Elon Musk has been at it again. Using his X platform and pure oomph as the richest man in the world and President-elect Donald Trump’s “first buddy,” the tech tycoon has been dishing out unsolicited political, especially electoral advice, imperious demands, and some harsh insults, too. Indeed, he is so busy on X you’d think he has little else to do. There is, as the thoroughly conservative British Telegraph notes, something “baffling” about Musk’s priorities, “when anyone else would be concentrating on the task at hand, set for him by Mr. Trump, to knock $2 trillion off the US federal budget.” In any case, this time, Musk has targeted Europe, in particular Germany and Britain. Or to be precise, their political leaderships and, more generally, traditional, mainstream parties.

In Germany, which is heading for crisis-induced snap elections on February 23, Musk has supported the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing insurgent challenger to the traditional parties. The establishment’s dubiously democratic, unimaginative, and probably futile counterstrategy is to, in essence, freeze the AfD out of government participation no matter how many votes it gets. The problem is that the AfD polls as the second-most-popular party, currently around at least 18%. By endorsing it – and not only on X but in the major conservative newspaper Die Welt as well – Musk is threatening the mainstream parties’ ‘firewall’ approach.

As the American uber-tycoon has also taken part in an X livestream chat with AfD leader Alice Weidel, could Musk’s support make the AfD so strong that it simply can’t be excluded from building Berlin government coalitions anymore? Consider, for instance, the cases of the Netherlands’s Geert Wilders or Austria’s Herbert Kickl. Indeed, government participation of right-wing parties roughly resembling the AfD is already an accomplished fact in several European countries, including, of course, Italy.

And even if the German firewall holds again on February 23 – one last time? – an empowered AfD in opposition would then be in a perfect position to profit from all the predictable failures and immobility of yet another creaky, hamstrung, quarrelsome ‘great coalition’ of one sort or another in Berlin. In that case, the AfD would end up in a very advantageous place largely comparable to that of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France at the moment: Watching from the sidelines as the old establishment and its parties continue their self-destruction.

In addition, Musk has just been having bratty fun, literally adding insult to injury, by, for instance, calling Germany’s dour figurehead President Frank-Walter Steinmeier a “tyrant” and the spectacularly deficient barely-still-chancellor Olaf Scholz an “incompetent fool,” before mangling his name in a very rude manner indeed.

In Britain, Musk has called for the end of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government, accused him of covering up and even facilitating an infamous case of mass child sexual abuse between 2008 and 2013, demanded that a minister go to jail, and that notorious far-right activist Tommy Robinson get out of it.

Robinson, a former football hooligan,

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