How Elon Musk boosting far-right politics across the globe

Elon Musk

By David Ingram and Bruna Horvath

Billionaire tech executive Elon Musk has encouraged right-wing political movements, policies and administrations in at least 18 countries in a global push to slash immigration and curtail regulation of business, according to an NBC News review of his political activity over the past two years.

While Musk has received widespread attention for the upheaval he is causing in the U.S. government, as well as for his growing role in Germany, where he recently told voters to “move beyond” Nazi guilt, the tech tycoon is making his influence felt in a long and growing list of other countries.

Musk has posted online in support of right-wing street demonstrations in Brazil and Ireland. He has welcomed a new conservative prime minister in New Zealand and expressed agreement with a nationalist right-wing politician in the Netherlands. He’s met in person several times with the right-wing leaders of Argentina and Italy. His social media app X has complied with censorship requests from right-wing leaders in India and Turkey.

“Musk can play an important role as a broker,” said Manuela Caiani, an associate professor in political science at the Scuola Normale Superiore, a university in Florence, Italy.

Caiani, who studies international far-right movements, said Musk is helping to grow those movements by trading ideas, making personal connections and building a shared ideological framework. And people listen because of his wealth, even though he lacks the conventional legitimacy of an elected office, she said.

“It is very dangerous that a nonpolitical actor now speaks with a sort of political legitimacy,” she said. “He’s changing the paradigm of politics.”

One common thread of Musk’s advocacy is his embrace of nationalism or nativism regardless of which country he’s talking about, but especially European countries. Musk has boosted various flavors of American nationalism, German nationalism, British nationalism, Italian nationalism and Dutch nationalism.

In other words: nationalism everywhere, all at once.

“Musk is succeeding in branding himself as a kind of global spokesperson of the far right,” said Rodrigo Campos, a postdoctoral researcher in politics at the University of York in the U.K., in an email.

“There is an irony to this because far-right leaders usually want to protect the nation from outside influences, whereas Musk is a billionaire who built his wealth from transnational corporate capital — in other words, he is the product of neoliberal globalization,” Campos said.

The extent of Musk’s right-leaning support varies by country, including endorsements on X of specific political parties, statements of support for specific causes and joint appearances virtually or in person with politicians. Thus far, he has not drawn on his personal fortune as the world’s wealthiest person to help politicians in other countries the way he helped Donald Trump in the U.S. last year with more than $290 million — or at least, he hasn’t done so publicly.

Right-wing politicians and political movements benefit from Musk’s support because of his worldwide celebrity as the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and because of his enormous megaphone on X, where he has 217 million followers.

And since Trump’s inauguration as president last month, Musk can also offer foreign leaders another potential line of communication to the White House. Musk has joined Trump for multiple meetings with national leaders including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Musk has kept up his meetings with world leaders as head of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), including an appearance Thursday with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi where the two mixed politics and business. The two men also sat for photos in the style of two equal heads of state.

While the Trump White House has let Musk police his own conflicts of interest, some Democrats have called Musk’s actions unethical.

“Musk is effectively operating as the Secretary of State, and he is meeting with a key foreign leader not to ask for concessions that would benefit Americans, but for concessions that would make him rich,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said on X.

Musk’s own nationality is complicated: He was born and raised in South Africa, he has held Canadian citizenship, and he became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

Now, Musk’s private diplomacy is meeting increased opposition from leaders in some countries who accuse him of improperly meddling in their domestic politics. French President Emmanuel Macron last month accused Musk of promoting a “new international reactionary movement.”

But even Macron may be understating the sweeping breadth of Musk’s international influence.

“The type of freelancing we’re seeing from Musk is unprecedented,” said Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a centrist think tank founded in 1910.

Feldstein said there are common threads in the politicians and parties Musk supports: They’re rooted in nativism and supportive of deregulation.

“He has exclusively thrown his support behind not just right-wing politicians but very extreme parties,” he added. Feldstein noted Musk’s vocal support for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, a party so far outside the German mainstream that other political parties have so far resisted joining with it in coalitions. The party has downplayed Nazi atrocities and has used a slogan previously employed by Adolf Hitler’s Brownshirt SA paramilitaries. – NBC News via EIN News