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DEBATE

Musk, Power, and the EU: Can EU Law Tackle the Challenges of Unchecked Plutocracy?

At a time when calls for the EU to respond to Musk’s actions are multiplying, the question of whether, why, and how the EU may react remains largely undefined. What makes Musk’s conduct problematic under EU law? Is it a matter of disinformation, electoral integrity, foreign influence, unprecedented market concentration, or possible abuse of power? Or is it all of the above, or a combination of these factors? This symposium intends to explore these questions through a series of brief opinion pieces.

FOCUS is a project which aims to raise public awareness of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, its value, and the capacity of key stakeholders for its broader application.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the European Commission can be held responsible for them.

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11 February 2025
Jacquelyn D. Veraldi, Alberto Alemanno

Does the EU Have What it Takes to Counter American Plutocratic Power?

Our symposium ‘Musk, Power, and the EU’ has evolved in parallel with the inauguration of the new US administration and has been marked by numerous and unprecedented attacks on the European Union. Amid a flurry of announcements challenging the status quo - often with brutal disregard, even against traditional allies - the European Union, along with the way it exercises power, suddenly appears as the antithesis of the new America. Yet does the EU have what it takes to resist such an expansionist and plutocratic projection of power, which now threatens Europe’s security, lifestyle and overall existence? 

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10 February 2025
Anna Gerbrandy, Viktorija Morozovaite

Corporate Power Beyond Market Power

Elon Musk’s corporate empire spans an impressive array of markets and industries. This empire includes SpaceX (and its subsidiary Starlink), Tesla, Neuralink, The Boring Company, X, xAI, and the Musk Foundation. These corporations are connected and interlinked, creating a cross-corporate power structure. Competition law, which focuses on market power in narrowly defined relevant markets – say, a market for booster rockets – has very limited reach to guard against the possible detrimental effects of such multifaceted concentrated power in the hands of a few on open democratic societies.

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07 February 2025
Julian Uhlenbusch

Elon Musk, the Systemic Risk

Elon Musk seems to many in Europe to symbolize the dawn of a digital dystopia. I argue, however, that this view may be incorrect in several respects. With the Digital Services Act (DSA) and its new “systemic tools,” the EU has an opportunity to address the technological roots of Musk’s powerful position in the digital sphere. In this context, Musk (potentially) using his platform (or AI) to intentionally influence the access, distribution, and presentation of information is “merely” a manifestation of risks that are already inherent in the systemic position of certain digital services.

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03 February 2025
Elena García Guitián, Luis Bouza García

Democracy vs. Digital Giants

After Elon Musk's attacks on European politicians, Emmanuel Macron warned of digital tycoons threatening democracy. This post examines how tech giants have evolved from EU allies to political actors shaping policy and public debate. It questions whether current regulations can curb their growing influence while balancing free speech and platform neutrality.

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27 January 2025
Carolyn Moser, Laurids Hempel

Elon Musk’s Wake-up Call for Europe

Viewing Elon Musk’s recent forays into (electoral) politics in Europe primarily as a geopolitical wake-up call to European leaders, our analysis focuses on the promise and relative weaknesses of law and policy solutions as well as institutional arrangements the EU has put in place to protect European democracies from foreign interference. The EU and its Member States must adapt quickly to the new international realities if they do not want to be norm-takers rather than norm-shapers on major international dossiers.

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24 January 2025
Ferry Biedermann

Countering the Tech Oligarchy

Seeing Elon Musk with Donald Trump at the latter’s inauguration, it would be tempting to single him out as a unique and overbearing threat to a range of EU interests, such as its online environment, election integrity and regulatory capacity. But that would be to miss the point of a larger trend; what Joe Biden has termed the “tech-industrial complex” is not limited to the US. It, and an associated worldwide oligarchy, is converging with ascendant ultra-nationalist political agendas to pose wide-ranging challenges.

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William E. Scheuerman

The US Supreme Court and Plutocracy

Populist authoritarianism is a global phenomenon. However, the US is the only so-called consolidated democracy where its ascent has been eased by the systematic dismantling of legal limits on campaign donations. US elections are now not only the world’s most costly, but they are also directly subject to the inordinate influence of wealthy individuals and corporations. The Supreme Court of the United States’ 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling has paved the way for the emergence of so-called “super” PACS (political action committees) that, while formally barred from coordinating with candidates or parties, can accept unlimited corporate contributions.

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3
23 January 2025
Todd Davies, Spencer Cohen

Democracy or Domination

The urgency of Europe’s creep towards plutocracy calls for a similarly urgent response. Competition law, given its history and potential as a tool of anti-domination, is a natural fit to protect and revitalise democracy in Europe from the threats posed by excessive concentrations of private power. For it to be effective for that purpose, competition scholars must clearly articulate which democratic values, like non-domination, competition law should seek to pursue, and clear-mindedly design mechanisms through which to channel them.

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22 January 2025
William E. Scheuerman

Trump and the Folklore of Capitalism

How can we make sense of the return of Donald Trump, who again convinced enough US voters of his populist bonafides? Populist authoritarianism has made inroads around the world. Only Trump’s version, however, probably brings together so much wealth and power, with super-rich business executives now at the helm. Here I tap a brilliant but neglected book, The Folklore of Capitalism (1937), by the legal scholar and New Deal trustbuster, Thurman Arnold (1891-1961), to understand this remarkable development. Folklore of Capitalism helps explain Trump’s wide appeal, despite the electorate’s disagreements with many of his policy preferences.

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21 January 2025
Judit Bayer

Zuckerberg’s Strategy

On January 7, 2025, and in the days following, the founder and CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, made a series of statements that framed Meta's previous and future content policy with an evidently strategic intention. The change of content moderation policy, as described in three comprehensive points in his personal announcement on his own platforms, may even sound reasonable, as discussed below. However, the reasoning and the framing of these changes appear to show that Meta is up to something entirely different from just further optimizing its curation of content on its platforms.

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1
20 January 2025
Dieter Zinnbauer

Plutocracy 2025

When thinking about this current moment in time when major currents of political and economic power seem to flow into each other in exceptional and perhaps unparalleled ways, it might be useful to tease out in some more detail how exactly plutocracy 2025 differs from the entanglements of economic and business power that have come before. Here is one difference that seems particularly striking. Plutocracy in 2025, unlike its typical predecessors,  is not really engineered in discrete fashion behind the scenes by deep-rooted dynasties of political and economic life. Instead, it is a full-frontal brash attack right on the public stage.

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1
19 January 2025
Viktoria H.S.E. Robertson

Protecting Democracy in the Digital Era

At the dawn of 2025, liberal democracy is faced with a considerable challenge: Big Tech bosses appear to leverage their market power for far-reaching political influence, without any democratic legitimisation to do so. As someone working on issues of market power in the digital economy, one cannot help but wonder: shouldn’t competition law be able to contain (some of) this unseeming wielding of market power?

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17 January 2025
Jacob van de Kerkhof

Musk, Techbrocracy, and Free Speech

In this blogpost, I situate and address Musk’s position within the broader EU debate on freedom of expression. The purpose of this symposium is to elucidate aspects that make Musk, his influence, and his provocations to the EU legal order, problematic under EU law, and, should we consider his influence as unwanted, harmful or illegal, whether EU law can provide answers to it. This post centres on three points: (i) Musk’s changes to X’s content moderation process, (ii) Musk’s usage of X to amplify select political candidates and (iii) Musk’s ownership of Starlink. It ends with a note on how this fits in a grander theme, which has been dubbed by commentators such as Paul Bernal as the ‘techbrocracy’.

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7
Alberto Alemanno, Jacquelyn D. Veraldi

Musk, Power, and the EU

At a time when calls for the EU to respond to Musk’s provocations multiply, critical questions about whether, why, and how the EU may react remain largely unanswered. Musk’s conduct, which spans sectors as diverse as social media (X, formerly Twitter), AI (xAI), satellite technology (Starlink), space rockets (SpaceX), and electric vehicles (Tesla), pose unique challenges to existing legal frameworks. His multi-industry influence gives rise to profound questions about the limits of individual influence and power accumulation in a complex geopolitical landscape.

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