The tech mogul lashed out at the “bureaucratic monster” after his platform X was slapped with a huge fine
US-based tech billionaire Elon Musk has called for the dissolution of the European Union after the bloc fined his social media platform X.
On Friday, the European Commission fined X €120 million ($163 million) for “breaching its transparency obligations” under the 2022 Digital Services Act, which sets standards for accountability and content moderation. The ruling cited a deceptive blue-checkmark design, weak advertising transparency, and failure to provide required data access.
In a series of posts on Saturday, Musk, who often accuses Brussels of imposing excessive regulations, argued that “EU bureaucracy is slowly smothering Europe to death.”
“The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people,” Musk wrote, calling the bloc a “bureaucratic Monster.”
Musk, who also owns Tesla and SpaceX, previously described the EU as a “giant cathedral to bureaucracy,” arguing that over-regulation suppresses innovation.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticized the ruling as “an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.” Vice President J.D. Vance said the EU had targeted X for “not engaging in censorship.”
US Ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder also condemned the move, saying Washington “opposes censorship and will challenge burdensome regulations that target US companies abroad.”
European Commission Executive Vice President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen defended the fine, saying that “deceiving users with blue checkmarks, obscuring information on ads and shutting out researchers have no place online in the EU.”
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski reacted to Musk’s tirade by posting, “Go to Mars. There’s no censorship of Nazi salutes there,” referring to accusations that the entrepreneur had performed the salute while celebrating President Donald Trump’s second-term inauguration in January 2025.
