When Elon
met Alice: 9 weird moments from Musk’s German far-right chuckle-fest
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.
January 10,
2025 12:02 am CET
By Tim Ross
and Nette Nöstlinger
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.
“The
American people are demanding change,” he said. “My recommendation to the
people in Germany is to do the same … I am really strongly recommending that
people vote for the AfD.”
In case
those Brussels officials hadn’t quite got the point, he added: “I think Alice
Weidel is a very reasonable person. And hopefully people can tell just from
this conversation, like nothing outrageous is being proposed, just common
sense. So, in fact, as I said publicly, I think only AfD can save
Germany.”
5. We’re all
going to die!
Weidel took
her chance to ask the SpaceX mastermind why he was focusing so much money and
attention on developing plans to travel to Mars. Several light years later, he
arrived at an answer, of sorts: Because the dinosaurs “didn’t have spaceships”.
“A lot of
people think there must be aliens but I have not seen any evidence of aliens,”
Musk explained. There’s a big chance of a humanity-ending event occurring —
like “a giant meteor” crashing into Earth like the one that did for the
dinosaurs, or a nuclear war. “There is some risk.”
“To be
clear, if we are a single planet species, it is just a matter of time before we
are annihilated.”
This is the
kind of downbeat comment that can be a real mood-killer on a date. Weidel
listened on in silence. Quickly, though, Musk tried to make amends with some
more long-term positivity.
“I think we
can send uncrewed starships to Mars in approximately two years.”
6. Oh, and
we need another planet
There will
be a lot of work ahead, though, if we are going to save the human race, Musk
said. He estimated it would take about 1 million tons of material and 1 million
people to make life self-sustaining on the red planet. But once that little
hurdle is overcome, humanity will be laughing — almost as much as Weidel and
Musk were.
“My guess is
that there will be cases where the future Martians actually come and help and
rescue us when there is an emergency, just as America has helped to rescue the
rest of world in World War 1 and 2 and the Cold War," he said.
“As for
humanity, we don't want to be one of those lame, one-planet-civilizations. Any
self-respecting civilization should have at least two planets.”
7. Do you
believe in God?
Weidel
followed the spaced-out riffing on the end of humanity with a classic
deep-and-meaningful, end-of-the-night question. “Do you believe in God?” she
asked.
“I'm open to
believing in things that are proportionate to the information that I receive,”
he replied, indicating he was “open to the idea” of God. “I try to form my
opinions based on what I learn. And as I learn more, I aspire to change my
views.”
Again, it
wasn’t perhaps the profound poetry that Weidel’s question deserved. But she
didn’t mind. “Yes, same here,” she said. “To be honest, I’m still on a search.”
8. Life, the
universe and everything
Musk had
more to say on the existentialist theme. “I'm curious about the nature of the
universe. I would say I subscribe to the Douglas Adams School of Philosophy
that was described in 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.' In that book, the
Earth was sort of a giant computer that was trying to answer the question,
'what is the meaning of life?' And that goes back with 42 and what does 42
mean?
“And
actually the answer is the easy part, and the question is the hard part. That
was actually quite an illuminating thing for me, because I had sort of an
existential crisis when I was 12 or 13 about the meaning of life. I read the
religious texts and the bookstore philosophy. I was reading Schopenhauer,” he
said, “which is a bit depressing if you're to read it as a child.”
9. War. What
is it good for?
It wasn’t
all froth and frivolity. Musk and Weidel also discussed the conflict in the
Middle East and how the Ukraine war could escalate into nuclear Armageddon. “I
want to have strong leaders in Germany,” she said. “This is also my hope in
Donald Trump and in your administration that you end that terrible war [in
Ukraine], this worthless dying of young people every day, as fast as you can,
because the Europeans, they cannot.”
Musk
reassured her: “I think President Trump is going to solve that conflict very
quickly. As you point out, it's now been in somewhat of a stalemate for a few
years. And all that's happened over the past few years is hundreds of thousands
of people dying, but for no gains. And the longer this conflict goes on, the
more Ukraine weakens relative to Russia. Ukraine is a much smaller country. It
simply cannot afford the losses relative to Russia ... the longer this drags on, the worse it is for
Ukraine."
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