Far-Right Transnationalisation from Above? Decoding the Role of Global Economic Elites in Elon Musk’s European Interventions

Far-right transnationalisation has more frequently been imagined as a “bottom up” process: either claiming the status of grassroots movements such as CitizenGo, or national-level party actors seeking potential allies such as in the European Parliament. Economic elites, meanwhile, are more often presumed to seek backstage influence or even conceal their involvement through “astroturfing” strategies. Yet 2024 saw a series of high-profile interventions in European politics by the world’s richest individual, US-based Elon Musk, which contradicts these expectations. This study uses critical discourse analysis to interpret two such interventions: an opinion piece written for Die Welt urging German voters to support the far-right Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD), and a meeting with representatives of the far-right Reform party from the UK following speculation that Musk was considering a donation of as much as £100 million. The study explores how both Musk’s own comments as well as their reception by different far-right actors actively modulates the relationship between global economic elites and the transnational far right. In some regards this represents a deepening of pre-existing processes, albeit “from above": for example, building affinities between different national far-right actors while emphasising cultural dimensions of globalisation and eliteness. In other regards it represents a more substantial departure: in particular, the familiar “threat of exit” deployed by the super-rich to obstruct national-level redistribution reformulated as a transnational “threat of entry” into a wider spectrum of national democratic contests.