Elon Musk held a live event on his social media platform X on Thursday with a leader of the German anti-immigrant, far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD), the latest step in the tech billionaire’s campaign to rally support behind reactionary candidates across Europe and North America.
Musk, the wealthiest person in the world, spent more than an hour speaking with Alice Weidel, co-leader of AfD, giving the anti-immigrant party a high-profile boost ahead of the national elections scheduled for next month.
The free publicity from Musk was a potential boon for AfD, which has been frozen out of mainstream German politics, in part, because its leaders have downplayed Nazi atrocities. The country’s domestic intelligence agencies are monitoring the AfD for extremism, and a German court upheld the surveillance last year, finding that some AfD members favor a two-tier society in which “ethnic” Germans are given more rights than people from immigrant backgrounds.
The conversation between Musk and Weidel was generally friendly, a dynamic that Weidel said was unusual for her.
“It’s a completely new situation for me that I just can have a normal conversation and I’m not interrupted or negatively framed,” she said. She called Musk a “visionary.”
Since purchasing X, then known as Twitter, in 2022, Musk has transformed the app into a megaphone for his own politics, helping to propel the comeback last year of President-elect Donald Trump. Musk has also reinstated the accounts of previously suspended neo-Nazis and allowed them to flourish on the platform, including with premium privileges and the opportunity to share in ad revenue and sell subscriptions.
More than 100,000 accounts were listening to the audio-only chat at any given time and, in all, more than 11 million accounts viewed the X post where the discussion took place, according to metrics on X. It wasn’t clear how many of the accounts were in Germany.
The event could have regulatory consequences for X in Europe. On Tuesday, the Party of European Socialists protested against Musk’s plans in a statement and asked the European Union to “use all the legal means available to protect democracy against misinformation and foreign interference on social media.” X is already under investigation for potential violations of the union’s Digital Services Act.
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the potential fallout.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Wednesday that the “ultra right” was being led “by the richest man on the planet” — referencing the Tesla and SpaceX CEO without naming him directly — and he alleged that the movement “incites hatred and openly supports the heirs of Nazism in Germany.”
Musk, during the chat, said that to him, AfD’s positions were “just common sense” and he cited the party’s views on energy policy and reducing immigration. He acknowledged, though, that he and AfD disagree on the value of solar energy, with Musk as a major proponent and AfD wanting to cut back.
Musk’s Tesla has a major factory outside Berlin, and the company has battled local opposition as it tries to expand its footprint.
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AfD has grown steadily since its founding in 2013 — long before Musk offered the organization his support. Going into snap elections Feb. 23, called after the collapse of Germany’s left-led coalition government, AfD is polling in second place nationally. Last year, AfD became the first far-right party to win a state election in Germany since World War II.
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Other German political parties have refused to join coalitions with AfD because of its extreme positions.
The AfD denies it is extremist, rejecting the allegations as an attempt by the establishment to exclude it from mainstream politics. Nonetheless, its leaders have made it clear they believe Germany should stop apologizing for the Holocaust and other policies of the Third Reich.
Weidel, asked by Musk to respond to criticism of the party, said that AfD is “exactly the opposite” of Adolf Hitler’s party. She said that it’s left-wing political parties in Europe that are antisemitic.
“We are wrongly framed the entire time, and we would like to free the people of the state,” she said.
Musk has been fascinated with the idea of a future civil war in Europe, and he has boosted right-wing politicians in various nations including Italy and the United Kingdom. Earlier this week, leaders in four European countries denounced Musk’s influence.
AfD’s rise is part of a wider surge for the far right across Europe, causing anxiety among opponents across the political spectrum. But it is felt particularly acutely in Germany, whose Nazi past of 80 years ago still looms large in the form of laws banning Holocaust denial, support of Hitler and swastikas.
Opponents of AfD find further evidence in rhetoric by leaders such as AfD co-founder Alexander Gauland, who was widely condemned in 2016 for comments about German soccer star Jérôme Boateng, who has a Ghanaian-born father. Germans “like him as a football player,” Gauland said. “But they don’t want to have a Boateng as their neighbor.”
Gauland has described the Nazi era as “just a speck of bird’s muck in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”
And in 2017, regional leader Björn Höcke caused outrage when describing a planned Holocaust memorial in Berlin as a “memorial of shame.” Höcke was also fined 13,000 euros (around $13,400) last year for using the phrase “Alles für Deutschland,” meaning “Everything for Germany,” the well-known slogan of Hitler’s Brownshirt SA paramilitaries.
