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This past weekend, there was yet another battle between the EU and Elon Musk, who claims the European Union should be “dismantled”.
It sounds extreme. But if you look at the timeline, the bells have been ringing for some time already.
Go back to July 2024. Musk claimed Brussels offered him a “secret illegal deal” to censor speech. Fact check: It was a standard compliance procedure offered to every platform but Musk used it to frame himself as being targeted.
Then, in August 2024, the European Commission sent a formal warning letter to follow EU law. In response, Musk tweeted a very non-diplomatic meme from the movie Tropic Thunder.
By late last year, the rhetoric turned into action. He told German voters to back the far-right AfD. And then he attacked Italian judges on migration, claiming they “need to go”.
Musk’s current battle is against the €120 million fine for X. It is not about censorship but about consumer fraud: selling verification to anyone — including bots, actively blocking researchers from seeing public data and hiding who actually pays for the ads you see.
Given that the penalty is well below the maximum possible fine, we need to ask one question: is this actually about business, or maybe something else?
Watch the Euronews video in the player above for the full story.