Elbahrain.net “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.
“I’m awed at his lack of inhibition to think that he can intervene in multiple countries where issues are complex,” Eric Nelson, a diplomat who served as Trump’s ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina during his first term, told CNN. “To assert that he knows best. It’s quite a hubris.”
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.”
‘An effort to cancel him’
Musk’s politics have evolved at supersonic speed since the SpaceX and Tesla mogul conducted a hostile takeover of Twitter in 2022. “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral,” he insisted then. He described politics as a “sadness generator” and wrote: “Politics is war and truth is the first casualty
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.
That chaos intensified after Musk made a gesture with his right arm on stage during a post-inauguration rally, which to some in Europe bore uncomfortable similarities to the Nazi or Roman salute used by fascist leaders in Germany and Italy. Musk has presented the reaction as a misinterpretation, writing on X that “the ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired
