A Coda Story from this week’s Coda Currents newsletter
Elon Musk isn’t just inserting himself into national conversations in democracies around the world – he’s taking a flamethrower to them. “Who would have imagined,” asked French president Emanuel Macron this week, “that the owner of one of the world’s largest social networks would be supporting a new international reactionary movement and intervening directly in elections?”
The question encapsulated the growing concern among European leaders about Musk’s increasingly aggressive intervention in European politics. But what appears to be Musk’s penchant for spreading digital chaos may actually be a calculated business strategy.
European Leaders React
Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre finds it “worrying that a man with enormous access to social media and huge economic resources involves himself so directly in the internal affairs of other countries. This is not,” tutted Støre, “the way things should be between democracies and allies.”
Germany’s Olaf Scholz says he is trying to “stay cool” despite being labeled “Oaf Schitz,” as Musk openly cheers for a far-right, pro-Putin party before next month’s federal elections. “The rule is,” Scholz told Stern magazine, “don’t feed the troll.”
Britain’s Keir Starmer has had to deal for days with an onslaught of inflammatory posts about historical sexual abuse cases, with Musk using his platform to resurrect decades-old stories about grooming gangs in northern England. He finally bit back, declaring that those “”spreading lies and misinformation” were “not interested in victims,” but “interested in themselves.”
But Italy’s Giorgia Meloni broke ranks with her counterparts, praising Musk as a “great figure of our times” while negotiating a $1.6 billion SpaceX deal – after a telling weekend visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.
Following the Money
Musk’s targeted invective against European leaders isn’t just digital trolling – it’s a business strategy. He is courting right wing parties, whatever their particular ideologies and rhetorical excesses, because he sees them as less likely to impose regulation, to seek to rein in Big Tech. Despite the concerns of European leaders, though, as long as Musk appears to have president-elect Trump’s ear, they will continue to walk on eggshells around him. They will have noted how the outgoing Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has been celebrated by the global right as an early triumph of the coming Trump-Musk world order. Musk derided Trudeau as an “insufferable tool” just last month and rubbed it in after the latter stepped down. “2025,” Musk announced on X this week, “is looking good.”
Musk’s influence over global discourse, heavily reliant on distortion and half-truths, will likely grow. The question is: who will dare to challenge him? Not Mark Zuckerberg who is abandoning fact-checking to pivot to X-style “community notes”.
It is true that fact- checking organizations have long been working against impossible odds, swimming against a tidal wave of digital sewage. Meta’s third party fact-checking system was akin, in the words of one content moderator, to “putting a beach shack in the way of a massive tsunami and expecting it to be a barrier.” But the system’s destruction still signifies a refusal to take even token responsibility for how social media platforms are used. Where once misinformation was a problem to be solved, it is now the primary mechanism of cultural exchange and political discourse.
“I don’t think Meta’s fact-checking program was particularly good; it certainly didn’t seem very successful.” says Bobbie Johnson, media strategist and former editor with MIT Technology Review. “BUT the speed at which Zuckerberg has publicly bent the knee to the incoming regime is still remarkable.”While, as Johnson points out, Big Tech is only too happy to bow down before Trump, it appears the incoming president is in turn putting the interests of Big Tech at the heart of his second term. Ironically, some of the pushback, at least in the case of “first buddy” Elon Musk, may come from within Trump’s MAGA movement. Musk was recently called out for his support of the H1B visa for skilled immigrants, which many of Trump’s base have described as a program that takes American jobs and suppresses American wages. Musk’s response was to deride his critics as “hateful racists.” For Musk, a committed race-baiter, spreading racist tropes is only a problem when it interferes with business.
