Elon Musk’s close relationship with President Trump may well end up shielding him from the 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions against his companies in the United States. But something else appears to be happening for Musk in Europe.
My colleague Adam Satariano got the scoop last night that X, Musk’s social media platform, is likely to face major penalties in Europe for violating a new law designed to combat illegal content and disinformation. The company is expected to face a significant fine and orders to change its service.
The investigation could complicate Musk’s agenda to make X a hub of freewheeling conversation, where anything goes. It has already inflamed simmering disagreement between the United States and Europe over online speech.
I asked Adam to explain how things got to this point, and how Europe is likely to handle its case against X, given Musk’s ties to Trump.
KC: You wrote that online speech has become a fractious issue between Europe and the United States. How did it get this way?
AS: It goes back decades but has intensified under the Trump administration. Europe has long adopted more limits on speech — think Germany’s restrictions on Nazism — while America prioritizes personal freedoms over all else, except perhaps being able to yell, “Fire!” in a crowded theater. As with many things, the internet, including social media, has made the differences in approach more pronounced, and turned them into a geopolitical pressure point.
Do you think this explains why so many tech companies are cozying up to the Trump administration?
No doubt, especially for Meta and X. The language they use about online speech is almost indistinguishable from how President Trump and Vice President JD Vance talk about it.
How might Trump’s foreign policy moves affect this case? Would Europe be more likely to fine Musk heavily in retaliation for tariffs? Or might they go easy on Musk, anxious about upsetting such a close ally of the president?
These are all ingredients in a big messy stew of negotiations underway involving trade, tariffs and Ukraine. When I was in Brussels this week, it was clear that when E.U. officials think about penalizing X or any other American tech company, they are weighing that against its impact on pieces of this puzzle. Musk’s close ties to Trump just make it even more complicated.
This would be the first penalty issued under the Digital Services Act, right? How big could it be, and how does it stack up to penalties against other tech companies in the United States?
The exact timing and size of the penalty is still to be determined. But officials I spoke with want it to be big enough to pressure other companies to comply with the law. One official explained why it could top $1 billion, but on Friday the European Union was publicly saying a fee that high is not “on the table.” I guess the question is, will a big fine matter? When Facebook was fined $5 billion some years ago by the Federal Trade Commission, its stock price actually rose.
Musk’s time at X has been focused on dropping content-moderation policies that once restricted hate speech and misinformation. Could the E.U. enforcement action change the tenor of the conversations we see on X here in the United States?
I seriously doubt it. This week, X called E.U. regulation an “unprecedented act of political censorship and an attack on free speech.” But I’m pretty fascinated by this and eager to see how it plays out. These are two very different views about how the internet and social media should work. I suspect X and Musk will fight this very hard, and then it becomes a standoff.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
DOGE REPORT
Cuts come to humanities and foreign-policy programs
The Department of Government Efficiency placed nearly all of the employees of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank, on leave, my colleagues Aishvarya Kavi and Edward Wong report. The center, created in 1968 as a working memorial to Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president, has long been a gathering place for scholars across foreign policy.
The director of the center’s Kennan Institute, which houses the personal library of the diplomat George F. Kennan, who studied the Soviet Union, posted photos of that collection online and compared it to the celebrated library of ancient Alexandria, in Egypt — which, the director wrote, had “served for centuries as a place of scholarship and intellectual conversation until it fell victim to political vicissitudes and war.”
At the same time, the Trump administration told state humanities councils and other grant recipients from the National Endowment for the Humanities that their funding would be canceled. The money will instead be used “in furtherance of the president’s agenda,” my colleague Jennifer Schuessler reports.
While tiny by federal standards, N.E.H. is a critical source of funding for museums, historical sites, scholarship and school- and community-based projects across the country.
The legal basis for the cancellations is unclear. Observers noted that the funding of state humanities councils was mandated in legislation passed by Congress.
MEANWHILE on X
Mum’s the word so far on tariffs
Musk has been using his X account as a megaphone. Sometimes, though, the most interesting topics are the ones he chooses to avoid.
More often than not, Musk unleashes a torrent of social media posts about the biggest political news of the day. But that wasn’t the case over the past 48 hours, as Trump introduced sweeping worldwide tariffs and the stock market — and tech stocks in particular — reeled.
Of course, Musk’s companies aren’t immune to the pain of tariffs. While Tesla does some of its manufacturing in the United States, it also has a huge factory in Shanghai and imports parts from China for its battery systems. His artificial intelligence company, xAI, has spent millions on chips for its supercomputer in Memphis. A majority of those are manufactured in Taiwan.
And then there’s SpaceX, Neuralink and the Boring Company — hardware companies that are likely to experience increased costs because of tariffs. Tesla’s stock has fallen about 11 percent since the tariffs were announced on Thursday.
But Musk hasn’t mentioned Trump’s new tariffs at all on his X feed. Most of his posts on the subject date to Trump’s first term, when Musk pushed the president to consider a tariff plan that would impose “equally moderate” fees on China and the United States and said there should be “no tariffs at all either way” between the United States and Britain.
Musk’s recent posts have instead focused on fairly anodyne subjects, like a successful SpaceX mission that ended on Friday. When he has waded into politics, he has focused on his usual culture-war talking points: “Remember when you could get canceled for not using the right pronouns? That was dumb,” he wrote early on Friday morning.
Musk’s silence regarding the tariffs is hard to miss. It suggests that he is working to maintain his warm relationship with Trump, even as his DOGE work may be ending soon.
you shouldn’t miss
Scapegoat, liability but still useful
Is a breakup between Musk and Trump coming? And if so, what will it mean for the future of the MAGA movement?
Those are questions everyone seems to be asking, and my colleagues Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Theodore Schleifer have analyzed what’s going on between the two most powerful men in American politics.
Despite Musk’s failed effort to tilt the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, the president doesn’t plan to cut ties with him, they reported. Musk is still the G.O.P.’s money man, as much as he rubs some Republicans the wrong way. And Trump seems happy to use Musk as a heat shield, deflecting criticism onto him when things go awry.
