Beware Billionaires Bearing Advice

Neither Elon Musk nor JD Vance have Germany's best interests at heart

Feb 18, 2025

So, I planned to be posting photos and anecdotes from my trip to Vienna. But - as with my article from our fall trip to Florence still languishing in my drafts folder - current events keep pulling me away.

With the Bundestag election so close, I feel I can’t just fiddle writing travelogues while two representatives from my homeland try to set fire to my new land.

Last week, U.S. Vice President JD Vance used his allotted time speaking at the Munich Security Conference to lecture European leaders for “abandoning” democracy and freedom of speech by refusing to normalize and work with the political far-right.

“If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump,” Vance told the conference.1 “You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years.”

After the meeting, he went further - snubbing current German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in favor of meeting with the far-right Alternative for Deutschland candidate Alice Weidel.

This comes on the heels of billionaire Elon Musk2 praising the AfD and hosting a 75-minute interview with Weidel on his social media platform, X - the one where she tried to claim Hitler was actually a “Communist, left-wing guy.”

I wrote about that here:

No, Hitler Wasn't a Communist

Cathi Harris

Jan 16

Read full story

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Quick fact(s) check

The far-right is not being censored or suppressed in Germany.

The AfD has elected representatives in the Bundestag, right now. Members of a far-right activist group held an authorized march through my neighborhood two months ago.

As Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, said in a discussion hosted by the news website Politico.

“There was a hypothesis in the speech that the voices of Europeans and democracies are not allowed to speak and are not being represented,” McFaul said on-stage at the POLITICO Pub after Vance’s speech. “The people that have his views in Europe are represented in all kinds of parliaments all across the continent. They’re competing in elections in this country in nine days.”

But I think it’s telling that Vance also used this speech—and a prior one—not to focus on issues of governmental cooperation or security, but on railing against—in the name of ‘free speech’—European laws designed to limit the spread of disinformation and prohibit the harassment—online and off—of minorities and women.

Even before the U.S. election, Vance said that the United States might withdraw support for NATO if the European Union continued to regulate the speech allowed on social media platforms, including the Musk-owned X.3

Follow the money

Before taking Elon Musk’s advice on what is necessary to “save” Germany, I hope Germans take a good look at what he is currently doing to save America.

And consider what ‘good’ German governance would look like to him.

Musk owns the car manufacturing company, Tesla. Its Gigafactory, located just outside Berlin in Grünheide, has been plagued by worker safety complaints, cited for wastewater discharge environmental violations, and disputes with its worker union, IG Metall.

Since Musk’s purchase of the social media platform, Twitter (now renamed to X) has rapidly shed both advertisers and users and run afoul of government regulation in both the EU, Asia and South America.

It is in his financial interests if new, much less restrictive governments take over—or at least distract—the current ones.

But it also fits in with a larger pattern of extremely wealthy tech billionaires attempting to use their wealth to exert more and more control in the political realm.

“Of the 70 or so billionaires in Silicon Valley, only 20 or so support the 47^thpresident of the U.S.,” Olivier Alexandre, a sociologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) told the French magazine Le Monde, recently. “But these 20 have direct access to the global media public space as they themselves have recomposed it.”

In the case of Musk, he not only controls an international media platform, he has and used the ability—via his SpaceX-owned Starlink—to intervene in Ukrainian military operations. SpaceX also has private contracts with the United States’ Department of Defense worth more than $22 billion dollars. 4

There’s a darker undercurrent to all of this political meddling, too.

Tech journalist Kara Swisher, who has interviewed Musk several times, has said she thinks he has something of a God complex, that he sees what is good for him, personally, or by extension, his companies, is what’s best for “the world.” He sees others, Swisher said, not so much as individual people, but more like NPCs (non-player characters) in a video game.

Musk and JD Vance have both indicated interest in or support for the ideals of the neoreactionary movement (nRX), also known as the “Dark Enlightenment, an explicitly anti-democratic philosophy that grew out of the writings of American alt-right writer Curtis Yarvin and British philosopher Nick Land.

It has since gained a large following among several wealthy tech CEOs.

In essence, nRX is a political ideology that holds that elected democracy has failed and that societies should return to governance by a single, all-powerful monarch or chief executive.

In a 2021 podcast interview with Jack Murphy, Vance explained his interest this way.

“There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin who’s written about some of these things. One has to basically accept that the whole thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance told Murphy. “The task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved and then when the inevitable collapse comes you build back the country in a way that’s actually better.”

For an idea of what actually better might look like (and for whom), I would point you to another Vance influence: billionaire Paypal founder Peter Thiel.

An avowed libertarian, Thiel has invested vast sums of money in the quest to remove virtually constraint on his freedom, be it governmental or physiological. A 2011 New Yorker profile of his interest in extending the human lifespan was simply titled, “No Death, No Taxes.”

Since the early 2000s, he has been a promoter and a serious investor in projects like Praxis—a company that wants to establish an independent state on private land at an undisclosed location, and The Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit working to build autonomous floating cities in international waters.

Part of the Network State movement, common features of both Thiel efforts is that these independent states would be governed by corporations, not elected officials, and base their economies on integrated cryptocurrencies.

Notably, Praxis founder Dryden Brown tweeted late last year that he had already attempted to “buy Greenland.”

Sound familiar?

As Gizmodo journalist Lucas Ropek wrote in January: “Zealots of this ideology believe they’re building the future, but critics of the movement see it as little more than a bizarre neo-colonial effort to lay claim to existing countries, re-write their legal frameworks, and extract all the wealth and resources from them.”5

I think the network states sound more like neo-feudalism —a project that is great for the lords or “founders” at the top of the pyramid, less so for everyone else.

Given Vance’s position and Musk’s recent unprecedented access to and influence in the U.S. federal government, it hard not to wonder if the tech leaders might not have decided to make the U.S. the prototype for their “new society.”

What does this have to do with Germany?

Anyone who knows me or reads what I write, knows that I lean to the left politically. I have never voted Republican and absolutely did not support anything in the 2024 U.S. Republican platform.

But the Republican voters I know—even those who supported the mass deportations or tariffs or government efficiency or whatever was going to magically bring down the price of groceries, suddenly—did not think they would be voting to give the purse strings of the U.S. Treasury and the personal financial data of all taxpayers to a crew of 22-year-old edgelords led by an unelected egomaniac.

I am aware that very few Germans read this newsletter—even fewer who would vote for the AfD.

But in case you are or know one: I urge you to look closely at who their leaders associate with and where their funding comes from—lest what you get in office look very different from what you thought you’d be getting.

Many German observers have already noted that Alice Weidel is a rather contradictory figure to come from the far right. No one knows precisely where she stands.

Others have made much of the fact that she is married to a Swiss woman of Sri Lankan ancestry and is a registered resident of Switzerland, though she says she spends most of the year, now, in Berlin. Still others have noted her background as an investment banker with a PhD in economics.

Her association with Musk and Vance—and their support of her —makes me wonder if there is far more that we don’t know about.