By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Real Ambitions of Musk

While we recently reported on Musk, a more consequential struggle is whether some of Washington’s most important allies, struggling with their domestic problems, can resist interference with their sovereignty by a man whose net worth roughly equals Russia’s entire 2025 budget. Especially when that man has Donald Trump’s ear. Musk Again.

Europeans are quickly learning a lesson that Americans internalized years ago: They ignore Elon Musk at their peril.

Until recently, Europe’s main challenge from Musk was mustering the means to enforce tech and trade rules on a billionaire mogul whose firms’ annual revenue exceeded British or German yearly defense spending.

The issue now is whether Musk can ride roughshod over European politics, dominating them as U.S. corporations dominated Central America’s so-called banana republics more than a century ago.

Or, more bluntly: Can Musk manipulate Germany or Britain as the United Fruit Co. once subjugated Honduras?

That should be a preposterous question, given that Berlin commands the world’s third-largest economy, and London the sixth. Yet with an escalating bout of dyspeptic tweets, the world’s richest man — who also happens to control a Tesla car factory near Berlin that is on course to dwarf any German Volkswagen or Porsche plant — has plunged both countries’ politics into turm.

The more urgent example is Germany, where Musk intervened just weeks before its federal elections. Even more extraordinary, he has thrown his weight behind an anti-American, Russia-loving, climate-change-denying populist party whose leaders include Nazi apologists and antisemites, along with run-of-the-mill deportation enthusiasts.

The party, Alternative for Germany, known by its German initials AfD, is Germany’s “last glimmer of hope,” as Musk wrote in Germany’s conservative Welt am Sonntag newspaper. Germany’s domestic intelligence service would disagree; it has designated some of the party’s elements as extremist and placed them under surveillance.

Conventional wisdom is that AfD, despite polling second ahead of the Feb. 23 elections, will be boxed out of any coalition government by the combined forces of Germany’s traditional left- and right-of-center political blocs. That was also the conventional, and wrong, thinking before the 2023 elections in the Netherlands, when a populist anti-Muslim party shocked analysts by finishing first. It now leads that country’s governing coalition.

In that context, it sounded almost like wishful thinking when a German government spokesman sniffed this week that it is “simply not the case” that Musk’s social media meddling could “influence a country of 84 million with untruths or half-truths or expressions of opinion.”

Top European leaders have warned Musk to mind his own business, or have counseled cool indifference. “Don’t feed the troll,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the German weekly Stern.

This week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer launched a counterattack after he and his center-left Labour government, in office just six months, suddenly became targets of the mercurial billionaire’s online assaults. Musk had accused them of complacency in a more-than-decade-old scandal involving gangs, composed mainly of British Pakistani men, that reportedly groomed, abused and raped underage girls.

Much of what Musk has alleged is wrong but, to him, the point isn’t the facts. It’s the power, and how he can wield it to dominate the spotlight and force his will.

One day, he was discussing bankrolling Britain’s right-wing Reform Party, led by a far-right populist, Nigel Farage. Soon after, he was demanding that Farage be deposed. The supposed reason for the rupture — a difference of views over a jailed British former soccer hooligan turned provocateur — is hardly worth unpacking.

Musk’s leverage owes much to his fortune (now approaching a half-trillion dollars), and legions of followers (211 million on his social media platform X). Perhaps just as potent is the opening afforded by Europe’s mounting failures, jitters, and despair. Musk’s meddling suggests a toddler’s attention to truth and consistency, but his basic analysis is on target.

“The traditional parties have failed in Germany,” he wrote in Welt am Sonntag. “Their policies have led to economic stagnation, social unrest, and the erosion of national identity.”

Musk has scheduled a discussion to be live-streamed on X this Thursday with the leader of AfD, Alice Weidel, the party’s first-ever candidate for chancellor. Weidel is a relative moderate and is a lesbian who has adopted two children with her Sri Lankan-born partner. “Does that sound like Hitler to you?” Musk said on X.

Never mind that Weidel has defended AfD extremists, including a prominent figure twice fined for using a banned Nazi slogan in his speeches.

Musk, whose $277 million backing for Donald Trump’s campaign was the biggest contribution in last year’s (or any year’s) presidential cycle, has made little secret of his contempt for Europe, singling out its plummeting birth rates — “Europe is dying,” he wrote — and soaring migrant population.

He has been especially incensed by the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which requires online behemoths to block and remove false content. To Musk, who faces the possibility of hundreds of millions of dollars in fines arising from X’s alleged violations of the DSA, it’s a mandate for censorship.

That regulatory dispute, among others, is ongoing. A more consequential struggle is whether some of Washington’s most important allies, struggling with their domestic problems, can resist interference with their sovereignty by a man whose net worth roughly equals Russia’s entire 2025 budget. Especially when that man has Donald Trump’s ear.

 

 

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