Elon Musk successfully used his immense wealth and ownership of X/Twitter to help put Donald Trump in the White House and scored himself a spot in the incoming administration. Musk, the richest man in the world, has now turned his attention to influencing political parties abroad.
Since purchasing Twitter in October 2022, Musk has become more active in politics, both on the platform and outside of it. He uses his widely followed Twitter account to bolster far-right ideas and spread disinformation. In 2024, he supported Trump’s campaign, helped kill a bipartisan spending bill in December, and got into a tiff with MAGA supporters who are against all immigration including Musk’s vocal support for H-1B visas for immigrants in the tech industry.
Positioning himself as a defender of “free speech” and the “will of the people,” Musk has moved Twitter in a far-right direction, restoring the accounts of formerly suspended extremists. He has tweeted support for antisemitic statements that claimed that Jewish communities had a “dialectical hatred against whites.” He has endorsed the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which falsely claims that elites are secretly organizing the “replacement” of the “native” white population with non-white immigrants, when he claimed that the “administration is actively facilitating illegal immigration” because “they view them as future Dem voters.” He is also an advocate for natalism, which emphasizes increasing the birth rate by way of authoritarian methods. He has agreed with users on Twitter, for example, who advocate for “limiting suffrage to parents” as a solution to low birth rates in countries where they are below replacement level.
Source: Twitter
In recent months, Musk has turned his efforts to Germany and the United Kingdom, endorsing far-right political parties and denouncing left-wing politicians. As a result, European elected officials have denounced Musk’s moves, with French President Emmanuel Macron calling him the leader of a “new international reactionary movement.”
Musk’s most recent intervention has been in Germany, where he came out in support of the far-right political party Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD). This public endorsement is of note given that the AfD had previously been cast out of the European Union’s most far-right grouping, Identity and Democracy (ID), for being too extreme, after Maximilian Krah, the AfD’s lead candidate for the June 2024 European parliamentary elections, defended members of the Nazi Waffen-SS.
Beyond this, the AfD has extensive ties to extremism. Among other things, leaders in the AfD held a secret meeting with white nationalist Austrian Identitarian activist Martin Sellner on November 7, 2024, to discuss a policy of “remigration,” a term used to describe the ethnic cleansing of non-white immigrants from European countries. AfD has been declared a “suspected extremist” organisation by Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and their youth group, Junge Alternative für Deutschland (Young Alternative for Germany, JA), has been categorized as a confirmed extremist organization by the BfV since January 2019.
Musk first caused outrage in Germany after he tweeted that “only AfD can save Germany” on December 20, 2024. He later wrote an opinion piece in a German newspaper claiming that his “significant investments” in the country justified him supporting a party in the election. He invited AfD co-leader Alice Weidel to join him in a Twitter spaces event on January 9, 2024. As a result, the German government accused Musk of interfering in their elections, while European leaders have urged the European Commission to do more to enforce Twitter’s compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which regulates hate speech and other issues on large social media platforms.
Another recent scandal provoked by Musk put him at odds with political figures in the United Kingdom. The tussle began on January 5, 2025, when Musk published a flurry of tweets about Labour MP Jess Phillips rejecting a request to launch a national public inquiry, as opposed to a local investigation, into child sexual exploitation (CSE) gangs, or “grooming gangs” as the British media and the far right have referred to them, in towns near Manchester. Musk tweeted that Phillips was a “rape genocide apologist” and falsely accused UK Prime Minister Keith Starmer of being “deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes” and “must go.”
Since the issue originally arose in 2011, numerous investigations have been launched into perpetrators of CSE crimes, leading to a number of arrests. Despite statistics released by the Labour government into the ethnic makeup of perpetrators that demonstrate a relatively equal number of prosecutions per ethnic category, the far right has continued to use the issue as a way to scapegoat immigrants of Pakistani descent, using the fact that many early arrests were British citizens of Pakistani heritage.
By re–politicizing the issue based on ethnicity and Muslim faith, and spreading disinformation about their being “millions of rapes,” Musk helped amplify racist disinformation that spread to far–right groups across Western Europe, and led individuals such as Paul Golding, a former member of the white nationalist British National Party (BNP) and neo-Nazi National Front, and current leader of the vehemently anti-Muslim party Britain First, to call for a “march for remigration.” Afterwards, British politicians denounced his comments and called for him to stay out of British politics.
Elon Musk responds to a tweet blaming Pakisteni men in the United Kingdom for “80% of the gang rapes.” Source: Twitter
While Musk had previously eyed far-right Reform UK leader Nigel Farage as his ideal choice to lead the UK, and in December 2024 considered making a very large $100 million donation to him for the next election, Farage’s call to not alienate Muslim voters in the UK was perceived by Musk and his online supporters as advocating for “embracing Islam to win.” As a result, Musk called for Farage to step down as leader of Reform UK.
Instead, Musk issued his support for an individual even more far-right than Farage, the rabidly anti-Muslim activist Tommy Robinson, leader of the far-right English Defense League (EDL), who is currently serving an 18-month jail sentence for contempt of court for repeatedly making false allegations against a Syrian refugee. Robinson, who was previously a member of the British National Party (BNP) from 2004 to 2005, has done much to spread hate and disinformation about Muslims in the United Kingdom over the past two decades by stoking fears of sexual violence by Muslim immigrants, including the “grooming gangs” case. Robinson used these racist tropes his 2022 documentary The Rape of Britain: Survivor Stories, and on January 29, 2022, he organized a protest against the “grooming gangs” in Telford, which brought together about 1,500 people.
Musk has developed close relations with other far-right parties in Europe as well. To thank Musk for abandoning Twitter’s previous efforts to tackle hate, extremism, and disinformation on the platform, the far-right Patriots of Europe (PoE) European Union grouping, led by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, nominated Musk for the Sakharov Prize, named after Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov, meant for those who fight for the defense of human rights and freedom of thought. Under Orbán’s authoritarian regime, which he refers to as an “illiberal democracy,” he has worked to strip rights from LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, women, and from his political opposition. On Twitter, Musk has shown support for Orbán for putting politics in the European Union on a far-right course. Moreover, Musk was present at the meeting at Trump’s residence Mar-a-Lago on December 9, 2024, between Trump and Orbán following the American presidential election.
Italy is another country that Musk has taken an interest in, and he has developed close ties with Giorgia Meloni, prime minister and head of Italy’s far-right party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy, FdI). The FdI is a the successor to the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), characterized by significant white supremacist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-LGBTQ+ views, and nostalgia for the previous fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (see Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’s entry for the FdI in its Italy report here).
Musk was invited to the Atreju festival in December 2023, organized by Meloni. At an Atlantic Council gala dinner in September 2024, Meloni invited Musk to give the opening speech, where the two traded compliments with Musk referring to her as “someone who is even more beautiful on the inside than she is on the outside,” and Meloni referring to him as a “precious genius.”
Italian President Sergio Mattarella issued a warning to Musk in November 2024 to refrain from interfering in Italian politics after Musk tweeted about an Italian court blocking Meloni’s policy to detain migrants in nearby Albania while they wait for processing, Musk writing “these judges need to go.” Meloni has defended him in the Italian press after meeting with Musk and Trump at Mar-a-Lago in early January, where the two allegedly negotiated a possible €1.5 billion deal for access to the Starlink communication system for the Italian military and intelligence services.
In Brazil, Musk has close ties to far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, who in May 2022 presented Musk with a medal from the Order of Defense Merit. After Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes issued an order requiring Twitter to suspend several far-right accounts connected to the 2022 coup attempt organized by Jair Bolsonaro followers, Musk publicly mocked the judge on Twitter and called for him to resign. Musk refused court orders to remove the accounts and defied the court by relocating Twitter personnel out of the country. In late August 2024, the court ordered Brazilian regulators to block access to Twitter for non-compliance, which lasted until early October.
During this conflict, Musk spoke out in support of Bolsonaro on Twitter, who organized a demonstration against the court decision on September 7, 2024. Later in the year, after a clip of Brazilian president Ignacio Lula de Silva’s wife went viral for saying that she was “not afraid” of Musk, and swearing at him, Musk replied on Twitter that they were “going to lose the next election.”
Finally, Musk has a demonstrable record of ties to figures in the Kremlin, known for interfering in the elections of Western democracies. According to an October 2004 article in The Wall Street Journal, Musk has been in “regular contact” with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin since late 2022, discussing business and geopolitics. It was reported that Putin personally asked Musk not to activate the Starlink satellite internet service in Taiwan as a personal favor to Chinese president Xi Jinping.
