“I would prefer to stay out of politics,” Elon Musk told his followers in 2021, on the platform then known as Twitter. Plenty has changed since then.
Musk now owns the social media giant, renamed X and repurposed as his personal soapbox. He has welcomed back far-right agitators banned under previous ownership. Musk spent a quarter-billion dollars to help reelect Donald Trump as United States president, and stood a few feet away as Trump took the oath of office on Monday.
Now, with that task complete, the world’s richest man appears to have a new goal: upend Europe, one government at a time. The mogul has cast himself as kingmaker in the populist wave that is submerging multiple centrist European leaders. “From MAGA to MEGA: Make Europe Great Again!” he posted on Saturday, reveling in the unease he is bringing to the continent.
Several European Union leaders have accused him of interfering in their affairs and promoting dangerous figures; Musk has waged a brutal and personal online campaign against Britain’s government, rallied for a far-right activist there to be released from prison, and endorsed a far-right party in Germany with a staunchly nationalist platform and a string of scandals relating to some of its members’ views on the Nazi era.
At the same time, a torrent of misinformation on Musk’s platform – plenty of it born from anger over high levels of migration – has unnerved Europe’s governments. Some in Britain blame it for contributing to a wave of far-right riots last summer. But X’s reach, Musk’s extreme wealth and his role as an efficiency adviser to Trump make him a difficult problem to deal with. Political figures in Europe are grappling with two questions: Why does Musk care about us, and what can we do about it?
Neither is easy to answer. “The Europeans are stuck,” said Bill Echikson, senior fellow in tech policy at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) think tank, and a former European communications head for Google. Leaders on the continent “certainly are worried,” he said. “They certainly blame disinformation and trolling and automated bots for causing problems with European elections and fostering the rise of their extremes.
“(But) they don’t have any plan. They don’t really know how to respond yet.” oday, Musk is on the front lines. The platform’s owner enjoys levels of disruptive influence around the world that few unelected figures have ever held, without facing the scrutiny of voters. He hails and shares the views of radical figures, and has backed fiercely anti-establishment populists around Europe. It’s not yet clear how much sway he will have on Trump’s foreign policy – and that’s precisely why, for now, European governments are so uncertain about how to tackle his interventions.
But his comments chime with a wider, interventionist tone towards Europe coming from the new administration, and could set up Musk for a role as an interlocutor. Trump and Musk have already forged close ties with figures whose politics at least partially overlap, like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, an immigration hardliner who attended the inauguration in a break with precedent.
Some of those who have previously advanced Trump’s interests in Europe now see Musk as an unfettered, even less polished version of the president; an agitator whose style and ambition has come to mirror Trump’s. As with Trump, opinion polls suggest Musk is unpopular across Europe. “It’s interesting to see the similarities between he and (Trump); their ability to try to drive public opinion, especially, unfortunately by disseminating disinformation. Creating a lot of chaos, being disruptors,” Nelson said.
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