Musk strengthens those who weaken Europe,” he said in a New Year’s address. “A weak Europe is in the interests of those for whom regulation is an unreasonable limit to their power.”

 

Musk has frequently clashed with the EU, the top global digital rulemaker, with the commission opening an investigation into X under its content moderation law, the Digital Services Act, or DSA. Things swiftly turned personal, with Musk and EU officials – notably former digital czar Thierry Breton – publicly feuding online. 

 

While the newly appointed commission has struck a more conciliatory tone, Musk remains a harsh critic, recently belittling the 27 nation bloc’s satellite constellation as “a child’s toy” compared to his Starlink. The EU said it will monitor Musk’s live-stream with Weidel to see if X’s algorithms are used to boost the party during the interview in a way that poses “systemic risks.”

 

Musk’s strategy, at least in Germany, appears to be independent from Trump. JD Vance posted on X that he would not endorse a party “as it’s not my country and we hope to have good relations with all Germans.” 

 

For Bannon, however, Trump’s presidential election victory proved that he is “an armor-piercing shell” that will blow up the US political establishment — and he believes Musk may be positioned to achieve the same thing in Europe.

 

“Musk just spent a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Trump,” says Bannon. “If he puts the same amount of money into all of Europe that he put behind Trump, he will flip every nation to a populist agenda. There’s not a centrist left-wing government in Europe that will be able to withstand that onslaught.”

 

That may be wishful thinking for Bannon, who has long agitated for a populist revolution. All the same, Musk, with virtually unlimited resources, might just be getting started. 

 

His successful intervention on behalf of Trump brought the realization that he commands a lot of political influence on top of his enormous business clout, according to Dennis Steffan, a professor of political communication and expert on social media at the Free University of Berlin. “Musk has now tasted blood,” he said.