Elon Musk praises Alice Weidel's far-right AfD in X chat

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the conversation between Elon Musk and Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader Alice Weidel began with a straight-up untruth: Alice Weidel, according to a claim by the multibillionaire owner of the social media platform X, was the most popular chancellor candidate in Germany "according to the polls."

Weidel's far-right party is actually second in the national opinion polls, 11 points behind the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and Weidel herself is joint bottom in terms of popularity among Germany's chancellor candidates in the upcoming February 23 election.

An Infratest dimap poll also released on Thursday showed that only 20% of Germans are satisfied with Weidel's current performance — the same as Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the center-left Social Democratic Party, who has historically low approval ratings.

What did Musk, Weidel discuss during the X chat?

The erroneous introduction from Musk was followed by a rambling 70-minute conversation, occasionally rendered awkward by language-based misunderstandings, that was punctuated with several wildly misleading claims — at one stage, Musk said that theft was legal in California, while Weidel insisted that Adolf Hitler was a communist.

In between laughing at each other's jokes, the two also discussed Germany's energy supply, the merits of nuclear power, immigration, the war in Ukraine, war in the Middle East and other topics.

Musk expressed his confidence that US President-elect Donald Trump would end the conflicts in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip quickly, while Weidel described what she called the mismanagement of Germany over the last two decades.

The pair agreed that the bureaucratic burdens were too great for companies looking to expand operations in Germany — something that Musk has experienced with his Tesla Gigafactory outside Berlin. However, he did acknowledge that both the state and federal governments of Germany had ultimately provided a lot of support for the factory.

In fact, Musk and Weidel spent much of the conversation agreeing with each other's wild claims. The only moment of minor disagreement came near the beginning, when Musk said he did believe in the benefits of renewable energy, though he thought, like Weidel, that Germany needed to reopen its nuclear plants.

A 'Joe Rogan moment' for Weidel?

But the big question for Weidel was whether the discussion would help her in the upcoming election. Though Musk repeated his endorsement of the party, insisting again that only the AfD can "save" Germany, political pundits were doubtful that Weidel made a significant impression.

"To be honest I'm a bit astounded by how poor her performance was," said Bendix Hügelmann, a German political communications strategist and founder of the consultancy People on the Hill. "This is a big moment, but ... I think she totally missed the opportunity that was given to her to build on her public profile, and give the impression of a highly-educated, super-sophisticated new prototype of a future right-wing politician."

Hügelmann was also surprised at some of the difficulties Weidel had expressing herself in English. "She didn't speak poorly, don't get me wrong," he said. "But I think for a 70-minute conversation with Mr. Musk I think she could've prepared a bit better."

The event did not, Hügelmann said, compare well with Trump's appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast during the US election campaign, when the Republican candidate appeared more relaxed than many had seen him before, and was able to spend three hours reaching a massive online audience. 

"I think the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump lived from this very casual tone that they both found, but from what I heard Ms. Weidel had difficulties matching this American style of getting a nice flow in the conversation," said Hügelmann.

"She had a very academic take, which had a huge contrast to the way Mr. Musk presented his arguments. But I would maybe explain this by the language barrier."

Who was the intended audience?

According to figures from X, around 200,000 people listened live to the conversation, though the numbers began to fall towards the end, when the talk drifted into Musk's plans for space exploration.

But then again, Weidel may still count the talk a success. For Philipp Adorf, political scientist at Bonn University, the main purpose of the event for Weidel was to not to convince a German audience, but to introduce herself to a US audience — particularly a right-wing audience in and around the corridors of power in Washington.

"It was an attempt to stretch out feelers in the US and to make more contact with members of the Trump administration, and perhaps to work together, or at least to be seen as a partner in Europe," he said.

How successful this will be remains open: Contrary to social media rumors ahead of the event, Weidel did not travel to the US to speak to Musk and possibly to attend the inauguration of Trump on January 20. Wednesday's X-based event was an audio-only chat that Weidel joined from her office in Berlin.

More space exploration than immigration

Weidel managed to repeat many of her familiar talking points — that the CDU's Angela Merkel had in fact been Germany's first "Green" chancellor, and that she had ruined the country by opening the border to refugees. But according to Adorf, she may have wanted more time to discuss Germany's domestic issues.

"From Weidel's perspective it might have been disappointing that they spoke relatively little about the AfD's main issue: immigration," he told DW. "At the beginning she got a bit caught up in discussing energy policy, which I think is perhaps not super interesting for a larger audience."

What she did more successfully, according to Adorf, was present the party as a moderates that merely makes demands that center-right parties used to make.

But all in all, he said, the talk may have been too casual. "I found the conversation sounded a bit disorganized to me, especially toward the end, when Weidel asked Musk what he thought of various issues," said Adorf.

In this later part of the discussion, the pair drifted into philosophical topics, culminating in Weidel asking Musk whether he believed in God. The science-fiction-obsessed billionaire said he believed in a physics-based approach to divinity, before saying he had an existential crisis at the age of 12 or 13, which was resolved by reading Douglas Adams' 1979 novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy."

"That led me to conclude that we should expand the scope and scale of consciousness, so that we're better able to know what questions to ask about the answers to the universe," Musk said. "We should take the sort of actions that lead to a greater understanding of the universe."

At this point, Weidel appeared overwhelmed, wrapping up the conversation by describing his final words as "beautiful." It remains to be seen whether the AfD's plan to deport thousands of immigrants will lead to the greater understanding that Musk aspires to.

Edited by: Wesley Dockery

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