Elon Musk has called for the European Union (E.U.) to be abolished in response to the bloc’s issuance of a $140 million fine against his social media platform, X. He was joined in his fury by several top Trump Administration officials, who also lambasted the decision over the weekend.
The European Commission announced a massive fine on Friday for several violations of the Digital Services Act (DSA), singling out the company’s “deceptive” design of X’s blue checkmark for verified accounts, its “non-compliance with transparency obligations,” and its failure to provide researchers with access to public data.
The fine drew an angry response from Musk and several top officials within the Trump Administration, which has made regulation of American tech companies in Europe a key point of contention in the U.S.-Europe relationship.
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The row comes at a time when that relationship is increasingly under strain over questions of free speech, immigration, and the war in Ukraine.
Musk replied “Bulls***” under a European Commission post about the fine. Then on Sunday, he called for the E.U. to be “abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people.”
Despite their past differences, Musk and the Trump Administration have been in lockstep on the issue of tech regulation in Europe. Both the X CEO and the Administration view any regulation of American tech platforms as an attack on free speech.
The European Commission, the European Union’s executive body, has denied that the DSA is about censorship. The landmark law, passed in 2022, requires tech companies—including American giants like Meta and X—to remove illegal content and provide transparency about their content moderation. DSA fines can be as high as 6% of a company’s annual global revenue.
“We are not here to impose the highest fines,” the European Commission’s tech chief, Henna Virkkunen, said Friday. “We are here to make sure that our digital legislation is enforced and if you comply with our rules, you don’t get the fine. And it’s as simple as that.”
“I think it’s very important to underline that DSA is having nothing to do with censorship,” she told reporters.
TIME has reached out to both the European Commission and X for comment.
America and Musk vs Europe
But Trump Administration officials have spent the last few days sounding off on social media, painting the fine as part of a larger attack on the American tech industry and on free speech.
“The European Commission’s $140 million fine isn’t just an attack on X, it’s an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on X on Friday. “The days of censoring Americans online are over.”
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr also condemned the union Friday morning, saying the E.U. “is fining a successful U.S. tech company for being a successful U.S. tech company.”
Few have been more outspoken on tech regulation than Vice President J.D. Vance, who built close ties with a number of Silicon Valley titans on his way to the White House.
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“The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage,” he wrote Thursday prior to the fine being announced.
Vance has frequently spoken out against the E.U.’s regulation of American tech companies and of Europe itself during President Donald Trump’s second term.
He set the tone early on, in a highly combative speech aimed at European leaders at the Munich Security Conference in February.
He singled out what he called “E.U. Commission commissars” for plans to restrict social media during times of civil unrest, and criticized the United Kingdom for a “backslide away from conscience rights.”
He also attacked European governments for “running in fear of your own voters” and argued that the biggest threat to Europe was not Russia, but rather unmitigated immigration and exclusion of far-right parties in the region.
Vance specifically defended Musk during the speech, after the Tesla CEO was criticized for wading into European elections. In January, Musk had appeared virtually at a rally for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, and urged attendees to “move beyond” the country’s culpability and history in the Holocaust, less than one century ago.
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“If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” Vance said in his speech in Munich.
Vance met with the leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel, following the speech.
The fine comes days after the administration revealed a new national security strategy that calls for the revival of the Monroe Doctrine to oppose any European interference in American affairs while “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”
Several current and former European officials have pushed back against the strategy, which asserts that Europe faces the “prospect of civilizational erasure.”
“It’s language that one otherwise only finds coming out of some bizarre minds of the Kremlin,” former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt posted on X, saying the document places the U.S. “to the right of the extreme right in Europe.”
“The stunning section devoted to Europe reads like a far-right pamphlet,” Gérard Araud, a former French ambassador to the United States, similarly observed in an X post, noting that the document “largely confirms” perceptions that Trump is an “enemy of Europe.”
