The US billionaire can be brutal, mean, and unfair, but Scholz, Starmer, et al deserve every bit of his ire
Elon Musk has been at it again. Using his X platform and pure oomph as the richest man in the world and President-elect Donald Trump’s “first buddy,” the tech tycoon has been dishing out unsolicited political, especially electoral advice, imperious demands, and some harsh insults, too. Indeed, he is so busy on X you’d think he has little else to do. There is, as the thoroughly conservative British Telegraph notes, something “baffling” about Musk’s priorities, “when anyone else would be concentrating on the task at hand, set for him by Mr. Trump, to knock $2 trillion off the US federal budget.” In any case, this time, Musk has targeted Europe, in particular Germany and Britain. Or to be precise, their political leaderships and, more generally, traditional, mainstream parties.
In Germany, which is heading for crisis-induced snap elections on February 23, Musk has supported the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing insurgent challenger to the traditional parties. The establishment’s dubiously democratic, unimaginative, and probably futile counterstrategy is to, in essence, freeze the AfD out of government participation no matter how many votes it gets. The problem is that the AfD polls as the second-most-popular party, currently around at least 18%. By endorsing it – and not only on X but in the major conservative newspaper Die Welt as well – Musk is threatening the mainstream parties’ ‘firewall’ approach.
As the American uber-tycoon has also taken part in an X livestream chat with AfD leader Alice Weidel, could Musk’s support make the AfD so strong that it simply can’t be excluded from building Berlin government coalitions anymore? Consider, for instance, the cases of the Netherlands’s Geert Wilders or Austria’s Herbert Kickl. Indeed, government participation of right-wing parties roughly resembling the AfD is already an accomplished fact in several European countries, including, of course, Italy.
And even if the German firewall holds again on February 23 – one last time? – an empowered AfD in opposition would then be in a perfect position to profit from all the predictable failures and immobility of yet another creaky, hamstrung, quarrelsome ‘great coalition’ of one sort or another in Berlin. In that case, the AfD would end up in a very advantageous place largely comparable to that of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France at the moment: Watching from the sidelines as the old establishment and its parties continue their self-destruction.
In addition, Musk has just been having bratty fun, literally adding insult to injury, by, for instance, calling Germany’s dour figurehead President Frank-Walter Steinmeier a “tyrant” and the spectacularly deficient barely-still-chancellor Olaf Scholz an “incompetent fool,” before mangling his name in a very rude manner indeed.
In Britain, Musk has called for the end of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government, accused him of covering up and even facilitating an infamous case of mass child sexual abuse between 2008 and 2013, demanded that a minister go to jail, and that notorious far-right activist Tommy Robinson get out of it.
Robinson, a former football hooligan, convicted fraudster, and founder of the now largely defunct extremist English Defense League, is as odious as it gets, real gutter class. Take it from the Times of Israel, which pegs the British agitator as “the founder and former chair of a far-right Islamophobic group” and “more than just an agent provocateur… one of the main forces bringing extremist forms of hate and bigotry from the fringes to the mainstream.” And all that while Robinson, who identifies as a Zionist, is plausibly suspected of spreading his misinformation, hatred, and chaos for Israel’s benefit and with its support.
One theory for Musk’s obsession with Robinson is that it’s all Jordan Peterson’s fault: The right-wing fashion philosopher and culture war guru – think Derrida but for bros – was first in honoring the English rabble rouser with undue attention. Be that as it may, in addition, as in Germany, Musk has publicly thrown his support behind a right-wing insurgent party, Reform UK, under former Brexit star Nigel Farage, but with a twist, about which more below.
By now, Musk’s meddling in British politics is so brazen that it has made page one of the Financial Times. Surely intentional leaks from his surroundings confirm what has been obvious for a while: He is thinking about how to pro-actively help topple Starmer. No biggie: Just a British prime minister, sort of like a Canadian one, really.
And Musk’s preferred candidate to replace Starmer, at this point at least? Andrew Tate, it seems, a self-promoting bro-fluencer who has been accused – among other things – of criminal sexual misconduct, including rape and human trafficking, as it happens. How ironic. Musk, some say, is on some sort of crusade to save what he considers to be ‘Western civilization’. Well, maybe. But that says a lot about that civilization’s real nature.
No wonder a Washington Post op-ed is asking whether Europe will soon be dominated by US corporations in the same vicious manner that “the United Fruit Co. once subjugated Honduras.” Way to go, European ‘elites’, slow claps all around: After the Cold War ended more than a third of a century ago, your obvious and eminently feasible task was to emancipate all of Europe from the US, but you chose – were coopted, bought, blackmailed, who knows – against all rhyme and reason to do precisely the opposite: To ‘lead’ your countries into total, helpless, slavish dependence. De Gaulle would have expectorated.
Across the cold, choppy North Sea, Germany is in deep economic crisis (a polite expression). Less than a month ago, Bloomberg described its economy as “unravelling,” approaching “a point of no return” on a path of decline that could become irreversible. For once, there is a shorter way of saying it in German: Welcome to Valhalla. Starmer, meanwhile, is the British prime minister everyone loves to hate, and for good reasons, too. After winning his election in July simply because the preceding Tories were so relentlessly disastrous, Starmer’s personal popularity rapidly cratered so badly that he is hated even more, producing “the biggest fall in approval rating after winning an election of any prime minister in the modern era.” Way to make history, Sir Keir. So, Musk’s attacks have hit plenty of sore spots and the reactions among his targets have ranged from inadvertently comical high dudgeon to transparently sly backhandedness and maneuvering.
Scholz has pretended to play it cool, while still making room for a swipe at Musk in his New Year’s address to the nation. There! That will teach him you don’t care, Olaf! Other members of his party have charged Musk with interfering in Germany’s elections and endangering the US-German relationship. Not so cool anymore, it seems, after all. In Britain, one cabinet minister huffed and puffed about Musk’s “disgraceful smear,” while also suggesting the American oligarch could redeem himself and “work with us.” So subtle.
Other British politicians have urged Starmer to set up a dedicated “Musk rebuttal unit” and take legal action. Good luck with that one, against an oligarch whose fortune is approaching half a trillion dollars. That’s no innocent Julian Assange for you, dear British establishment, to be cajoled and tormented at will with pseudo-legal bigotry and on behalf of Washington. Musk is a guy who is as mean and ruthless as you are, and he can torment you because he has oodles of money and the US is on his side.
What most of the responses to Musk’s provocations have in common, in any case, is that they are predictable. There is almost a ritualistic feel to the clash between the American bad boy oligarch and the objects of his barbs and arrows. He flaunts and taunts, they dodge and fume. And that’s why there is only so much one can learn from following the detailed twists and turns of this season of the Great Elon Musk Potshot Saga.
Instead, let’s take a step back and focus on some broader issues. Maybe there are some lessons here. First: Why are we even having this discussion? And there, believe it or not, is something for which we have to thank Musk. Namely, just how brash he can be. By conventional standards – that is, in terms of preserving appearances – Musk’s behavior is, of course, inappropriate, as some never tire of pointing out.
But let’s take words literally for a moment – then Musk’s open lack of minimal respect for the governments and sovereignty of what once were great powers (in Britain’s case, even a 19th-century superpower) is entirely appropriate. In the simple, literal sense that Musk’s brutally open disdain reflects the reality of these US vassals’ current submissiveness.
Let’s put it like this: For starters, Germany, if you don’t want one American slapping your leaders in the face one after the other, then here’s a hot insider tip: Next time other Americans help blow up your vital energy infrastructure and systematically wipe out your industry’s competitiveness, don’t just stand there and grin, Olaf-style. Kick them out. Britain: If you think an American oligarch should not presume to redesign your government, consider stopping obediently co-perpetrating a genocide with Israel on the side of Washington.
Lesson number one: Try having a spine, and you might find some respect again.
Here’s another thing too often overlooked. Thought experiment: What would have happened if Musk had tweeted about European politics but to support mainstream parties and politicians? For instance, a quasi-declaration of love for EU Empress Ursula von der Leyen instead of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni (now in, it seems, for a big Space X deal, too)? Or what if Musk supported not the raucous AfD but the German FDP – hapless but mainstream free-market liberals who have, literally, embarrassingly been begging him for his benevolence? What if he had come out to congratulate Britain’s Labour leaders on their brutal slashing of benefits?
As the Germans say, in your heart, you know it: If Musk were precisely as meddlesome as now but on the side of the traditional establishment, the latter would lap it up, wagging their tails with delight and rolling over to show their bellies for more cuddles. In Germany, Musk would receive a ‘Bundesverdienstkreuz’ from President Steinmeier in person or, at least, a ‘Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels’ (just Google that one; it’s beyond explication). And in Britain, the always very, very flexible upper classes would find a freshly knighted Sir Elon eminently clubbable. In short, Europe’s sub-elites do not have a problem with being humiliated, they just don’t like it when their American masters threaten to replace them with new favorites.
Hence, lesson number two: If you want respect, don’t allow them to buy you. Because once they buy you, they can also throw you away and buy others.
That, by the way, is what is now also happening to Nigel Farage, leader (at the time of writing, at least) of Reform UK. He has rubbed Musk the wrong way by being deeply submissive but not quite enough. Perhaps in a futile quest for personal dignity, Farage tried to have it both ways, agree with his hero Elon in the most fawning manner and cautiously hint that sometimes he may want to have a tiny bit of a mind of his own. Boy, oh boy, did that hammer come down! Musk’s immediate response was to slap down Nigel-the-uppity-underling and tell his Reform UK party it needs a new leader. Farage’s response: More almost comically abject groveling. And perhaps that will work. Because, clearly, the new boss likes his submission complete.
Lesson number three: Don’t try to be clever.
And finally, consider this heroic stand by Germany’s conservative leader – and probably next chancellor – Friedrich Merz. Not to be outdone in the patriotic-umbrage stakes, Merz really let it rip: “I cannot recall, in the history of Western democracies,” he thundered with just a whiff of that good old Churchill bombast, “that there has been a comparable case of interference in the electoral campaign of a friendly country.” He asked his fellow-Germans to imagine “for a brief moment, the – justified – reaction of Americans to a comparable article by a prominent German businessman in the New York Times backing an outsider in the US presidential election campaign.”
Oh, Friedrich, where to begin? First of all, in the US, no one would care. Because there are no German businessmen like Musk, for better or worse. And also: Why should Americans take Germans seriously to begin with? Because of all that famous leverage built on economic prosperity, technological edge, military power, and hegemonic leadership that Berlin can bring to bear? And they say Germans have no sense of humor.
But thanks for being so comically honest – “backing an outsider” – that is your problem, we know. If Musk had only backed you instead, the frontrunner, you’d be standing cap in hand begging for more. But we’ve dealt with that already (see under ‘lesson number two’).
And then, that ‘Western democracies’ thing. Oh my, really? Here, write that down (or ‘zum Mitschreiben’, as you like to say), Friedrich: The reason why Musk can be Musk is that he is an uber-oligarch in a political system made for and by his type. Which is why we call it oligarchy – meaning rule by and for the rich. And that is not democracy (no, it does not matter what it calls itself). As a former Black Rock highflyer and millionaire, you should really know that much. And ‘West’ and ‘East’ have zilch to do with it. So, let’s just keep your ersatz obsession with Russia out of this one, even by implication, for once, shall we? You are being humiliated and ruined and cajoled from Washington, not Moscow.
Lesson number four: If you want respect, don’t talk BS. Especially not the same BS as the people disrespecting you. Try some honesty – first with yourself. Then one day, you might manage to be honest with the bullies, too, and finally send them packing. Until then: Musk is brutal, mean, and unfair, I know, and yet you deserve every bit of it.
