Elon Musk turns X into political weapon across Europe

Elon Musk has spent the first weeks of 2025 doing what no foreign billionaire has done before: using a global communications platform he owns to intervene directly in the democratic politics of two major European nations. In Britain he amplified a Conservative and Reform Party campaign to reopen a grooming-gang inquiry, calling Prime Minister Keir Starmer "evil" and spreading a false claim that posting a critical meme could land a British citizen in prison. In Germany he endorsed the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) weeks before a federal election, telling his 210 million followers that "only AfD can save Germany" and hosting a live interview with party leader Alice Weidel that attracted 16 million views.

The British intervention: grooming gangs and a false legal claim

The UK episode began with a long-running scandal. Organised groups of British men of Pakistani heritage sexually abused white underage girls in towns across the Midlands from the late 1990s through the 2000s. A 2013 Times investigation exposed police and prosecutorial failures, prompting an inquiry. In January 2025 the Conservative and populist Reform parties demanded a new inquiry, arguing the original had been a cover-up. Starmer refused, saying the parties sought to fuel anti-immigrant hysteria. Musk then took to X, posting "Starmer is evil" and amplifying GB News claims that "UK politicians are selling your daughters for votes." He also asserted that a meme critical of Starmer "could get you sent to prison in Britain", a claim with no basis in UK law.

Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, described Musk as "a classic social media adolescent who hasn't grown up, the temper tantrums, the lack of responsibility." On LBC radio Hislop added that Musk is "riddled with contradictions, and at some point, I am hoping that even his followers will begin to notice that from sentence to sentence, he makes no sense." Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch politician and critic of Islam, offered the opposite view: "He's using his superpowers to say, 'I'm going to give a voice to the voiceless.' He's a once-in-a-multigeneration human being. He's my hero. He's amazing."

The German intervention: AfD, Hitler revisionism and a rival's plea

Germany's election, scheduled for February 23, 2025, presented a larger stage. The governing Social Democrats trail in polls. On January 9 Musk interviewed Weidel on X. She used the platform to recast Adolf Hitler's Nazis as forerunners not of her party, which emerged from the neo-Nazi movement, but of the Social Democrats. "The biggest success after that terrible era in our history was to label Hitler as right and conservative. He was exactly the opposite," Weidel said. "He was a communist, socialist guy … We are exactly the opposite. We are a libertarian conservative party. We are wrongly framed the entire time, and we would like to free the people." The interview drew 16 million views within a week.

The performance provoked envy from Christian Lindner, leader of the Free Democrats (FDP). Lindner wrote to Musk asking him not to support the AfD but to back the FDP as the "true libertarian" force. Jose Ignacio Torreblanca, who heads the Madrid office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, called Lindner "the most pathetic figure I have seen" and asked: "Who will vote for Christian Lindner after he has asked Musk to interfere in the German election?"

Platform reach and the amplification loop

Digital experts estimate X has between 50 and 100 million users in Europe, a continent of 550 million people. Raw user numbers understate Musk's influence. His posts are amplified by mainstream news outlets that treat every provocation as a story, and by fellow platform owners who adjust their own policies in response. On January 7 Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would replace third-party fact-checkers with a community-notes system modelled on X, saying recent elections felt like "a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritising speech." Torreblanca warned that this delegates platform integrity to users, which is "unacceptable to European legislation."

The EU's regulatory lever: the Digital Services Act

The European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA), which applies to very large online platforms, makes content moderation a legal obligation. Platforms are liable for harmful, violent or offensive content. The DSA enjoys broad support across the political spectrum, conservatives, socialists and Greens, which Torreblanca argues allows the European Commission to enforce it "in a neutral and even-handed manner," avoiding the dramatic confrontation and outright ban imposed by Brazil in 2024. "In practice, our competition authorities in the EU are autonomous to make investigations and fine [a] company," he said, "and I think the best way Europe should do this is in a politically impassionate way."

Transatlantic complications: Trump, trade and national security

Musk's closeness to Donald Trump, who returned to the White House on January 20, 2025, creates a structural deterrent for European regulators. Giorgos Verdi, also of the ECFR in Brussels, explained: "[Musk's] new connections with Trump make it very difficult to respond. Trump views the US tech champions as very important instruments when it comes to the trade war with China. If the EU forces those companies to slow down by following regulations, this could become a national security issue for the US." In his farewell address on January 15, President Joe Biden warned that "an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy … I'm equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex … Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation that enables the abuse of power."

The Russian parallel: ecosystem building as influence

Maxim Alyukov, a research fellow at Manchester University's Department of Russian and Eastern European Studies, argues that Russian influence operations now model themselves on the Musk-Trump playbook. "Russian influence operations are actually modelled on examples of Trump or Musk," he said. "They select certain incidents, like scandals in the UK … and then they try to present certain politicians as the solution to this problem. That is exactly what Musk does." Alyukov, who co-wrote a study of Moscow-funded outlets in Europe that pose as legitimate news services, described the method: "You don't do outright censorship. You create a conducive ecosystem to making your voice heard, and what [Musk] did was he basically got himself an ecosystem."

Business interests fused with political power

Musk's leverage extends beyond X. SpaceX launches NASA payloads. Starlink provides the Pentagon with the largest global constellation of communications satellites. Tesla forced a global automotive industry that had marginalised Detroit back into relevance. X now functions as what Musk calls "citizen journalism … by the people, for the people," a framing that positions legacy media as obsolete. Newsrooms now spend resources verifying whether a rumour on X constitutes a story. Hislop summarised the dynamic: "I think he thought … 'I can say anything I like, it doesn't have to be true, it's better if it's not true, and no one will stop me.' We're in an era of total fatuity." Verdi put it in geopolitical terms: "The economy has been geopoliticised. It's not just about applying ethical principles to technology equally. It's also about power."