By George Day, University of Birmingham
All opinions are those of their respective author, and are not indicative of the stance of EUPS.
I remember thinking as a child that Elon Musk was the real-life Iron Man. As I’ve gotten older, I increasingly think he should be put in an Iron Maiden. The billionaire owner of Twitter has sparked controversy this week amid his row with the European Commission, which recently fined Mr Musk’s company £140 million.
Twitter breached several regulations set out under the Digital Services Act of 2022, with the platform’s almost unregulated blue tick verification system. Under its previous owners, blue check verification marks were awarded by Twitter admins to the accounts of major public figures, countries, companies, etc. Under the new system, Musk allows anyone to have a blue check mark if they subscribe to X Premium for £8 a month. This system is open to abuse by scammers and bots looking to steal people’s personal details or spread misinformation on the platform, leading Twitter to fall foul of DSA regulations.
When Musk took over Twitter, he promised to make it a haven for free speech; this has been in part successful. Users can now share their bigoted opinions, crypto scams, and bombshell allegations against Presidents utterly unchecked, and with no consequences. In light of these and other changes, the Commission has handed down the fine to X, who have 30 days to respond before facing further penalties.
Never to be outshone however, Musk and his admins have banned the account responsible for running ads for the EU commission. They are accused of using a loophole to amplify content without paying the appropriate costs. It must be noted, however that this account had not posted anything since 2021, before Musk took over the platform. He also claimed in a series of tweets that ‘The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people’.
So the question I pose is: has he crossed the line?
The long and short of it is, yes. Musk is obviously behaving like a child (a trait likely picked up from his pal Donny) but childish or not this doesn’t mitigate the danger of him spouting this kind of anti EU rhetoric. In the long run, though, will this have a lasting impact on the EU and its relationship with the US? Yes.
See I’ve noticed a disturbing trend recently, although I of course realise that it’s nothing new. The tech bros who now run our society from their gilded mansions have been on a campaign over the last few years to launder their public image amid the rise of the far right. Turning away from Musk, I’d like to focus specifically on Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Meta. After the attempted coup on January 6th, the world seemingly breathed a sigh of relief as indictments came pouring in against former President Trump. Several social media sites banned him entirely, including Instagram and Facebook, leading Zuckerberg to realise he had to stand with the left and turn his back on right wing populists, at least for the time being. Not even two years later though, Trump was allowed to return. This coincided with a complete revamp of Zuckerberg’s public image, making the shift from strange inhuman creature to cool millennial tech bro. His Instagram now sports pictures of him surfing, celebrating his daughters’ achievements and generally trying to seem like a more relatable guy – he even got a perm! But when he sits down in front of microphones to chat with the right wing podcast circuit, this illusion melts away as he begins to agree with them.
The digital republican ecosystem, propped up by figures like Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and Elon Musk, has been an instrumental mouth piece for disseminating the ideas of the ruling classes straight into the ears of the general public, who are increasingly beginning to listen. Billionaires use this E-network to launder their public images and make themselves seem relatable, but also to exert an increasing influence on politics. The components of the network, from the podcast circuit to Twitter proved major contributing factors in convincing young white men to overwhelmingly vote for Donald Trump at the last election. Although Musk’s comments about EU abolition may seem to be the trivial words of a man-child, they carry real weight with young men, especially amongst the demographic of ‘left behind voters’.
The EU has come under genuine threat in the last decade with Brexit, and now the Russia Ukraine crisis on its doorstep. What it needs now more than ever is cooperation: that’s why billionaires like Musk want to destroy it. As we march towards a total climate meltdown triggered by rampant mass consumer culture, billionaires want us to be more individualistic. It allows them to do two things. First, to shift the burden of responsibility for climate change onto individual consumers, and away from the corporations they own. Second, to make us less empathetic to the swathes of refugees who will be displaced by soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, and global famine. We can already see this kind of rhetoric in action in the UK, as Nigel Farage and Reform surge in the polls. Figures like Farage and Musk hate the EU, because it promotes cooperation, free movement, and tolerance of people from different countries.
Moreover, Musk was one of the biggest donors to, and mouthpieces of, President Trump. Despite their public fallout over Trump’s connections with the pedophile sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein, Musk is still very much in favour of Trump’s agenda. The administration continues to tariff the European Union but its efforts are falling short of the intended effect. Europe remains strong and united. This is bad for Trump’s tariffs, which would have a much bigger impact on a divided Europe. Furthermore, the EU has been one of the largest supporters of Ukraine amidst the Russian invasion, a decision which Trump has been vocally critical of. This EU backing sinks Trump’s ‘saviour’ narrative, leaving him unable to claim he will be the sole person responsible for resolving the conflict (taking him one step further away from the coveted Nobel Peace Prize). EU support for Ukraine also makes it more difficult for Trump to roll over and surrender large swathes of Ukrainian territory to Putin, something he is under significant pressure to do.
The attacks by Musk on the EU will not be the last we see as the right tries to destroy it in the coming years. But the thing we must all remember is that if Elon Musk and his billionaire buddies are putting their time and attention into telling us something, then it is best we ignore them. We must work together as a collective to fight the imperialism, injustice, and discrimination peddled by Musk and all the other billionaires like him, because when the last tree has fallen, the last river has been poisoned, and the last animals die – we will remember that we cannot eat money.
