BERLIN — With lots of laughter, earnest agreement and effusive mutual appreciation, it started off like a promising date between two nervous teenagers (she even forgave him for getting her name wrong).
But by the end of the night, Elon Musk’s live conversation with far-right German politician Alice Weidel had veered off the rails — and indeed off the planet entirely — into a rambling dialogue about Hitler, the existence of God, and why “future Martians” will one day save the Earth.
Musk’s decision last month to endorse Weidel’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party earned him a storm of criticism from European politicians. But he shrugged it off — despite the threat of a regulatory investigation — and offered up his X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, so she could speak to voters ahead of Germany’s Feb. 23 election.
Weidel is standing to succeed Olaf Scholz as German chancellor, and while that seems a long way off, her party is attracting significant support and is currently in second place on about 20 percent in the polls.
In the meandering — sometimes surreal — 85-minute chat, Donald Trump’s favorite entrepreneur, who is the boss of Tesla, a space travel enthusiast and the world’s richest man, restated his heartfelt support for Weidel, claiming her party was the best hope for saving Germany.
Then it went weird. Here is a summary of the oddest parts of the conversation between the X owner and the co-chair of the AfD:
1. You say “Weidel,” I say whatever
“Welcome to the conversation with Alice Weidel, who is currently the leading candidate to run Germany, I think,” Musk declared as the X conversation opened. Unfortunately, he pronounced her name incorrectly as “Veedle.”
2. Hitler was a communist
Musk decided to show off his knowledge of German history, including “Hitler and whatnot.” He asked Weidel to address media portrayals of the AfD as “somehow associated with Nazism or something like that.”
“Hmm, hmm,” she replied. “Thank you for that question.”
“He was a communist and he considered himself as a socialist.” She went on: “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. Full stop. No more comment on that. And we are exactly the opposite.”
3. Hitler censored the media so he would succeed
Weidel made the rather odd argument that Hitler “would never have been successful” if he had not first “switched off free speech.” His party won the most seats in the German election of 1933. After that he got to work on what Musk, a free-speech fundamentalist, called “extreme censorship.”
4. Save Germany, vote AfD
Weidel cited POLITICO’s story revealing how 150 EU officials will be monitoring their conversation to see if Musk was breaking the bloc’s digital rules by giving her party an advantage. Musk clearly isn’t worried.
“The American people are demanding change,” he said. “My recommendation to the people in Germany is to do the same … I am really strongly recommending that people vote for the AfD.”
In case those Brussels officials hadn’t quite got the point, he added: “I think Alice Weidel is a very reasonable person. And hopefully people can tell just from this conversation, like nothing outrageous is being proposed, just common sense. So, in fact, as I said publicly, I think only AfD can save Germany.”
5. We’re all going to die!
Weidel took her chance to ask the SpaceX mastermind why he was focusing so much money and attention on developing plans to travel to Mars. Several light years later, he arrived at an answer, of sorts: Because the dinosaurs “didn’t have spaceships”.
“A lot of people think there must be aliens but I have not seen any evidence of aliens,” Musk explained. There’s a big chance of a humanity-ending event occurring — like “a giant meteor” crashing into Earth like the one that did for the dinosaurs, or a nuclear war. “There is some risk.”
“To be clear, if we are a single planet species, it is just a matter of time before we are annihilated.”
This is the kind of downbeat comment that can be a real mood-killer on a date. Weidel listened on in silence. Quickly, though, Musk tried to make amends with some more long-term positivity.
“I think we can send uncrewed starships to Mars in approximately two years.”
6. Oh, and we need another planet
There will be a lot of work ahead, though, if we are going to save the human race, Musk said. He estimated it would take about 1 million tons of material and 1 million people to make life self-sustaining on the red planet. But once that little hurdle is overcome, humanity will be laughing — almost as much as Weidel and Musk were.
“My guess is that there will be cases where the future Martians actually come and help and rescue us when there is an emergency, just as America has helped to rescue the rest of world in World War 1 and 2 and the Cold War,” he said.
“As for humanity, we don’t want to be one of those lame, one-planet-civilizations. Any self-respecting civilization should have at least two planets.”
7. Do you believe in God?
Weidel followed the spaced-out riffing on the end of humanity with a classic deep-and-meaningful, end-of-the-night question. “Do you believe in God?” she asked.
“I’m open to believing in things that are proportionate to the information that I receive,” he replied, indicating he was “open to the idea” of God. “I try to form my opinions based on what I learn. And as I learn more, I aspire to change my views.”
Again, it wasn’t perhaps the profound poetry that Weidel’s question deserved. But she didn’t mind. “Yes, same here,” she said. “To be honest, I’m still on a search.”
8. Life, the universe and everything
Musk had more to say on the existentialist theme. “I’m curious about the nature of the universe. I would say I subscribe to the Douglas Adams School of Philosophy that was described in ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.’ In that book, the Earth was sort of a giant computer that was trying to answer the question, ‘what is the meaning of life?’ And that goes back with 42 and what does 42 mean?
“And actually the answer is the easy part, and the question is the hard part. That was actually quite an illuminating thing for me, because I had sort of an existential crisis when I was 12 or 13 about the meaning of life. I read the religious texts and the bookstore philosophy. I was reading Schopenhauer,” he said, “which is a bit depressing if you’re to read it as a child.”
9. War. What is it good for?
It wasn’t all froth and frivolity. Musk and Weidel also discussed the conflict in the Middle East and how the Ukraine war could escalate into nuclear Armageddon. “I want to have strong leaders in Germany,” she said. “This is also my hope in Donald Trump and in your administration that you end that terrible war [in Ukraine], this worthless dying of young people every day, as fast as you can, because the Europeans, they cannot.”
Musk reassured her: “I think President Trump is going to solve that conflict very quickly. As you point out, it’s now been in somewhat of a stalemate for a few years. And all that’s happened over the past few years is hundreds of thousands of people dying, but for no gains. And the longer this conflict goes on, the more Ukraine weakens relative to Russia. Ukraine is a much smaller country. It simply cannot afford the losses relative to Russia … the longer this drags on, the worse it is for Ukraine.”
The post When Elon met Alice: 9 weird moments from Musk’s German far-right chuckle-fest appeared first on Politico.
