Elon Musk is a global problem | Opinions

From his apparent “Nazi salute” at United States President Donald Trump’s inauguration celebration to his labelling of the US Agency for International Development as a “criminal organisation” that needs “to die” and the devastating austerity policies he excitedly pursues as the head of the newly minted “Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)”, multibillionaire X owner Elon Musk has undoubtedly become a destructive force in American politics.

But Musk’s narcissistic political ambitions are not limited by the borders of the United States. After helping Trump and his far-right MAGA movement assume control of the US, he has set his sights on replicating this success across the world.

The South African started his “world tour” of stirring far-right sentiments and attempting to install radical, Musk-friendly figures in positions of power in the United Kingdom.

Musk spent the past year periodically elevating British far-right voices, such as English Defence League co-founder Tommy Robinson and Reform Party leader Nigel Farage. In early January he once again tweeted “Free Tommy Robinson!” and shared a link to the UK far-right leader’s controversial documentary titled Silenced.

In the documentary, reportedly commissioned by US far-right radio host Alex Jones’s InfoWars, Robinson falsely claims that Syrian refugee schoolboy Jamal Hijazi had violently attacked English schoolgirls and threatened to stab a boy at school.

Robinson had made the same claim a few years earlier in 2018 in a response to a viral video of Hijazi getting beaten at a school in Yorkshire. His response video on Facebook was viewed by more than a million people. Hijazi’s family faced death threats as a result.

Subsequently, Robinson – known to be funded by right-wing groups in the US – was smacked with a libel case from Hijazi, which he lost. He was ordered to pay Hijazi 100,000 pounds ($125,260) in damages, cover his legal costs to the tune of 500,000 pounds ($626,300) and was served with an injunction preventing him from publicly repeating his false claims about the Syrian schoolboy.

By making the documentary Silenced, in which he repeats his false claims about Hijazi, screening it for the public in London’s Trafalgar Square in July and widely sharing it online, Robinson violated the injunction. As a result, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison in October.

Of course, none of this features in Musk’s rants about Robinson.

Rather, he uses Robinson and the Hijazi case to peddle a wider far-right racial trope – namely that mass immigration from the non-West is a threat to women and girls in the West – and to try to influence domestic politics in the UK.

Musk knows well that this trope has recently gained currency in the UK.

Last summer, the UK was swept by violent anti-immigration protests and riots after a Welsh man of Rwandan descent stabbed and killed three girls at a dance class. However, the real trigger for the violence was not the crime itself but the misinformation spread by far-right groups and activists, including Robinson, that the suspect was a 17-year-old asylum seeker named “Al-Shakati”.

The decade-old “grooming gang scandal” related to the widespread abuse of white girls in several English towns and cities, such as Rochdale, Rotherham and Oldham, predominantly by British men of Pakistani origin, has also provided Musk and the British far right with opportunities to push tropes about race and immigration.

Since the scandal first became public, local agencies and security forces were accused of trying to cover it up to avoid being branded racist and Islamophobic.

A 2022 report into safeguarding measures in Oldham, a town at the centre of the scandal, eventually found that there was no cover-up despite “legitimate concerns” that the far right would capitalise on “the high-profile convictions of predominantly Pakistani offenders across the country”.

The truth and all its nuances, however, do not concern Musk. He decided the “cover-up” narrative serves his agenda and turns the wider public against immigrants, so he has continued to push it.

Recently, he has claimed that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who led the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) from 2008 to 2013, had failed to effectively deal with these “grooming gangs”. He tweeted: “Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years. Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.” He called Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls Jess Phillips “a rape genocide apologist”. Musk also published a series of posts calling on King Charles III to dissolve the UK Parliament and order new elections.

Musk’s tweets and overt support for figures like Robinson may not trigger immediate change in the UK, but he is clearly setting the stage for the rise of the far right in the country – politically and economically.

Musk has also made a visit to Germany as part of his world tour of far-right agitation and support.

The tech mogul and DOGE leader has thrown his weight behind the country’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

In an opinion piece published in the conservative newspaper Welt am Sonntag in late December, Musk made his support for the far-right party public, calling the AfD the “last spark of hope” for Germany. He suggested the party’s commitment to restricting immigration would enable it to keep Germans safe and protect German culture. He wrote: “A nation must preserve its core values and cultural heritage in order to remain strong and united.”

In early January, Musk hosted a live conversation with AfD leader Alice Weidel on X. On it he warned “only AfD can save Germany” from what he said was a migration-induced rise in crime and “wokeish liberal education system”, including “gender studies”, that supposedly plagues the country. For her part during the conversation, Weidel claimed Adolf Hitler was not a conservative or libertarian, rather, “he was this communist, socialist guy.” She also thanked Musk for the mainstream exposure, saying, “Elon, it’s a completely new situation for me that I can just have a normal conversation, and I’m not interrupted or negatively framed.”

In late January, Musk went on to address an AfD rally in Halle, Germany, via videolink. Speaking to the thousands in attendance, he once again declared that the far-right party was “the best hope for the future of Germany”. He added that the German people were “an ancient nation which goes back thousands of years” and AfD supporters needed to “fight, fight, fight” for the country’s future. In seeming reference to the AfD’s neo-Nazi links, Musk also said Germany needs to “move beyond” feeling guilty for the Nazi crimes of the past and Germans must “be proud of German culture, German values”.

By publicly supporting the party and providing its leader with a platform to promote her extremist agenda without challenge, Musk is likely trying to help the AfD secure a Trump-style victory in Germany’s February 23 elections.

Trump is working to elevate the far right in several other countries.

He, for example, has struck up a close bond with the right-wing prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni. They share a mutual love of Lord of the Rings and xenophobia. He has called Meloni “even more beautiful on the inside than she is on the outside”. Meloni has called Musk “a genius” who has been unfairly portrayed as “a monster”. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to think that Musk had a hand in facilitating Meloni’s growing relationship with Trump.

Beyond Europe, Musk has been public about his admiration for Argentinian President Javier Milei. Milei’s “chainsaw” austerity measures were an inspiration for DOGE. Milei was also present at Trump’s inauguration.

In September, Musk met with El Salvador’s “cool dictator” Nayib Bukele, who has made global news for his highly controversial “mano dura”, or “iron fist”, policies against gang violence and his mega-prisons. Now the Trump administration is reportedly considering housing its criminals “including those of US citizenship and legal residents” in Bukele’s lock-ups. Bukele has said he is willing to help “outsource part of [the US] prison system” by housing convicted US criminals in his mega-prisons in “exchange for a fee”. He added: “The fee would be relatively low for the US but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable.”

Meanwhile, Musk’s far-right influence has taken on a life of its own and started to have an impact even in countries he has not yet visited or said anything about.

He, for example, has said very little if anything at all about Polish politics. But a recent poll shows that close to 45 percent of Poles would vote for a candidate endorsed by the billionaire.

It is, of course, early days in Musk’s attempted global far-right revolution. Some of his moves may work, and others may not have the level of political impact he is hoping for. However, it is still a worry that Musk has been able to get as far as he has in terms of meddling in the internal politics of several countries. One can only hope that there will soon be a concerted pushback to Musk’s global moves.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance