When the mask slips

TetleysTLDR: The summary

Elon Musk tweeting that the EU should be abolished and Kremlin stooge Dmitry Medvedev immediately replying ‘Exactly’ is the clearest sign yet that the world’s richest man is now parroting Russian strategic aims. Moscow has spent years trying to fracture Europe so its neighbours stand alone and easier to bully.  Musk is doing that job for them, whether out of arrogance, ideology or sheer tech-bro delusion.  A united EU and NATO: flawed, lumbering monsters though they are, remain the only real counterweights to authoritarian regimes and billionaire saboteurs. Fragmentation is Putin’s dream scenario, a gift-wrapped route to domination.  Musk’s billionaire-libertarian shtick about 'sovereignty' is nothing more than deregulation for oligarchs.  Medvedev’s endorsement exposes the truth: Musk’s politics now align with authoritarian power. The mask has slipped and Europe must recognise the threat before it’s too late.

TetleysTLDR: The long bit 

It's no secret that Russia has spent years trying to weaken and fracture Europe so its neighbours stand alone and easier to bully.  Look at how much money and subterfuge was poured but Putin into Brexit for exactly this reason.  Musk, whether through arrogance or ideology is now doing that work for them.  A united Europe is the one thing that terrifies both oligarch billionaires and authoritarian regimes: it can regulate Big Tech, resist Russian aggression and protect workers’ rights.  So of course Musk, Farage, and Medvedev all want it smashed to pieces.  The moment Medvedev endorsed Musk’s tweet, the mask fell off. The tech-bro emperor isn’t defending freedom, he’s pushing the same agenda as a warmongering dictatorship. Divide Europe, weaken democracy, empower oligarchs. That’s the real plan, and they’re not even hiding it anymore.

Firstly, we need to talk about the EU.  The EU is in many ways a lumbering technocratic monster: a bloated, baffling, sometimes smug bureaucracy that can’t help tripping over its own feet, but in a world where Elon Musk is playing at being a private-sector warlord and Vladimir Putin is openly trying to redraw borders with blood, we need that monster on our side. The alternative is facing two unaccountable hugely powerful men:  one a genocidal imperialist, the other a billionaire egomaniac with a God complex.  Without the EU, Europe is left to do this with nothing but a patchwork of isolated nation-states to stand against them. The EU might be clumsy, infuriating and slow, but it’s the only thing big enough, democratic enough and stable enough to act as a counterweight when the world’s worst actors are conspiring to pull it apart.  We've seen in real time what happened to Britain through Brexit.  

And of course the the same goes for NATO.  It’s hardly a choir of angels, more a grizzled trigger-happy uncle who’s made more than his fair share of catastrophic decisions.  It’s not a moral force, it’s a geopolitical insurance policy forged in Cold War paranoia and held together by expediency rather than virtue.  But when the bear is quite literally at the door: Putin snarling on one side with assorted wannabe strongmen cheering him on, we need to cling to whatever keeps the walls standing. You don’t have to like NATO to recognise that a fragmented Europe without it would be Putin’s fever dream.  It’s imperfect, infuriating and often hypocritical but in a world stalked by autocrats and billionaire saboteurs, it remains the only shield we’ve got.  

As for Musk in dialogue with Putin.  Well he's been doing that for 2 years now. Two years when Russia has been involved in a war in Europe.  Musk doesn’t just 'happen' to chat with Putin.  For two years he’s been circling around the Kremlin like some self-appointed geopolitical guru, drifting between back-channel peace plans that conveniently favour Russian territorial grabs and public statements that undermine Ukraine’s position and push the bro-tech toxic ideology of Curtis Yarvin that he's wholeheartedly bought in to.  And the question isn’t why would Putin want to talk to Musk, it's really why wouldn't he?  Musk owns critical comms infrastructure, has a messianic ego and can sway markets, politicians and the media with a single deranged tweet.  He’s useful to Putin.  As for Musk?  well Putin flatters him because he thinks he belongs at the top table with strongmen and presidents.  Because he imagines himself a kingmaker, a sort of Silicon Valley Henry Kissinger without the intellect, ethics or understanding of geopolitics, and because cosy chats with Putin feed the delusion that he’s the one man who can 'solve' global crises, even when his solutions amount to rewarding aggression.  It’s not diplomacy.  It’s not statesmanship.  It’s a billionaire with too much power, too little accountability, and a dangerous fascination with autocrats, and that’s precisely why the EU and NATO, behemoths though they may be,  are essential. They’re the only things big enough to stop men like Musk and Putin turning the world into their private playground.

APNews article

So there are moments in politics when the mask slips, when the powerful forget to dress their intentions in euphemisms and polite fiction and the truth bursts through like a drunken yob kicking down a door. 

The screenshot doing the rounds of Elon Musk declaring that the European Union should be abolished, and Russia’s perennial Kremlin gargoyle Dmitry Medvedev chirping in with a smug ‘Exactly’, is one such moment.  It’s a still frame from the global chaos machine: a billionaire techno-libertarian and an authoritarian Russian warmonger agreeing, hand-in-hand, that Europe should be fragmented, weakened and easier to manipulate.  If that doesn’t tell you everything about the current geopolitical moment, nothing will, because here’s the thing: authoritarianism loves division.  It thrives on balkanisation, on weakening alliances, on convincing ordinary people that cooperation is tyranny and solidarity is some kind of plot.  The EU has its flaws, many of them serious but the idea that smashing it to bits is a step toward democracy is the sort of nonsense you only believe if you’re either (a) a billionaire who thinks taxes are a war crime, or (b) a Kremlin stooge whose dream Europe is one where Russian tanks can roll into whichever country has the misfortune of being left standing alone.  That’s why the image is so revealing.  

Musk, in his infinite, self-declared wisdom, posts his latest cosmic brainwave: dismantling the EU in the name of 'sovereignty', a word the right has abused so often that it now floats around political discourse like a stale fart in a train carriage and who’s the first to clap like a trained seal? Not some Reform UK blowhard, not Nigel Farage swigging a pint while salivating at the thought of deregulated markets and borders that only work one way.  No.  It’s Dmitry bloody Medvedev: former Russian president, current mouthpiece for Putin’s aggression, and someone who has spent the past two years cheering on the bombardment of Ukrainian cities.  

If Elon Musk ever wondered who his cheerleaders actually are, this should have been the moment of clarity.  Instead, it merely confirms what many of us already suspected: the world’s richest man is perfectly happy to amplify messaging that directly aligns with the strategic objectives of Russia, the very state currently conducting a genocidal war in Europe.  So let’s take this properly, the mask has slipped.  It’s lying on the floor next to a half-empty bottle of snake oil and one of Musk’s discarded ‘free speech absolutist’ slogans and reinforced with one of his Ketamin fuelled Nazi salutes.

A divided Europe is a conquered Europe

You don’t have to be Von Clausewitz to understand geopolitical strategy. Russia’s long-term aim has always been obvious: weaken the EU, fracture NATO and restore its sphere of influence over the European continent. This isn’t subtle.  They’ve said it openly.  They’ve funded far-right parties across Europe, pumped disinformation into our media ecosystems and weaponised energy dependence.  And now here’s Elon Musk, the self-anointed philosopher-king of Silicon Valley, parroting the exact same line the Kremlin has been pushing for a decade:  break up the EU.  It’s like watching someone run into a battlefield wearing a neon sign saying ‘I AM USEFUL IDIOT, PLEASE DEPLOY ME’.  Now, Musk would claim, because he always does, that he’s motivated by some noble ideological crusade about decentralisation and liberty, but hang on a minute, billionaires who want to smash supranational institutions rarely do so out of love for democracy. They do it because they want fewer regulations, fewer constraints, and fewer people in a position to challenge their power.  The EU’s competition rules alone have terrified Silicon Valley for years.  Musk, who cannot tolerate even the most minimal oversight of his businesses or his online empire, has every incentive to undermine the only bloc capable of meaningfully checking his influence.  When someone like Musk talks about 'returning sovereignty to individual countries', what he means is:

‘Break up the only structure capable of holding me to account'.  

It is the classic con of the libertarian oligarch: dress your self-interest as ideological principle and rely on enough people being too distracted, too exhausted or too furious about imaginary Brussels conspiracies to notice.

And then there's Medvedev...

Medvedev tweeting ‘Exactly’ under Musk’s post should chill anyone with an understanding of modern geopolitics. This is not some random backbencher or a fringe crank. This is the former president of Russia, one of the top men in a regime currently invading a sovereign European nation, threatening nuclear escalation and openly declaring its intent to rewrite the post-Cold War world order.  For Medvedev to endorse Musk is not a coincidence. It is a signal.  It is affirmation that Musk’s argument aligns with Russian strategic goals because if Europe is splintered, if its members are isolated, bickering, and vulnerable then Russia has carte blanche to do whatever it wants.  It wins economically, militarily, diplomatically and let’s not forget:  Musk directly intervened in the war in Ukraine.  He provided Starlink access, briefly considered cutting it, shoved his ‘peace plan’ down the world’s throat (one that conveniently involved appeasing Russia) and then acted wounded when anyone dared question his motives.  He behaves like a man who thinks sovereignty is a toy, something other people have to worry about, while he plays emperor from the comfort of his billionaire bunker.  So yes, Medvedev saying ‘Exactly’ is significant.  It is not just agreement, it is recruitment.  It is the Kremlin co-signing the world’s richest man and if that doesn’t terrify you, you're not paying attention.

The billionaire-Authoritarian axis

Let’s widen the lens. We are living through a moment where billionaires and dictators increasingly find common cause. They share a hatred of regulation, disdain for democratic accountability, and contempt for the public.  Musk’s posts, whether he realises it or not, place him squarely in this emerging alliance of reactionary power.  Consider who Musk courts and amplifies:

• Far-right politicians
• Conspiracy theorists
• Anti-EU demagogues
• ‘Free speech’ grifters
• Tech bros who think history began in 2010

These people are not defenders of democracy. They are midwives of authoritarianism, dressed up in memes and pseudophilosophy.  And then there’s Musk’s pet platform, once Twitter, now a kind of digital Thunderdome where the algorithm ensures the most extreme, divisive voices rise to the top.  Musk paints this as liberation but in truth it’s a blueprint for social collapse: disinformation, polarisation, and the destruction of any shared reality.  Russia doesn’t have to hack democracies anymore.

Elon Musk is doing the job for them.

An all too familiar British parallel 

This situation feels uncomfortably familiar here in the UK, doesn’t it?  We’ve lived through the consequences of weaponised 'sovereignty' rhetoric.  We’ve spent years watching public school pricks like Boris Johnson and hedge-fund goons like Sunak turn the country into a deregulated playground for the wealthy while the rest of us suffer the consequences.  We’ve watched Nigel Farage, professional grifter, pint-clutching snake-oil peddler and the Reform Party UK's spiritual sewer-rat gleefully dismantle our political stability while bankrolled by shadowy donors who’d happily see the UK become a low-tax, low-rights offshore sweatshop.  The playbook is identical:

• Convince people that solidarity is tyranny. 
• Convince them that division is liberation. 
• Convince them that they’re taking back control while surrendering it to billionaires and foreign powers.

If Musk had been around during the Brexit campaign, Reform would have plastered his tweets on the side of a bus and you can bet Medvedev would’ve endorsed that too, probably with a sly grin and a bottle of vodka.

A strong united Europe in a thorn in both Musk and Putin's side 

The reason Musk, Medvedev, Farage and every other opportunistic right-wing operator hates the EU is simple: a united Europe is an obstacle.

• An obstacle to Russian aggression.
• An obstacle to American tech monopolies.
• An obstacle to tax avoidance.
• An obstacle to deregulation.
• An obstacle to nationalism.
• An obstacle to billionaire control.

The EU, for all its bureaucratic nonsense and technocratic smugness, retains one fundamental advantage: it gives ordinary people collective power that no individual member state possesses alone and that terrifies every authoritarian on Earth.  It’s why Russia fights it.

It’s why the American far-right despises it.

It’s why Elon Musk is now taking potshots at it.  You don’t have to be a flag-waving Europhile to understand this.  You just need to recognise basic strategic reality.  A fragmented Europe is vulnerable.  A united Europe is not.

^{The Moscow Times}

What this moment reveals most about Musk 

Musk has spent years cultivating the image of a misunderstood genius, a visionary unfairly maligned by the establishment. This is a PR façade thicker than the paint on one of his malfunctioning Cybertrucks. The real Musk is a billionaire reactionary whose politics align far more closely with authoritarian power than with democratic ideals.  Look at his record:

• Busted unions in Tesla factories? Check.
• Boosted far-right content on X? Check.
• Courtship of Trump and the US hard right? Check.
• Deployed Starlink like a private geopolitical lever? Check.
• Threatened to stop providing Ukraine with communications unless they behaved? Check.
• Advocated for policies that benefit him at the expense of society? Every bloody day.

This is not a man defending freedom.

This is a man defending his fiefdom and when a billionaire with that much global influence starts advocating for the dissolution of the strongest democratic bloc on the continent, we should pay attention.

The deeper threat: normalisation

There’s another danger lurking beneath this: normalisation. When Musk posts something like this, millions see it.  When Medvedev endorses it, millions more do.  It frames the idea of abolishing the EU not as a fringe fantasy of cranks and dictators, but as a legitimate mainstream position.  It shifts the Overton window toward chaos.  The algorithm always rewards provocation, not truth.

Musk understands this.

Russia understands this.

The far-right understands this.

And the public ends up trapped in a feedback loop of manufactured outrage, unable to distinguish genuine debate from weaponised propaganda. This is how democracies erode, not with a coup, not with tanks in the streets but with the slow drip-drip-drip of extremist ideas being laundered into legitimacy.

Europe stands at a crossroads.  War rages on its border.  Far-right parties are rising in multiple countries.  Disinformation is at record levels and into this volatile mix, one of the richest men in history decides to lob a grenade calling for the abolition of the EU.  It is not harmless.

It is not a joke.

It is not a hot take.  It is a billionaire amplifying authoritarian narratives at a moment of maximum fragility.  We cannot afford to shrug this off as ‘Musk being Musk’ in the same way we can’t shrug off Farage as ‘just a character’ or Reform UK Ltd as ‘just another party’.  These people are part of a global ecosystem of reactionary power, one that thrives on division, chaos and the dismantling of institutions that protect ordinary people.

The mask has slipped and it's our job to say so 

Elon Musk has revealed exactly what he is: not a visionary, not a genius, but a useful idiot for authoritarians and a self-interested, unaccountable oligarch whose politics align disturbingly well with those of dictators. 

Medvedev’s reply isn’t a glitch in the matrix.

It’s a neon-lit warning sign and if Europe ignores it, if we allow billionaires and Kremlin cronies to dictate the terms of our political future then we’ll find ourselves living in the fractured, weakened continent they dream of: a collection of isolated states, ripe for exploitation, governed by neoliberal wreckers and nationalist charlatans.  We’ve been here before.

The last century should have taught us what happens when Europe falls apart.  

The mask has slipped and underneath it the face staring back is not one of democracy, liberty, or sovereignty.

It is the leering grin of authoritarianism, emboldened by billionaire hubris and cheered on by public school pricks, Reform Party Ltd conmen and every slimy piece-of-shit snake-oil salesman who thinks chaos is a shortcut to power.  The question now is simple: 

Will Europe stop them? 

Or will it let the richest and the ruthless carve it up like carrion?

Tetley is a left of centre writer and retired musician based in the UK.  A former member of the Labour Party, he writes political analysis exposing Britain’s authoritarian drift, the criminalisation of protest, and the erosion of civil liberties.

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