Tech billionaire Elon Musk exploded in a vulgar outburst on his X platform in the dead of morning on Monday, in response to a foreign grad student accusing him of purveying fake news and urging the European Union to rein him in.
"Elon Musk is rapidly becoming the largest spreader of disinformation in human history, hijacking political debates in the process," wrote Joni Askola, a Finnish graduate student and activist for defense of Ukraine. "The EU must take action!"
Musk, the richest man in the world, who in addition to owning X also controls one of the United States' most important federal contractor firms on space exploration and co-leads President-elect Donald Trump's "Department of Government Efficiency" advisory task force on cutting federal spending, replied, "F u r----d," using a common slur for mental disabilities.
Musk then proceeded to reply approvingly to a post from a far-right account that screenshotted his response and said, "We could have avoided a lot of disasters by simply telling leftist r-----s to stfu."
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This comes at a moment when Musk, who spent tens of millions of dollars on a super PAC to handle Trump's voter outreach operations last year, is growing increasingly bold about advocating for far-right parties around the world on his platform. Most recently, he has urged German voters to back Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), an extremist Euroskeptic and anti-immigrant party that has been described as effectively a successor to the Nazis.
The E.U., where speech regulations have some differences from those in the United States, has already threatened Musk with consequences if hate speech continues to proliferate on the platform, with Digital Commissioner Thierry Breton telling him in a letter that E.U. regulators are prepared to fight “any negative effect of illegal content” with "our full toolbox, including by adopting interim measures, should it be warranted to protect [our] citizens from harm."