The Ballad of Twitter and that Billionaire Bumpkin, Elon Musk

a Milwaukee meteorologist has been fired from her TV station after she criticized Elon Musk

Bluesky running warm this morning

Like any good entrepreneur who found early success in one market, Elon Musk is now starting to expand to others. Yesterday, Musk—the entrepreneur turned Donald Trump megadonor—hosted a livestream on X with Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD.

“Only the AfD can save Germany, end of story,” Musk said during the 70-minute conversation, endorsing the party ahead of the country’s elections next month. This is not the first time Musk has publicly thrown his support behind the AfD. At the end of last month, he wrote an op-ed in a German newspaper endorsing the aggressively nativist party, whose members and staff have well-documented ties to neo-Nazis and other extremist groups. (The party, for its part, has expelled some politicians and staff over suspected links to such groups, though others still remain).

Musk has spent recent days hyper-focused on replicating the influence campaign he has waged on U.S. politics. In addition to backing the AfD, he has injected himself into British politics, accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, of enabling child sex abuse by failing to address grooming gangs as a previous head of England and Wales’s Crown Prosecution Services, and calling for his ouster. (Starmer has defended his record, noting that he reopened the cases and was the first to prosecute the perpetrators.) Musk posted a poll on Monday asking X users whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” Musk has also started posting in support of Tommy Robinson, an Islamaphobic far-right political activist in the U.K. who is currently in prison for repeatedly breaching court orders related to a libel case he lost; Robinson falsely claimed in Facebook videos that a Syrian refugee had “violently attack[ed] young English girls in his school.”

After Nigel Farage, who leads the U.K.’s far-right Reform Party, said that he disagreed with Musk about Robinson, Musk posted: “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.” As Musk has waged this pressure campaign, he has incessantly posted in support of the far right in Europe and their current causes célèbres. On Wednesday, he suggested that there were “Sharia Law courts” in the United Kingdom, that “UK politicians are selling your daughters for votes,” and that “Irish citizens get longer sentences than illegal immigrants. That’s messed up.”

Despite Musk’s ability to become a major political figure in the United States, it’s not clear whether his pressure campaign in Europe will work. Musk’s efforts to influence European politics are hampered by campaign regulations that curb the role of money in politics. In addition to his online campaign during the U.S. presidential election, he donated more than $250 million to help Trump, in part funding ads that ran in swing states. But in Germany, radio and TV ads can air only within a month of the election. In the U.K., national campaign spending in the 365 days prior to an election is capped at about $40 million per party. The perspective of an avaricious billionaire may not mean the same thing in Europe that it does in the U.S.: A YouGov poll in November showed that just 18 percent of people in the U.K. view Musk favorably, down from 23 percent in 2022, after he initiated his purchase of Twitter. In the U.S., by contrast, more than a third of Americans have a favorable view of Musk.

Some European leaders, perhaps sensing that their constituents share a dim view of Musk, have pushed back. Starmer has accused him of spreading “lies and misformation.” Even officials in European countries who haven’t been targeted are speaking out. French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently welcomed Musk to the reopening of Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral, accused him of “supporting a new international reactionary movement and intervening directly in elections.”

But even if Musk falls short of his goals of propelling AfD to power in Germany and ousting Starmer as prime minister, he’ll likely still have made some gains for the European far right. A YouGov poll from earlier this month showed the AfD polling at 21 percent, behind only the mainstream center-right party. The party has gained two points since the beginning of last month, suggesting that Musk’s campaign is at least not stifling the party. Even though the AfD is a formal party with considerable support, it’s still considered taboo in much of Germany. Every other party has agreed not to work with the AfD, effectively ostracizing it. Musk’s endorsement of the AfD “is a problem,” Miro Dittrich, a co-CEO of CeMAS, a Berlin-based nonprofit that tracks the far right, told me. “It’s seen as legitimizing them.” During the conversation with Weidel, Musk tried to sanitize and downplay the Afd’s far-right tendencies and neo-Nazi ties by accusing the media of misportraying the party, and giving Weidel space to do the same: Adolf Hiter “wasn’t a conservative; he wasn’t a libertarian,” she told Musk. “He was a communist, socialist guy, so full stop, no more comment on that, and we are exactly the opposite.” (Hitler, of course, was an anti-communist, anti-Semitic dictator.)

Musk doesn’t need to make endorsements or post aggressively to exert his influence over Europe. Even before he attached himself to the Trump campaign, Musk gained significant leverage over governments through Starlink, his satellite-internet service. In 2022, Musk reportedly made the decision to not provide Starlink service to Ukraine while it was launching an attack on Russian forces in Crimea, after speaking with the Russian ambassador to the United States. In September, he used the company to partially circumvent a temporary ban on X in Brazil, by refusing to block the website for Starlink customers in the country.

Unless something truly intractable stands between Musk and a goal, he will relentlessly go for it, no matter how trivial or ill-advised it may be, often no matter the cost to those around him. That pattern is probably how Musk’s political ambitions will play out. Unless he gets bored, governments across the world will be forced to at least listen to his whims—especially as European leaders contend with the possibility of retaliation from the president of the United States. Perhaps a fallout between Trump and Musk is coming. Trump has reportedly started complaining about how much Musk is hanging out in Mar-a-Lago, where he pays $2,000 a night to stay at a villa to regularly dine with Trump. Still, even without the president-elect, he has the wealth and connections to exert his will on politics worldwide. Musk is here for as long as he wants to be.

Fears for ‘security of Jews worldwide’ in wake of Elon Musk AfD speech
Top US Jewish advocate Halie Soifer calls Trump adviser’s address to far-right Germany rally ‘incredibly dangerous’

Elon Musk’s remarks to a German far-right party that Germans should not focus on their country’s Nazi past should prompt “deep concern” about “the security of American Jews” and “of Jews worldwide”, a leading US Jewish advocate has told the Guardian.

“Speaking as a deeply concerned American Jew,” said Halie Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA), “I am deeply concerned about the security of American Jews, of Jews worldwide, given our president’s clear alignment with dangerous rightwing extremists.”

Musk, the owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X and the world’s richest person, donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Donald Trump’s campaign and is now a close adviser with an office in the White House complex.

In a video address to the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party on Friday, Musk said it was “good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything”; said “children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents”; and said there was “too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that”.

He also gave two fascist-style salutes last week, during a speech at Trump’s inauguration.

Soifer’s response comes after world leaders marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, in Poland.

Given her leadership of the JDCA, and a résumé that includes stints advising Kamala Harris and Democratic senators and working on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, Soifer said she knew she “may be viewed as partisan”.

But she said: “This administration is clearly attempting to remake the world order in its image. And Elon addressing the AfD, encouraging the AfD, clearly aligning with the AfD is also a form of election interference, in addition to being incredibly dangerous, given the extreme views of many of its members.

“It is not the norm for a senior adviser to the US president to align with a [foreign] political party in advance of elections” next month.

Amid outcry over his salutes and his comments to the AfD, Musk has denied far-right sympathies while gleefully trolling his critics. On Sunday, he pinned to his X account a Latin motto – “Nemo me impune lacessit”, or “No one provokes me with impunity” – which Musk attributed to Sulla, a Roman dictator, but which is actually the national motto of Scotland.

Soifer said: “The salute, the message to the AfD, the fact that he is willing to joke about the criticism he is getting, it all demonstrates that [those around Trump] are unwilling to recognize how dangerous their words and actions are.

“They don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to this alignment. It has been a steady stream of signaling to rightwing extremists that they have an ally now in the White House.”

On his first day back in office, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people convicted over the Capitol attack of 6 January 2021. He has signed executive orders instituting hardline immigration policies including plans for mass deportations.

Soifer said it was imperative opponents of Trump and Musk continue to condemn extremist behavior and language, because “words and signaling have dangerous consequences and Trump and his allies, including Elon Musk, are giving a green light to extremists.

“It’s important that that American voters, especially those who may have supported Donald Trump, open their eyes and see what’s right in front of them. He said he would be a dictator on day one, and for once he is making good on his promise.”

On Monday evening, Soifer noted that Trump had then not issued a statement marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, a step he took each year in his first term, though in 2017 he caused controversy when his statement did not mention Jewish people.

“Donald Trump is taking Elon’s advice to ‘move beyond’ the Holocaust,” Soifer said in a post on social media. “It’s (the end of) Holocaust Remembrance Day and Trump hasn’t said a word about it. But he did pardon the ‘Camp Auschwitz’ insurrectionist just in time for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.”

That was a reference to Robert Keith Packer, now 59, who was sentenced to 75 days in prison for his part in the Capitol attack, during which he was photographed wearing a hoodie with “Camp Auschwitz” printed on the front.

Trump sent a delegation to Auschwitz on Monday, led by Steve Witkoff, the US special envoy to the Middle East, and Howard Lutnick, Trump’s nominee for secretary of commerce.

The White House eventually issued a “presidential action”, marking Holocaust Remembrance Day as a “National Day of Remembrance” but released after 10pm ET.

Tesla vandalized again....

Musk has turned into a right wing bigot fascist since buying Twitter (maybe he always was, but being unaccountable has just revealed his true nature)
Tesla is indelibly linked to him
Ipso facto someone owning / driving one of his company's cars either buys into his bigotry or doesn't care enough about what he says and does to eschew the brand
Owning a Tesla doesn't mean you buy into everything he says, but I can easily see why people make the connection. No other car company really has a figurehead that is so closely linked to the brand.

Someone scratching a swastike into your car - that's as obvious a "cause and effect" thing as there is really.

That said it sucks that this has happened to you twice. It's something I have an elevated fear of when leaving my car unattended nowadays.

As much as Musk sucks as a person, he is still a top-notch visionary.

So what happens when these people start being replaced with self-driving technology?

Society has never seemed to give much of a **** about about displaced workers.

To me self driving vehicles are small change compared to AI.

Because frankly I don't have the same sense of sympathy with coal miners, lumberjacks and oil drillers losing their livelihoods...