Foreign Policy According to President Musk

Elon Musk, the billionaire who bankrolled Donald Trump’s successful 2024 run for the White House, has earned the title of Shadow U.S. President by pressuring the president-elect to scuttle government policies and funding that threaten Musk’s personal business interests.

The 53-year-old CEO of X, SpaceX and Tesla, the world’s richest man, claims Trump’s victory gives the incoming Republican administration a mandate to shake up government and politics, appoint other billionaires enriched by government contracts to slash the federal workforce, and to slim down or eliminate whole federal entities, including the Department of Education.

Musk appears to have grown bored with his post-election appointment to the Trump-proclaimed nongovernmental Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, that has no real power to cut perceived waste in government institutions. Any significant reductions in the federal $6.75 trillion budget under scrutiny will need action by Congress before the next deadline for funding the 2025 budget.

America’s most powerful unelected official is now focused on undermining elected foreign leaders in U.S.-allied countries in support of far-right forces more aligned with his and Trump’s authoritarian and anti-alliance sentiments.

Musk’s interference in foreign elections has stirred concern among US allies, in Europe in particular, where he has called for the ouster of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and endorsed Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the Feb. 23 snap election set after German lawmakers voted no-confidence in Social Democrat Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Musk quickly cozied up to Hungary’s right-wing populist leader Viktor Orban after Trump won the Nov. 5 presidential election, receiving the European Union disrupter at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. He also hosted Britain’s far-right Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at the Florida compound to launch an influence campaign to oust Starmer, the Labor Party leader who was elected in a landslide just six months ago, ending 14 years of Conservative Party governance.

Eager to fill the void before Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, Musk has turned his wrecking skills to the domestic challenges facing European allies and to securing China’s favorable terms for his manufacturing ventures in the Communist-ruled country considered America’s most powerful adversary.

Musk has been on a rampage against the new leadership of Britain, calling for the ouster and prosecution of Starmer over a sexual-abuse scandal a dozen years ago when the prime minister served as chief prosecutor for England and Wales. A 2014 investigative report on the lack of criminal prosecution in gang recruitment for the sex trade cited “systemic failures” in police and local authorities’ response to earlier reports of abuse involving an estimate 1,400 young women and teenage girls before or during Starmer’s tenure as head of the Crown Prosecution Services from 2008 to 2013.

“Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain,” Musk proclaimed last week on X, the former Twitter platform he bought in 2022 and ceased efforts to remove disinformation in favor of unfettered free speech.

Musk initially promoted Nigel Farage, leader of the fringe right-wing Reform UK party, who was also hosted at Mar-a-Lago last month. But Musk waged an X barrage of demands for UK politics last Friday, claiming Farage “doesn’t have what it takes” to be leader of the Reform UK party, which he founded. Musk’s turnabout followed Farage’s refusal to join his attack on the current parliamentary official responsible for safeguarding women, Jess Phillips, whom Musk called a “rape genocide apologist” for declining to order another investigation into why it took so long to bring the main perpetrators of the grooming scandal to justice.

Musk also called for release from prison of an extremist agitator who goes by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, another move rebuffed by Farage. And in keeping with the incoming White House war on media that take a derogatory view of Trump and his “America First” ideology, Musk retweeted a post by the shortest-serving prime minister in British History, Conservative Liz Truss, who is proposing the government end support for the world-renowned BBC.

The tweet-fest last week triggered a mass of X users warning of Musk’s interference in foreign countries’ domestic political affairs, from politicians in Norway and Australia and even from some members of Reform UK.

“I find it worrying that a man with enormous access to social media and large financial resources is so directly involved in the internal affairs of other countries. This is not how it should be between democracies and allies,” Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere told public broadcaster NRK.

In Musk’s intervention in Germany’s upcoming election, he emulated Trump’s affinity for disparaging nicknames in referring to the German leader as Oaf Schitz. Scholz replied in an interview with Stern magazine with an appeal that German voters “don’t feed the troll.”

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier set the snap election for next month after Scholz lost his parliamentary majority when the pro-business Free Democrats withdrew from the three-party coalition over a tax dispute. Musk had earlier demanded that Scholz resign as chancellor after the Dec. 20 vehicular attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg that killed six and injured scores of others.

Musk called Steinmeier a “tyrant” for criticizing his plan to host AfD chancellor candidate Alice Weidel for a promotional conference on his X platform. All other German political factions have proclaimed they will refuse to include AfD in any coalition government, which has long been necessary to cobble together a governing majority.

Not all of Musk’s international musings align with Trump’s stated foreign policy positions—to the degree that he has articulated them—or those of Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio. The Florida senator is a prominent China hawk, having labeled the Communist country America’s foremost adversary and vowed to protect US companies’ intellectual property from Chinese spying and theft and U.S.-China trade from unfair practices that benefit Chinese entities.

Democrats in Congress started blaming “President Musk” for torpedoing a bipartisan budget proposal for 2025 on the eve of a government shutdown last month because of a clause in the funding bill that would have allowed the government to regulate U.S. investments in China.

After Musk encouraged Trump to reject the initial continuing resolution to keep the government funded for another three months, the provision for regulating investments in China was dropped before House Speaker Mike Johnson submitted a version cleansed of provisions opposed by Musk.

Musk’s Tesla is the only foreign automaker operating a factory in China that is not partnered with a local joint venture. The largest producer of electric vehicles also has a battery plant in Shanghai and research and development operations in self-driving vehicle technology.

“His bottom line depends on staying in China’s good graces,” U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said of Musk’s intervention to scrap government oversight of U.S. operations, lamenting that regulation would have made it easier to keep cutting-edge AI and high-tech jobs in the United States.

Conspicuous in its absence is any reported Musk contacts with the leaders of Ukraine or Russia except for immediate post-election courtesy calls and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s coinciding visit to Paris for the unveiling of the rebuilt Notre Dame Cathedral.

Trump, Musk and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance have long railed against U.S. support for Ukraine in Russia’s widely condemned war soon to reach its three-year-old milestone. The absence of that previously dominant subject may be due to political setbacks for Russian President Vladimir Putin since the dramatic ouster of his key Middle East ally, former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in late December.

Putin’s granting of asylum to his fallen ally served as a humiliating defeat for the Kremlin leader and strategic losses in his ability to exercise influence in the volatile region. Russia had built aviation and naval bases on Syria’s Mediterranean coast allowing it to funnel arms and fighters from Iran to militias in Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza and in African countries where elected leaders have been ousted in recent years by Russian mercenary-backed national insurgents.

Russian sabotage of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea to disrupt and communications and energy transmission has been exposed in recent weeks by seizures of Russian-operated ships by Denmark and Finland. Putin’s accelerating casualties in Ukraine and the Kursk region of Russia occupied by Kyiv forces has forced the Kremlin leader to import more than 10,000 North Korean fighters, whose lack of a common language and adequate weapons and clothing has led to reports of 1,000 to 3,000 deaths among the foreign troops.

Musk also faces a significant business conflict in backing any Trump effort to cease assistance to Ukraine. His SpaceX Starlink satellite and drone businesses currently provide essential communications in Ukraine, a loss of billions in revenue should Trump cut off aid to Kyiv. Russia, which suffers shrinking resources as the war drags on and human losses that have risen to 1,500 a day, would be unlikely to backfill Starlink sales if those benefiting Ukraine are curtailed.

Russia has also suffered catastrophic losses of its Black Sea Fleet, with as much as 40% of the Crimea-based navy sunk since Russia seized and annexed the strategic peninsula in 2014. The Sevastopol region that houses the former Soviet southern fleet headquarters has been idled by a state of emergency declared last month after two Russian-operated tankers suspected of transporting sanctioned fuel exports sank in major storms late last year, spilling at least 3,000 tons of heavy crude that has washed up on shore.