Getty Images | Dan Kitwood
Elon Musk came to blows with the EU ahead of a planned interview with Donald Trump on X, sparking a war of words between Brussels and the tech billionaire’s social media platform over content related to the US election.
The dispute arose when Trump, the Republican US presidential candidate, returned to X on Monday with a series of posts on a social media platform that had previously banned him, just hours before the interview with Musk.
The billionaire's planned event with Trump prompted a stark warning to X from Thierry Breton, the EU's internal market commissioner, over the dissemination of “content promoting hatred, disorder, incitement to violence or certain cases of disinformation.”
Breton wrote in a letter to Musk that he “had to remind” the tech entrepreneur of the “due diligence obligations” enshrined in the EU’s Digital Services Act, which is designed to combat hate speech and disinformation online.
Breton said he wrote to Musk “in connection with” the planned live X broadcast with Trump on Monday, and following the recent violence in the United Kingdom, where social media platforms have been criticized for fueling race riots across the country.
Musk responded to Breton with a meme from the 2008 film Tropical Thunderin which an actor screams, “Take a big step back and literally fuck your own face.”
X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote of Breton's letter: “This is an unprecedented attempt to stretch a law meant to apply in Europe to cover political activity in the U.S. It also patronizes European citizens, suggesting they are incapable of listening to a conversation and drawing their own conclusions.”
Trump's campaign criticized the EU as an “enemy of freedom of expression” in response to Breton's letter. “The European Union should mind its own business instead of interfering in the U.S. presidential election,” a Trump campaign spokesman said.
The campaign also suggested the union was trying to prevent Trump's return to the presidency for trade policy reasons.
“They know that a President Trump victory means America will no longer be ripped off, because he will cleverly use tariffs and renegotiated trade deals that put America first,” the report said.
Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” supported Trump's re-election campaign last month, shortly after his failed assassination attempt, and recently launched a campaign finance group to support the former president's run for the White House.
Trump said Monday's interview with Musk on X would be the “interview of the century” and marked the event with messages on the platform that were crucial to his 2016 election success.
Among the messages was a campaign video reminding viewers of the federal charges against him for allegedly mishandling classified documents and plotting to overturn the 2020 election. “They want to silence me, because I will never let them silence you,” Trump says in the video. He also vows to “completely wipe out the Deep State.”
According to X, the message had already been viewed more than 19 million times four hours after posting.
Another video criticized Kamala Harris, his Democratic rival in this year's presidential election.
Trump’s sudden resurgence on X comes as the race for the White House heats up this year. Harris is now tied or ahead in a number of swing states, according to polls conducted since she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.
X, formerly Twitter, banned Trump from the platform for life in 2021, shortly after a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. He had repeatedly violated the platform’s rules prohibiting incitement or glorification of violence.
Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022, reinstated Trump's account later that year and relaxed the platform's moderation policies, allowing suspended and controversial figures to return.
Before Monday, Trump had posted just once since Musk reinstated his account: on Aug. 24, 2023, when he surrendered to authorities in Georgia on felony charges related to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in the state. The post spurred a surge in donations to his campaign.
Trump launched his own social media platform, Truth Social, in 2022 in an attempt to compete with Twitter.
A clause between Truth Social and Trump requiring him to post on the platform for six hours before posting elsewhere expired last year. Trump’s audience on X, where he has 88 million followers, is much larger than on Truth Social, where he has 7.5 million followers.
In quarterly results released Friday, sales at Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social, fell from $1.19 million to $837,000 in the three months through June, for a net loss of $16.4 million. Shares in TMTG closed down 5.1 percent in New York on Monday.
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