Elon Musk played such an important role in the United States election campaign that Donald Trump dedicated a fifth of his acceptance speech to him. In all, America's president-elect celebrated the American tech billionaire for nearly four of that speech's twenty minutes. “He’s an amazing guy,” enthused Trump, who quickly turned to the entrepreneur's company Space X and its recent achievements. “You know, he sent the rocket up two weeks ago... and I saw it coming down...And I'm thinking Elon can do this, it must be Elon … the spaceship came down so gently and wrapped those arms around it just like you hold your baby at night and it was a beautiful thing to see and I called Elon ...who else can do that? ... he can do that. And I said 'That's why I love you, Elon',” Trump continued.
The founder of Tesla and SpaceX put his financial might behind the supremacist candidate, injecting nearly two hundred million dollars to help the former president regain power. Musk also organised an “illegal” lottery for voters in Pennsylvania and deployed his industrial muscle, notably his powerful social network X (formerly Twitter), from which Trump had been banned in 2021, to flood public debate with fake news.
“A star is born: Elon!” the president-elect declared in his speech. During the campaign, Trump had expressed his intent to make Musk a prominent member of his administration, entrusting him with a mandate to slash public spending. Visiting Trump’s headquarters in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, with his son, the billionaire - who reclaimed his title as the world’s richest man in May 2024 and who has made himself indispensable to the US military - posted an initial message proclaiming “Game, set, and match” as the election results were announced. He then shared a photoshopped image of himself in the Oval Office, before telling his followers: “You are the media now.”
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Meanwhile, at the same time in Paris, France's minister for European Affairs was a guest on public radio station France Inter. Benjamin Haddad, a politician largely unknown to the public, was the first member of prime minister Michel Barnier’s government to respond to the outcome of the American election. Asked about the possibility of wealthy businessmen openly taking control of future elections here in France as well, the minister seemed confident it could not happen.
Inadequate control over campaign financing
Benjamin Haddad insisted that France is completely protected from this phenomenon, citing two main reasons. First of all, he stated that “we have a model of regulation and platform accountability regarding online hate and misinformation. We have a single market, which means these rules apply even to American companies investing in Europe”. This claim is widely disputed: and a look at the surge in racist, misogynistic, transphobic, climate-sceptic content in France since Musk’s takeover of Twitter shows why.
Secondly, according to the minister French election rules are robust enough to prevent the private sector from gaining a dominant hold. “I’m pleased to note that our rules for political and electoral financing are not the same in France, and we have very strict regulations regarding the money that billionaires might inject into political life,” said Benjamin Haddid.
This second observation is again contradicted by the facts. Firstly, because campaign finance oversight is so lacking in France that every recent presidential election has been marred by scandal. Benjamin Haddad should be especially aware of this, having begun his career with the conservative UMP, a party so mired in legal cases that it had to rebrand itself (it is now called Les Républicains). He was appointed national secretary of the UMP in 2011, the very year that the Libyan financing scandal for Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign erupted, alongside the setting up of the Bygmalion double billing scheme ahead of the 2012 election campaign.
Despite the repeated scandals and expressions of frustration from Jean-Philippe Vachia, head of the France's election spending supervisory body, the Commission Nationale des Comptes de Campagne et des Financements Politiques (CNCCFP), Parliament has consistently refused to tackle this issue head-on. That complacency remains to this day, even after the recent early parliamentary elections in July, where warnings over the issue were starkly ignored.
An unstoppable juggernaut
The work of media outlets controlled by the Bolloré Group during those elections set a new precedent: while major corporations have always thrown their weight behind campaigns in a bid to influence public debate, never before had one done so as openly and unapologetically, with the clear aim of helping the far-right into power.
In a new judgement published on October 31st, the broadcasting authority ARCOM once again sanctioned presenter Cyril Hanouna, to whom Vincent Bolloré gave free rein during the campaign, for having deliberately played the role of “intermediary” in order to “facilitate” discussions among far-right parties. The host of the 'Touche pas à mon poste' ('TPMP') programme had called his friend Jordan Bardella - leader of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) - live on air to encourage him to form an alliance with the rival far-right Reconquête party led by Éric Zemmour, another candidate backed by Bolloré. During the campaign itself, ARCOM had already been compelled to issue a formal warning to Europe 1 radio (another Bolloré group media outlet) due to Cyril Hanouna’s lack of “moderation” and “honesty” on air.
Yet, though the Bolloré group's highly visible involvement in the campaign marked something of a turning point in French politics – it was a practice they have previously engaged in during elections in Africa - there has been little comment from those in positions of authority in France, even though they have voiced concerns about the rise of such a phenomenon across the Atlantic. Despite the urgency of the situation, no reforms of the current regulatory system have been proposed. Meanwhile, the release of Jordan Bardella’s new book, edited and promoted through Bolloré’s vast media network – it arrived in bookshops on November 9th - offers further proof of the impossibility of stopping this juggernaut under the present setup.
In an interview with Le Parisien newspaper on October 27th, the RN president openly acknowledged that the release of his book, along with the considerable resources dedicated to it, was “part of the Rassemblement National’s permanent campaign”. It is worth recalling that in France companies are theoretically banned from financing electoral campaigns or political party activities. However, neither the law nor the oversight bodies are equipped to counter a billionaire who, instead of directly funding a candidate, deploys the news channels he controls for their benefit.
For instance, Article L.52-12 of France's electoral code specifies that a “candidate’s consent is required for expenses made on their behalf”. This essentially means that RN officials need only declare that the Bolloré media outlets campaigned for the far-right independently and spontaneously, without prior agreement, to avoid any repercussions.
When asked about this situation, the president of the CNCCFP, the election spending watchdog, implicitly acknowledged that a legal loophole might exist. “It's up to the legislator to take into consideration, if necessary, changes in practices, whether these are the growth of all types of campaigns on social media or the interventions of third-party legal entities in electoral campaigns under circumstances not currently covered by legislation,” Jean-Philippe Vachia told Mediapart.
Looking at their backgrounds, industrial models and political projects, many things distinguish Elon Musk from French billionaire Vincent Bolloré. Yet highlighting the differences between the United States and France also risks overlooking something crucial: that the convergence of far-right movements in the world is not merely ideological, it is strategic as well.
As early as Trump’s first election, the Front National – the previous name for the RN – turned to the man orchestrating him, the racist ideologue Steve Bannon, who advocated “flooding the [editor's note, media] zone with shit”.
“The metapolitical battle that Elon Musk is waging goes beyond electoral combat,” declared Damien Rieu, a far-right activist on identity issues specialising in mobilisation on social media, on the eve of the American election. “If we transpose this to France, Musk is a kind of Bolloré on steroids, because he has even more resources and more power.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter