Musk has in recent days boosted populist and anti-immigrant figures in the major economies across the Atlantic, where he holds significant business investments.
The tech billionaire has called for new elections in the U.K., criticizing British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and voicing support for the Reform Party and far-right figures such as Tommy Robinson, an anti-immigrant agitator.
And ahead of snap German elections in February, Musk is voicing support for the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) — suspected by German authorities of potential right-wing extremism — and belittling German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as “Oaf Schitz.”
“As someone who has invested significantly in Germany’s industrial and technological landscape, I believe I have earned the right to speak candidly about its political direction,” Musk wrote in an op-ed for the German magazine Welt am Sonntag.
Musk has “this sense of having the world as his stage,” said Jackson Janes, resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund and president emeritus of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies.
“I think that to some extent, he is thinking that he can inject this, ‘You gotta break things before you can make them new,’ and he represents that.”
Musk inserting himself into U.K. and German politics follows his rapid ascent to Trump’s inner circle, having donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to boost the president-elect’s campaign.
Trump has included Musk on calls with foreign leaders and appointed him as co-head of an advisory body to slash government bureaucracy in the name of efficiency, dubbed the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).
Musk successfully lobbied Republicans to kill a short-term government spending deal last month and was joined by Trump this week in backing H-1B visas for highly skilled workers, despite blowback from the anti-immigrant voices in Trump’s base.
Now he’s appearing to try to replicate that kind of influence in Europe.
The Hill’s Laura Kelly has more here.
