God! Martians! A “communist” Hitler! It was heavy on oddness and light on policy as the X owner and the AfD co-leader hit it off.
BERLIN — With lots of laughter, earnest agreement and effusive mutual appreciation, it started off like a promising date between two nervous teenagers (she even forgave him for getting her name wrong).
But by the end of the night, Elon Musk’s live conversation with far-right German politician Alice Weidel had veered off the rails — and indeed off the planet entirely — into a rambling dialogue about Hitler, the existence of God, and why “future Martians” will one day save the Earth.
Musk’s decision last month to endorse Weidel’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party earned him a storm of criticism from European politicians. But he shrugged it off — despite the threat of a regulatory investigation — and offered up his X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, so she could speak to voters ahead of Germany’s Feb. 23 election.
Weidel is standing to succeed Olaf Scholz as German chancellor, and while that seems a long way off, her party is attracting significant support and is currently in second place on about 20 percent in the polls.
In the meandering — sometimes surreal — 85-minute chat, Donald Trump’s favorite entrepreneur, who is the boss of Tesla, a space travel enthusiast and the world’s richest man, restated his heartfelt support for Weidel, claiming her party was the best hope for saving Germany.
Then it went weird. Here is a summary of the oddest parts of the conversation between the X owner and the co-chair of the AfD:
1. You say “Weidel,” I say whatever
“Welcome to the conversation with Alice Weidel, who is currently the leading candidate to run Germany, I think,” Musk declared as the X conversation opened. Unfortunately, he pronounced her name incorrectly as “Veedle.”
2. Hitler was a communist
Musk decided to show off his knowledge of German history, including “Hitler and whatnot.” He asked Weidel to address media portrayals of the AfD as “somehow associated with Nazism or something like that.”
“Hmm, hmm,” she replied. “Thank you for that question.”
“He was a communist and he considered himself as a socialist.” She went on: “The biggest success after that terrible era in our history was to label Adolf Hitler as right and conservative. He was exactly the opposite. He wasn’t a conservative. He wasn’t a libertarian. He was a communist socialist guy. Full stop. No more comment on that. And we are exactly the opposite.”
3. Hitler censored the media so he would succeed
Weidel made the rather odd argument that Hitler “would never have been successful” if he had not first “switched off free speech.” His party won the most seats in the German election of 1933. After that he got to work on what Musk, a free-speech fundamentalist, called “extreme censorship.”
4. Save Germany, vote AfD
Weidel cited POLITICO’s story revealing how 150 EU officials will be monitoring their conversation to see if Musk was breaking the bloc’s digital rules by giving her party an advantage. Musk clearly isn’t worried.
