Elon Musk: Seduced by Unbridled Power

After the US, Elon Musk’s ambition has now extended to the UK and Europe.

At a net worth of nearly $430 billion, Elon Musk has been flexing his political muscle. He spent over $200 million to back his close friend Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign and has emerged as a key Trump ally all set to run a cost-cutting ‘Department of Government Efficiency’.

(Photo: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

Is it a rich man’s fantasy or is it a more sinister political manoeuvre playing out? In this case it is the latter, and it is the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who is firing salvos at democracies in the West.

At a net worth of nearly $430 billion, Musk has been flexing his political muscle. He spent over $200 million to back his close friend Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign and has emerged as a key Trump ally all set to run a cost-cutting ‘Department of Government Efficiency’.

Musk’s ambition has now extended to the UK and Europe.

Musk's Power Play in the UK, Germany

Soon after Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer took over as the UK's Prime Minister, following the 2024 general elections, Musk has been relentlessly attacking him on X which he owns.

To begin with, after a meeting with the far-right Reform Party leader Nigel Farage in December 2024, the party said the Tesla CEO was one of several billionaires planning a big donation to the party. However, this week, Musk called on the Reform Party to replace Farage, attacked Starmer viciously, and prepared for an interview with a far-right German leader.

Farage expressed "surprise" at Musk’s tweet and claimed that Musk was unhappy about his criticism of right-wing anti-immigrant activist Tommy Robinson – Musk wants him to be freed and join the Reform Party – but Robinson has a lengthy criminal record and is serving a prison sentence for contempt of court related to a libel case he lost for spreading false claims about a Syrian schoolboy. Farage clearly stated Robinson “won’t be” joining his party – and wanted to have nothing to do with him. In response to Musk, Farage tweeted, “my view remains that Tommy Robinson is not right for Reform, and I never sell out my principles.”

Last month, Musk expressed support for Germany’s right-wing Alternative for Germany party, known as the AfD.

Writing an opinion piece in a German newspaper, he claimed Germany’s traditional political parties have prompted economic decline by becoming “comfortable with mediocrity”. He wrote that “the AfD can save Germany from becoming a shadow of its former self.”

The article nevertheless caused a backlash, but Musk has live-streamed a discussion with AfD leader Alice Weidel on Thursday (9 January) night. Will the interview give Weidel, who is currently running second in the forthcoming elections next month, an advantage?

European Leaders Concerned by Musk

Amid growing concern among European leaders about Musk’s interference in European political issues, according to media reports, a team of up to 150 European Commission officials in Brussels and Seville will help scrutinise whether Musk’s social media site X plays by the European Union’s (EU's) tech rules.

They have far-reaching investigative powers that allow them to visit X’s offices and request access to its algorithm and internal correspondence.

The Brussels-based enforcers of the Digital Services Act (DSA) at the European Commission’s DG CONNECT tech department are assisted by experts from the European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency in Spain.

Evidence gathered on Thursday evening could bolster the EU’s landmark case against X under the DSA. In July, the bloc had formally charged Musk’s platform with failing to respect EU rules. If the decision is finalised, it will be a first-of-its-kind verdict under the tech law.

But, given Musk’s closeness to the incoming US President Trump, fining X could trigger a diplomatic war.

However, European leaders are increasingly voicing their criticism of Musk and his X ownership. French President Emmanuel Macron said: “Ten years ago, if anyone had said that the owner of one of the world’s largest social networks would support a new reactionary alliance and intervene directly in elections, even in Germany, who would have imagined it?”

Nowegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre told the media:

“I find it worrying that a man with enormous access to social media and large financial resources is so directly involved in the internal affairs of other countries.”

Musk, a friend of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, attacked the Italian judiciary for curbing her hardline anti-asylum immigration policies.

The Musk pushback on the European mainland has increased after Musk targeted the UK, reigniting a political row about gangs of men who groomed and raped girls in England over several decades. In his latest intervention in UK politics, Musk shared a spate of posts on X, accusing Starmer and other senior politicians of covering up the scandal. He has claimed that Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions in England and Wales, was “deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes”.

He audaciously also called for the King to dissolve parliament and call new elections.

The Grooming Scandal

On Monday, 6 January, the prime minister hit back at those “spreading lies and misinformation”, and said, “they’re not interested in victims, they’re interested in themselves”. Musk’s posts have put the grooming scandal in the headlines and led to renewed calls for action, with Conservative MPs attempting to force a vote on whether to hold a new inquiry. Professor Alexis Jay, chair of the original inquiry, intervened, saying it would be better to implement the measures already recommended.

In fact, retired investigative journalist Andrew Norfolk of The Times, who first exposed the abuse in 2011, criticised the “relentless attacks” on mainstream media by Musk. In an interview to Times Radio, he said,

“The truth is a concept that Elon Musk clearly has very little interest in.”

Norfolk also defended Starmer after Musk accused him of being “complicit”. As stated earlier, Starmer was director of public prosecutions when Norfolk exposed the grooming and sexual abuse of vulnerable girls by organised groups of men in towns and cities across the north, and the reluctance of child protection authorities to take action in towns, including Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford.

Starmer met Norfolk and they discussed how official guidelines were hampering prosecutions for a string of reasons, including a lack of coherent accounts from victims because they had been plied with drugs and alcohol.

“I want to put the record straight on this,” Norfolk said. “It was Starmer who changed the rules to make more prosecutions possible. That happened – and there was a huge increase in convictions.”

Norfolk emphasised that in the years since, police, councils, and child protection agencies had made great strides in tackling the issue. Victims had received justice when they were believed by juries and their perpetrators were jailed.

“There is now much greater awareness of what was happening, and where it is identified it must be tackled. Priorities, budgets, and training have all changed massively,” he said.

A Threat to Western Democracies?

Musk’s relentless targeting of the Labour government is part of a sinister plan to destabilise it.

According to a report citing people familiar with the matter, Musk has been weighing how he and his allies can destabilise the Labour government and has sought information about building support for alternative British political movements to force a change in government.

In a recent report, an analysis of the entrepreneur’s feed, The Financial Times found that "Musk – whose attacks on the British prime minister and senior politicians have become more scathing over the past week – has amplified or responded to a handful of X accounts that have posted extensively about the handling of historic sex crimes in the country."

“The posts seem to have encouraged Musk – who has more than 211 million followers on X and has used his online pulpit to support conservative cultural stances, to step up his attacks on Starmer and UK safeguarding minister Jess Phillips,” the report added. Over the past week, calling Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” and “wicked witch”, Musk alleged that Starmer and her failed to hold leaders of sexual grooming gangs in England to account because the perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage.

British officials are trying to find out who the individuals and organisations are that are colouring Musk’s views.

According to The Financial Times, “several believe that a small cast of conservative-leaning British commentators and analysts based in the US are shaping views about the UK among the wider milieu of Trump’s allies."

"There is a pretty right-wing libertarian UK émigré network in the US who are feeding a lot of this,” said one British government official, adding that they were free speech advocates linked to right-wing US think tanks that are projecting an image of the UK as “uber woke”.

Bruce Daisley, former head of Twitter’s operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, succinctly said, “Musk has seemingly become the first tech leader to fall down the rabbit hole of radicalisation by his own product.”

Can the US constrain him if he is so seduced by the thrill of unbridled power?

(Nabanita Sircar is a senior journalist based in London. She tweets at @sircarnabanita. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)