Elon Musk
Musk says German election could ‘decide fate of the world’ at AfD event
Elon Musk spoke at a campaign event for Germany’s controversial Alternative für Deutschland, or Alternative for Germany (AfD), party over the weekend, ahead of an upcoming election in the country next month.
On Saturday, AfD candidate Alice Weidel posted a video broadcast of the event on X, which included a roughly-ten-minute speech from Musk, following his appointment last week as an advisor for newly-inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump. The AfD, which advocates for German nationalism, halting immigration into the country, preserving German culture and other related topics, has drawn concern and been called a far-right populist party by some critics.
The appearance comes ahead of a German election being held on February 23, which Musk says could “decide the entire fate of Europe, maybe the fate of the world.” During the speech, he also spoke about preserving German culture and the removal of bureaucracy from Brussels, along with being affirmed by Weidel and the audience about the recent election of Trump, who has advocated for similar deregulatory and anti-immigration policies.
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You can see the full broadcast from Alice Weidel on X below with Musk’s speech starting around two and a half hours in, or you can read the full transcript below that.
Mega-Wahlkampfauftakt mit Alice Weidel live aus Halle! https://t.co/eHzMOShPHR
— Alice Weidel (@Alice_Weidel) January 25, 2025
Musk: Can you hear me? Okay, yes, unfortunately, I can’t hear you very well.
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Wow, hello, everyone. I hope you can hear me well, the audio I’m hearing from my side is… I can’t hear you. So hopefully this, this is coming through. Please, please confirm that this you can hear me. Okay. I don’t know, raise your hand or something. Okay. All good. Okay, great.
Well, first of all, I wanted to really say that I’m very excited for the AfD and I think, I think you’re really the best hope for Germany. I think some things that… something I think that is just very important is that people take pride in Germany, and being German, this is very important. It’s, you know, it’s okay to be proud to be German. This is a very important principle.
It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything. I think we want to have unique cultures in the world. We want to have people that have… we don’t want everything to be the same everywhere, where it’s just one big sort of soup, you know, we want to have something where it’s… you go to different countries and you experience a different culture, and it is unique and special and good and that the German government takes actions to protect its citizens, and make sure that it seeks the health and well-being of the German people.
The German people are sort of, really an ancient nation. It goes back thousands of years. Read Julius Caesar’s account of, like, first encountering the German tribes in the Gallic campaigns. And he was like, “Very impressive. These are very, very powerful warriors.”
I think there’s, like, frankly, too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents or even, let alone their parents, their great grandparents, maybe even. And we should be optimistic and excited about a future for Germany.
That’s really what it is, to be excited, to be optimistic about the future, to preserve German culture and protect the German people. And you know, there are some other things that I think would be very helpful too, which is that, I think you want more self-determination for Germany and for the countries in Europe, and less from Brussels.
That’s my opinion. I think there’s too much bureaucracy from Brussels, too much control from sort of global elite. And you know, when I’ve given talks at these sort of global government conferences, what I’ve said is there should be “less global government, there should be more determination by individual countries.”
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And so I very much hope that the AfD does well, and that Alice Weidel does become a chancellor. I think that would be very good for Germany, and I think it’s very important. I hope the German people unite and strongly support AfD.
You’re doing the right thing, is what I’m saying.
Let’s go guys, let’s go! Fight for a great future for Germany! Fight for a great future for Germany! Go go go, convince your friends, convince everyone, let’s go!
Get excited about the future, and if you want to make the future great, if you want the future to be great, you need to make it great, and fight for the future to be great. That’s how it becomes great.
Weidel: Let me try one thing, and I hope you can hear me. No, you can’t?
Musk: No, I think I can hear you now.
Weidel: Okay, yes, good. Entire audience, we wish you, President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, all the best to make America great again. You’re the best. God’s blessing.
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Musk: Exactly. I mean, I think we should fight for an exciting, bright future where people can be optimistic about what’s going to happen, where you wake up and you look forward to the future. And the best way to… ensure the future is good, you have to fight for a good future every day, and it will be great, and we’ll have a very exciting, wonderful future so…
I think this election coming up in Germany is incredibly important. I think it could decide the entire fate of Europe, maybe the fate of the world. That is the significance of this election. So that’s why it’s very important to talk to your friends and family and convince them to consider voting for AfD and then, and just go with it like a chain reaction, convince one friend, talk to another friend, and say “Hey guys, do you want more of the last ten years, or do you want something different?”
And I think the people in Germany want something different, and if you want something different, you have to vote for a different party. This is just a fact. This is logic.
So you are the future of Germany. Make it happen, but I can’t emphasize enough: go out there, talk to people, convince people, one vote at a time, there’s a need for change. It’s got to be done. And this election is so important, it’s extremely important. I do not say it lightly when I think the future of civilization could hang on this election.
So when something is so important, it’s you really need to say, “Okay, you’re going to go all out to convince people to vote for AfD.”
And you certainly… obviously you have my full support. I think the Trump administration is also supportive. So, you know, I think the policies that I’ve heard from AFD, they make a lot of sense.
They’re really just, it’s, you know… to me, when I look at the policies, they’re sort of, they’re common sense policies, and just like President Trump has common sense policies, getting things done, you know, getting the government out of people’s way so that you can get, you know, you can get things done, and giving people back personal freedom and protecting the people from dangers.
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These are fundamental things that, frankly, the current government is not doing. Current government is suppressing speech very aggressively and really, when you suppress freedom of speech, it’s not it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to have a true democracy, because freedom of speech is the foundation of democracy.
People cannot be expected to vote in an informed manner if they are not able to know the truth. So, this is why it’s so important to have to have freedom of speech, so people can make an informed vote, and it can be a true democracy. But this is not what the current government has been doing. They have been suppressing freedom of speech and putting people in jail for even mild criticisms of politicians or social media posts. This is crazy. This is, this is, this is, frankly, a totalitarian approach. It is not a democratic approach.
So there needs to be… to restore freedom to the people of Germany and have freedom of speech and have less government oppression in general. So anyway, I think this is I can’t emphasize enough, go do everything you can, full blast. Put every effort you can into this election, this… the fate of the world, I think, rests upon this election in Germany. It’s extremely fundamental.
Everything you can, please go all out.
Weidel: Thank you, great. All the best for you, blessings.
Musk: Alright, and unfortunately, Alice, I can’t hear you. I wish I could hear you, but I can see the enthusiasm of the crowd. And… danke schoen. And, you know, go, go, go, fight, fight, fight.
Elon Musk’s past meetings with other world leaders and Donald Trump’s re-election
The speech follows Musk’s appearance at Trump’s inauguration earlier this week, during which the Tesla CEO performed what many said appeared to be a Nazi salute, which he later defended as a gesture meant to highlight his statement that his “heart goes out to all of you” after thanking the audience for helping to make Trump’s victory happen.
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After the inauguration, Musk downplayed the gesture in a flurry of posts, including one on X, noting that he had apparently been called both a Zionist and a Nazi. In others, he reiterated his disdain for legacy media, adding that it would be “another nail in the coffin.”
“It was astonishing how insanely hard legacy media tried to cancel me for saying ‘my heart goes out to you’ and moving my hand from my heart to the audience,” Musk wrote in an additional post on X on Friday. “In the end, this deception will just be another nail in the coffin of legacy media.”
“Elon is a great friend of Israel,” Netanyahu wrote on X following the event. “He visited Israel after the October 7 massacre in which Hamas terrorists committed the worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. He has since repeatedly and forcefully supported Israel’s right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists and regimes who seek to annihilate the one and only Jewish state. I thank him for this.”
Musk has also met with several world leaders over the past few years, even before his official endorsement of Trump last July. He has previously held meetings with Netanyahu and several others, including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Argentina President Javier Milei, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, Hungary President Katalin Novák, Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, President of Namibia Dr. Nangolo Mbumba, Thailand Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, and several officials in China, among many others still.
Many of these conversations have included similar concerns about immigration, population collapse and the need for people to have more children, the civilizational risks of AI and ambitions to make humans multiplanetary by landing on Mars, among many other adjacent topics.
During campaign events leading up to the November election, Musk used similar language to his January speech for the AfD, noting that “President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution” and “democracy,” and saying that it would “be the last election” if voters didn’t encourage others to register to vote.
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What are your thoughts? Let me know at zach@teslarati.com, find me on X at @zacharyvisconti, or send us tips at tips@teslarati.com.
Elon Musk talks AI, birth rates and more at Italian conference
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Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
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None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
Elon Musk
Another Tesla SpaceX merger prediction by ARK Invest has Elon Musk talking
Elon Musk again denies a Tesla China split as new SpaceX merger speculation resurfaces quickly.
Elon Musk restated that Tesla has no plans to separate its China business from the rest of the company, responding to a new round of merger speculation from ARK Invest.
On the firm’s “Brainstorm” podcast, Cathie Wood’s team, including chief futurist Brett Winton and research director Nick Grous, argued a Tesla and SpaceX combination remains likely, with an announcement possible before the end of the year even if the deal itself would not close that quickly. Winton called Tesla’s Shanghai operations a “small ish wrinkle” for a merger rather than a real obstacle, since SpaceX’s national security work with the U.S. government sits uneasily next to Tesla’s manufacturing base in China.
Musk pushed back on the framing directly. “China is awesome. I strongly encourage people to visit,” he wrote on X. He also repeated language he first used in late July, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Tesla executives had been told to prepare for a possible spinoff, sale, or closure of the China business ahead of a SpaceX tie up. Musk called that report “absurdly fake news” at the time, adding that a separation had “never even come up in a discussion ever,” a line he echoed again this week.
The repeated denial has not settled the underlying question, because Shanghai’s role in Tesla’s business is exactly what makes a merger complicated. Gigafactory Shanghai still ships more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries and functions as the company’s main export hub for Europe and Asia. Teslarati previously reported on Musk’s initial denial, and the merger conversation itself has been building since SpaceX’s IPO gave it public shares to use as acquisition currency.
Wedbush’s Dan Ives has pegged the odds of a Tesla SpaceX merger at 80 to 90 percent by early 2027, and ARK’s prediction of a year end announcement adds another data point to that timeline, even as Musk keeps rejecting the specific mechanics reporters have described. Neither position rules out the other. Musk can deny a China spinoff was ever discussed while analysts still expect some form of combination to move forward, since ARK and Ives are both describing convergence at the corporate level, not necessarily the internal restructuring the Journal described in July.
For now, Tesla’s China business remains intact, and Musk’s comments this week make clear he has no interest in publicly walking that position back, no matter how often the merger question resurfaces.
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Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
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