First, he took Washington, and now his sights are set on Europe. Or, as Elon Musk wrote in a January 18 post to his social media platform X: “From MAGA to MEGA: Make Europe Great Again!”

Musk made his opening moves across the Atlantic last summer, just as he threw his weight behind Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. In early August, the billionaire seemed personally obsessed with the anti-immigration riots that engulfed the United Kingdom, taking to X to amplify disinformation about the deadly murders that set them off. Come September, and he was exchanging fire over X’s lax content moderation policies with Thierry Breton, the European Union’s outgoing Internal Market commissioner.

But the billionaire’s most sustained maneuver has been his full-fledged endorsement for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is currently polling second in the Reichstag elections scheduled for late February. After delivering what many saw as a fascist-style salute at a Trump inauguration rally, Musk appeared remotely at an AfD event on January 25 and told supporters, “There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that,” referring to Germany’s traumatic national memory of Nazism.

There’s no doubt a great deal of ideological conviction here, to say nothing of the power-hungry megalomania driving Musk’s European filibustering. For a faction of the European far right, the billionaire has become a guiding star and free-speech champion against what they claim is an overbearing Brussels technocracy. Arguably the most powerful far-right figure in Europe, Italian premier Giorgia Meloni, defended Musk’s incursion into the old continent: “Is the problem that Elon Musk is influential and rich or that he is not left-wing?”

But Musk’s new passion project is more than just the latest chapter of his political radicalization. And the material questions at stake are also bigger than any personal interest in winning the occasional contract from a European government eager for ties in the new US president’s inner circle. Musk and Meloni appear to be approaching a deal concerning the billionaire’s StarLink service.

Rather, Musk has become the self-appointed bludgeon of Silicon Valley, which for years has opposed the European Union’s creeping moves to regulate big US technology companies. In the late 2010s, the EU’s GDPR rules established protections on the exploitation of Internet users’ personal data. More recently, the 2022 Digital Markets Act imposed checks on so-called “gatekeeper” companies, dictating norms about app marketplaces and software interoperability and granting the European Commission—the bloc’s executive arm—the power to penalize monopolistic practices. In the 2022 Digital Services Act (DSA), the European Union likewise instituted guidelines for content moderation.

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Compared to European dithering on defense policy, the bloc’s “commercial and digital regulations are up and running,” says Sandro Gozi, a centrist French member of the European Parliament (MEP). “This gets to the core of what the common market, EU legislation and the regulatory power of the commission are all about. The commission has the means, but the question is if it has the political courage to act.”

“The commission has quite large investigative powers against the big platforms,” says Eliška Pírková, senior policy analyst at Access Now. These include the power to seize equipment, search corporate offices, and order access to algorithms. In terms of sanctions, the commission can enforce interim measures such as fines, going as high as 10 percent of global revenues for the largest anti-competition infractions. It can even order temporary suspensions of services.

It once looked like Silicon Valley firms had made their peace with the DSA, which largely leaves platform governance in the hands of the companies themselves, who are expected to submit due diligence reports to enforcers assigned to the nation-state level. EU norms on content circulation, designed to limit hate speech and misinformation, also dovetailed with the Stateside push for content moderation in dominant tech circles during the first Trump administration and under Joe Biden’s presidency.

That’s out the door now with the return of Trumpism, as the new president takes aim at all forms of regulation. Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, has taken Trump’s lead and announced a scrapping of fact-checking services. Google has announced that it would withdraw from political advertising services in Europe out of a desire to avoid compliance-requirements with EU law.

“The demands made by the new US government are less and less compatible with their legal requirements in the EU,” says Jan Penfrat, senior policy advisor with the Brussels-based group European Digital Rights (EDRi). “What is expensive is not slight changes to content moderation, it’s having entirely different approaches to moderation in two of the major markets.”

“The general rule of thumb is, if it’s good for their bottom line, they’re going to align with whoever is in power at the moment,” he continued.

For Big Tech, the DSA was little more than an annoyance, one, granted, that is set to be more cumbersome now that the political winds in the US have shifted. Rather, it was the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that prefaced what some observers described as an “existential” threat to Silicon Valley’s reach in Europe. Here, the European Commission found itself armed with serious powers to investigate and fine companies for noncompetitive practices.

Thanks to these laws, US platforms are facing a growing list of investigations and sanctions. Thanks to the DMA, Apple was ordered to pay €1.8 billion in 2024 over violations on its App Store. EU regulators have also accused Microsoft of violating market rules by integrating its Teams application within the broader Microsoft Office software. In an escalation of its tug-of-war with X, the commission ordered Musk’s platform in January to grant it access to its algorithm.

“X is violating at least seven articles of the DSA,” said Gozi, a member of the EU parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection committee. “We want the European Commission to accelerate its investigations and begin to adopt sanctions.”

Digital rights groups are currently on the lookout for any sign of retreat from Brussels, amid fears that EU executives could be tempted to water down their regulatory push. “If the EU wants to uphold its sovereignty it must not pause or weaken the enforcement of its rules,” dozens of Europe-based NGOs, including EDRi and AccessNow, wrote in a letter to commission leadership last week.

“There’s a lot of conflicting reports,” says Max von Thun of the Open Markets Institute, describing the various readings within the European Commission about how to navigate the alignment of powerful Silicon Valley interests behind the Trump administration. “There are noises suggesting that the commission was looking at dialing down some of the DMA investigations. But as it stands, the commission has denied it.”

As just about all sources noted, the commission just might not be prepared for a full confrontation. The regulatory offices tasked with enforcing EU digital norms are relatively new and understaffed, especially compared to the armada of attorneys at the disposal of the tech giants.

Deregulation is already the watchword in other parts of the commission’s agenda for responding to both Trump and concerns about Europe’s economic decline compared to the United States. On January 29, commission chief Ursula von der Leyen unveiled a “competitiveness compass” to unwind regulations and norms, notably related to the environment.

“There is certainly a faction in the commission who are thinking: “look, we need to stay in Trump’s good books,” von Thun told the Nation.

These days, the big fear for EU planners is over the imminent possibility of across-the-board tariffs from Washington. Although the White House appears to be biding its time, Trump told reporters last Friday that he “absolutely” planned to impose levies on imports from the bloc. In one sign that the commission is readying for an escalation, the Financial Times reported on February 5 that EU executives are prepared to respond to tariffs with pointed attacks against America’s technology companies.

Silicon Valley wants Trump to see any misstep from Brussels as an attack on the United States. In October, Apple CEO Tim Cook called the then-candidate to complain about his legal troubles with European regulators. Mark Zuckerberg has also vented over his battles with the commission, saying on the Joe Rogan podcast that EU fines were “almost like a tariff.” Last November, Meta was fined upwards of €800 million over anti-competition violations. “I think it’s a strategic advantage for the United States that we have a lot of the strongest companies in the world,” Zuckerberg told Rogan.

But the tech giants’ keen interest in Europe is a symptom of vulnerability. Given the size of the EU’s digital space, advocates for confrontation think the bloc has leverage if it plays its cards right. “These tech oligarchs and the Trump administration really only speak the language of power,” says von Thun. “If they see that you are not willing to stand up for yourself when they’re directly attacking you, they’ll take that as a sign of weakness and they’ll only push for more.”

JD Vance has gone so far as to draw a connection between European tech regulations and the United States’ security commitment to the bloc. Criticizing the investigations against X, Trump’s running mate said in September that “American power comes with certain strings attached. One of those is respect free speech, especially in our European allies [sic].”

That’s a bluff, according to centrist MEP Gozi. “It’s absolutely ridiculous and not credible,” he said. “I’m sure that Vance himself has already forgotten that he said something so silly.”

That, in turn, may be wishful thinking on Gozi’s part. But it’s true that caving to Trump’s desires is ultimately a losing strategy. “I don’t think Trump will say: ‘OK, Europe, you’ve gone soft on the tech companies, I’m not going to put tariffs on you again,’” says von Thun. “I would want the commission to start quite firm, really set red lines, and double down on all forms of enforcement.”

Anyone hoping that the EU plays hardball will also remind you that the tech giants have been stared down before. Last summer, the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered the suspension of X for its amplification of far-right content. In October, Musk yielded to the Brazilian ruling and agreed to pay a $5 million dollar fine.

Jussi Saramo, a left-wing Finnish MEP, views the Brazilian standoff as an instructive example. “Europe is a much bigger and richer market than Brazil,” he told The Nation. “If the European market is closed to them, they’ll view that as a huge threat.”

“Suspension is the last-resort measure, and from a fundamental rights and access-to-information perspective should only be used if everything else fails,” says Pírková. She also noted the significant risk of abuse. In 2023, French President Emmanuel Macron threatened to suspend social media platforms during nationwide riots protesting police violence. “If we had a checklist to measure the proportionality and necessity of [suspension], the decision in Brazil would probably check many of these boxes,” Pírková nonetheless maintains.

In the brewing EU-Silicon Valley battle, or in the fight over entities like the Chinese-owned TikTok, some see the outlines for a compartmentalization of the largest digital platforms. “With TikTok, there are two versions—one for the Chinese market and another for the Western market,” said Saramo. “Maybe US companies will come to have two versions, one for Europe and another for the United States.”

As they dream of leveling the playing field in an industry dominated by US groups, European elites also think there are considerable gains in not yielding to digital deregulation. In late January, breakout Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek took the tech world by surprise in unveiling an AI model far less reliant on the investable capital and computer infrastructure underlying the hegemonic position of Silicon Valley. That could be taken as a sign that the costs of confrontation are not insurmountable.

As it stands, the EU has a framework for regulating the digital commons, including powers to curtail abuses of market position by the dominant corporations and platforms. But the bloc is doing little in the way of funding the infrastructure needed to develop credible alternatives, let alone the homegrown “champions” endorsed in recent policy white papers. That pathway is not without its risks either. Any confrontation with Silicon Valley will be in vain if it re-creates platforms of comparable scale, only closer to home. “It doesn’t really matter where these platforms are based,” says Penfrat. “The problem is that their commercial interests are so misaligned with the needs and requirements of an online space that can be used for a healthy public debate.”