Musk's interview with AFD leader lacks substance but not importance

As a media event, it didn't really live up to the hype. 

Fresh from bankrolling electoral success for Donald Trump in the USA, Elon Musk has now turned his eye to Europe. The world's richest man has praised the British populist party Reform UK, before deciding its leader Nigel Farage "doesn't have what it takes."

Musk has thrown himself more fully behind Germany's far-right Alternativ Fur Deutschland (AFD) party. So when he announced he'd host a one-on-one chat with Alice Weidel, AFD's candidate for the next leader of Germany, it was reasonable to expect some spark.

In the end, we got a somewhat rambling, audio-only conversation between the two that didn't really generate the expected controversy. Both Musk and Weidel think that taxes are too high in Germany, that there is too much immigration to the country and that shutting down nuclear power was a mistake.

Possibly the most contentious moment came when Weidel proffered the idea that Adolf Hitler was a socialist or even a communist: "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." 

This has been seen as disrespectful to the German socialists and communists who were among the first people rounded up and put in camps by the Nazi regime. Besides, the dictator's views on socialists and communists are very clear from his contemporaneous speeches and writings.

Weidel also had some questions for Musk, whom she probed on his plans for putting humans on Mars and his belief in God. After 76 minutes, the chat fizzled out, with Weidel saying she had no more to ask Musk, who in turn suggested ending things there. 

Experts queued to analyze the conversation, and specifically why Musk wanted to get involved.  Potsdam-based economist Roland Verwiebe told the ARD program Tagesschau that as "first and foremost an entrepreneur who is interested in maximum profits," Musk is primarily focused on lowering the regulatory obstacles that his international business operations could face. 

"Musk has global economic interests. State regulation stands in his way," political scientist Hans Vorländer told the same show. "He uses right-wing populist and right-wing extremist political forces to remove obstacles. And with his global platform capitalism, he is simultaneously gaining political and communicative power that can be used autocratically."

Most German media experts consider it unlikely that anyone unsure about voting AFD would have had their minds made up by the conversation. But given the impact Musk's backing had for Trump, his support for AFD – currently second in the polls behind the conservative CDU/CSU 'union' – is being watched closely.