What Elon Musk and Kaiser Wilhelm have in common
I’ve been watching with a mixture of dread and curiosity how deeply Elon Musk has got involved in German politics over the last few weeks. The most recent flurry of activity began in December 2024 when the tech billionaire endorsed the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as the only party that could ‘save Germany’.
Musk followed this up with a controversial op-ed piece in Die Welt, a mainstream German newspaper, in which he outlined why he thinks people should vote for the AfD as the ‘the last flicker of hope for the country.’
In my comment on this for The Telegraph, I focussed mainly on the post-war taboo that was broken by a German news outlet in giving a sympathetic platform to a party that positions itself to the right of the conservatives. But the impact of Musk’s interventions is just as interesting.
The Tesla boss has since gone on to call the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz an ‘incompetent fool’ (not for the first time) and said ‘Chancellor Oaf Schitz or whatever his name is will lose’ the next election. Then he called President Frank-Walter Steinmeier ‘an anti-democratic tyrant!’ He has also announced that he will host a conversation between himself and AfD boss Alice Weidel on his social media platform X.
German politicians are trying hard to appear as though this doesn’t worry them. Scholz told the political magazine Stern that ‘you have to stay cool,’ adding that there was ‘nothing new’ in ‘rich media entrepreneurs who do not appreciate social democratic politics.’ He urged everyone not to ‘feed the troll’. Steinmeier’s office said they had seen Musk’s remarks but wouldn’t comment.
But Musk's interventions mark somewhat of a seachange in the relationship between politics and media, and that’s why politicians and their advisors don’t really know what to do about it.
The comparison that springs to mind is the advance of mass media in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the twentieth. Before, it was very hard for, say, a monarch to say something so outrageous in the heat of the moment that it would have got them in trouble with their people. They simply had no means of speaking to the wider public in any way that was spontaneous.
Then newspapers and photography came along. I talk about that a bit in Blood and Iron because Kaiser Wilhelm II was completely enamoured with the opportunities mass media combined with the advent of mass literacy afforded him in terms of communication and image building:
Kaiser Wilhelm II became a media monarch, courting the press in an almost modern sense. Restlessly, he travelled from town to town, showing himself to as many people as possible. Between 1897 and 1902 alone, he made 233 visits to 123 different towns where he gave speeches that would often be printed in the newspapers afterwards and thus discussed nationwide rather than just locally.
Acutely conscious of this, Wilhelm would spend hours at a time scanning the papers for comments about him. He could also become very upset when even small details were inaccurate or had been embellished by journalists.
The unfortunate combination of Wilhelm’s desire for publicity and his sensitivity to it was completed in its potential for disaster by the fact that he was ‘singularly ill-suited to the communicative tasks of his office’, as the historian Christopher Clark put it in his biography of the man.
His grandfather Wilhelm I and his father Frederick III had understood that it was the role of a modern monarch to represent the country while experts wrote speeches, made policy and forged diplomatic networks. By contrast, Wilhelm II naively imagined that he could restore the royal authority and pomp of bygone centuries, ‘always taking a piece of the Middle Ages with him’, in the words of a contemporary court official. Thus his frequent interferences in domestic and foreign policy were dreaded by those who sought to manage and mitigate their impact.
One cannot help but observe similarities to certain modern politicians who, frustrated with the desire of their staff to soften and tone down, take to social media to communicate directly with the public.
There followed a period for much of the 20th century when politics became very carefully managed in the media. Adolf Hitler is often seen as someone with natural charisma who was able to have such enormous effects on his audiences because his angry rants came across as authentic.
In reality, his speeches and public images were very tightly crafted. He practised his poses and his pitch over and over before speaking in public. His propaganda man Joseph Goebbels obsessed over the power of impactful communication and managed Hitler’s and his own public appearances accordingly.
If you look at election posters, speeches and media reports in the interwar period, there is nothing incidental about the way that parties and politicians presented themselves to the public. Not in Germany and not in any other Western country.
After the Second World War, we saw the professionalisation of political communication evolve further. Teams around public figures crafted election campaigns and narratives so carefully that eventually, the actual personality of the people delivering them didn’t seem to matter anymore (though I believe it always did to most voters). The age of bland politics was upon us.
Suddenly all politicians said things like ‘let me be clear’. Some, and I would include Olaf Scholz in that category, have made an art form out of talking for minutes and saying nothing at all. Professional politicians are clearly not even allowed to point their fingers anymore when emphasising an important argument, instead, they form a fist with their thumb pointing forward – a gesture no normal person ever used.
And now? Well, I think the style Elon Musk and Donald Trump are using on social media points in a different direction. In a way, we’re back to Kaiser Wilhelm territory where the link between public figures and the public is missing in the chain of communication. But unlike Kaiser Wilhelm, who was mortified when the papers pointed out that he’d got something wrong, Musk and Trump don’t seem to care.
To give a mundane example: When Musk advertised his op-ed in Die Welt, he posted on X: ‘My opinion piece in Weld’, misspelling the name of the paper. Not only was there clearly no professional media team managing a post that had been viewed 14.7 million times at the time of writing, but even Musk didn’t seem to think it was worth his time to check or think before he put things in the public domain.
He also predicted on X that Steinmeier ‘will lose the next election’, apparently unaware that the German President is a) not directly elected by the people and that b) Steinmeier is in his second term which will take him to 2027 when he will have to step back as a third consecutive term is not allowed in the German constitution.
It’s all impulse with Musk. German press and politicians can pretend his remarks don’t matter or call it childish all day long, but there is no denying that Musk is already having an impact on the way the AfD is perceived.
The debate on whether it should be called ‘far-right’ for instance has gathered momentum since he claimed in his op-ed that ‘depicting the AfD as far-right is obviously wrong.’ I’ve had conversations with the editorials of three large news outlets in the UK and in the US since then as they are contemplating whether or not to change their policies on that.
I daresay, Musk will go into his online event with Alice Weidel totally unprepared but will that matter? Probably not. People will watch it and the profile of the AfD will be raised further.
As a historian, I don’t know yet what I’ll make of the new immediacy between politics and people. On the one hand, the professionalisation of political communication has gone so far in recent years that people in the West are getting fed up with it. In good times, they have found it boring, in bad times callous and unfeeling to hear the same phrases delivered with the same gestures by politicians of all stripes and colours.
On the other hand, social media is not the democratic communication platform that many proclaim it to be. Musk has the power to single-handedly shape politics because he is so rich that he owns a media platform outright. His power and wealth amplify his views in a way that others can’t match. And that’s before we even get into algorithms.
His enormous platform also gives him the opportunity to amplify voices and issues in other countries as we have just seen with his attack on the UK government's handling of the grooming gangs scandal. Health Secretary Wes Streeting called Musk’s comments ‘misjudged and certainly misinformed’ and the Conservatives have also complained that he was ‘sharing things that are factually inaccurate.’
The new thing is that it’s not a scandal anymore if people say inaccurate things. While Kaiser Wilhelm’s media gaffes got him into serious political trouble, the same isn’t true for Musk. He doesn’t know much about the AfD but one impromptu comment about them on X was enough to give him space and weight in the German and international debate on the party.
Even lower down the chain, the chase for clicks and likes leads to shrill announcements with less and less regard for truth and nuance in influencers and by extension also by newspapers and traditional broadcast outlets. Direct mass communication through social media is a genie that, for better or worse, won’t go back in the bottle, no matter how ‘cool’ everyone pretends to be about that.
Good article Katja. Musk is a thoroughly unpleasant cur. He is a contrarian who enjoys stirring up trouble. His embrace of Reform UK snd AfD is entirely mischievous. Musk has no interest whatsoever in tackling the real problems we all face. He has similarly demonstrated his lack of knowledge of British constitutional arrangements, believing HM KCIII could simply dismiss the elected government. His comments about the grooming gangs were particularly ill-considered and clearly intended to inflame tempers. He has malign intentions. Wiser minds than mine have suggested that Musk/Trump will be done within the year; Trumps colossal, narcissistic ego will fatally collide with Musk’s hubris. The world would be a better place if he sloped off to a remote country estate and saw out his time chopping wood. Back to firmer ground. Clark’s book Kaiser Wilhelm II A Life in Power, good book.
Interesting piece, as always. People seem somewhat divided about how to handle Elon Musk’s increasingly unhinged interventions in the politics of other nations. Many commentators and politicians assume he will burn himself out, fall out with the equally unhinged massive ego that is Donald Trump, or finally be understood by reasonable people to be an uninformed bore and ultimately disappear into irrelevance. Others talk about the need to ‘take him down,’ ie challenge his dangerous assumptions, or encourage everyone to boycott his platform. I think a lot of politicians are rather frightened of him, which in itself is quite troubling. Maybe more people who, like yourself, point out the similarities between him and other vainglorious figures in history have an important part to play here?