Far-right policies are getting stronger around the world thanks to Elon Musk.

The richest person in the world is trying to change the way politics work on six countries.

Global News looked at Elon Musk’s political action over the past two years and found that he has supported right-wing movements, policies, and administrations in at least 18 countries. His goal is to reduce immigration and business regulations around the world.

A lot of people know Musk for the trouble he’s making in the U.S. government and for his rising influence in Germany, where he recently told voters to “move beyond” Nazi guilt. But the tech billionaire is also having an effect on a long list of other countries that keeps growing.

Musk has written online that he supports the protests in Brazil and Ireland by people on the right. He said nice things about New Zealand’s new conservative prime minister and agreed with a Dutch nationalist right-wing leader. Elon Musk has been praised for his role as a go-between for far-right movements in Argentina and Italy, helping them grow through exchanging ideas, personal connections, and forming shared beliefs. He has also blocked certain posts at the request of right-wing leaders in India and Turkey.

She said, “It is very dangerous that someone who isn’t involved in politics can now speak with some seriousness about politics.” “He’s changing the way politics work.”

No matter what country Musk is talking about, he supports nationalism or nativism. This is especially true for European countries. Musk has raised the profile of different types of nationalism in the United States, Germany, Britain, Italy, and the Netherlands.

To put it another way, nationalism is happening everywhere at once.

Rodrigo Campos, a postdoctoral researcher in politics at the University of York in the U.K., said in an email, “Musk is succeeding in making himself look like a global voice for the far right.”

Campos said, “This is ironic because far-right leaders usually want to keep outside influences out of the country. But Musk is a billionaire who got his money from transnational corporate capital. In other words, he is the product of neoliberal globalisation.”

Musk’s support for right-leaning causes and political parties varies from country to country. In some countries, he has endorsed specific political parties, spoken out in support of certain causes, and appeared with politicians in person or online. As the richest person in the world, he hasn’t used his money to help lawmakers in other countries like he did with Donald Trump in the U.S. last year (more than $290 million), or at least he hasn’t done it in public.

Musk supports right-wing politicians and political groups because he is famous all over the world as the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and has 217 million followers on X, which is like a big microphone.

And since Trump became president last month, Musk can also give leaders from other countries another way to possibly talk to the White House. Musk has met with many world leaders with Trump, such as Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, and Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary.

As head of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk has kept up his talks with world leaders. On Thursday, he met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, where they talked about both business and politics. The two men also posed for pictures like they were equal heads of state.

The Trump White House has let Musk handle his own conflicts of interest, but some Democrats have said that what Musk is doing is wrong.

“Musk is basically acting as Secretary of State, and he is meeting with a key foreign leader not to ask for concessions that would help Americans, but to ask for concessions that would make him rich,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said on X.

Musk is a complex citizen. He was born and raised in South Africa, has been a Canadian citizen, and in 2002 he became an American citizen.

Now, leaders in some countries are becoming more against Musk’s private diplomacy because they say he is meddling in their internal politics without permission.French President Macron blamed Elon Musk for supporting a reactionary movement, but Carnegie Endowment for International Peace senior fellow suggests Musk’s global power may not be adequately acknowledged

Feldstein said that the politicians and groups Musk backs all have two things in common: they believe in nationalism and want to loosen rules.

“He has only backed right-wing politicians and very extreme parties,” the source said. Feldstein pointed out that Musk publicly backs the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party. This is a party that is so far from the centre in Germany that other parties have been reluctant to form coalitions with it

Musk’s collaboration with DOGE to reduce government spending has been widely recognized globally, with President Javier Milei of Argentina being a significant influencer. There have been several times when Musk and Milei have met.

In an email, Rita Abrahamsen, a professor of public and foreign affairs at the University of Ottawa in Canada, said that policies like “DOGE” might also be liked in other places.

Abrahamsen explained that radical-right politicians are against what they call “managerialism.” “They believe that modern societies are run by a New Class of liberal managerial elites, whose power is growing and spreading and whose only goal is to further their own power and benefits,” she said.

Musk, like many other CEOs of large companies, has spent a lot of time travelling around the world to try to grow the sales and supply lines of his companies. In 2015, he invited India’s Modi to a Tesla plant to talk about battery technology. And last year, he met with foreign leaders to talk about business issues, such as SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service.

But Musk’s behaviour towards world leaders changed around three years ago, when limits were put in place because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In December 2021, he made fun of Sanna Marin, who was prime minister of Finland at the time, by posting a meme on X that said she was breaking social distance rules by going to a bar. Two months later, in February 2022, he shared and then deleted a picture that said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was like Hitler because of how he handled the pandemic.

In 2022, Elon Musk criticized Ukraine for sacrificing land to prevent Russia’s invasion, sparking anger. In the same year, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro awarded Musk an honorary medal, citing Musk and Trump’s support for Bolsonaro’s political return.

But things changed again in the second half of 2023. Musk started to speak out more strongly about elections in other countries, especially in Europe, where he called changing demographics and the arrival of refugees from other countries the start of a “civil war.”

In August 2023, he praised Orban of Hungary for trying to get more babies born. In September, he shared a social media post from an ultra-right Italian account that said letting in refugees was the same as “European suicide.” In November, he said nice things about a Tucker Carlson interview with Santiago Abascal, the far-right leader of Spain. For example, when asked about birth rates, he said, “Many interesting topics.” In November, he also said that Leo Varadkar, who was prime minister of Ireland at the time, “hates the Irish people” because they disagreed on hate speech rules. Varadkar, a politician on the centre-right, wanted to make it easy to go to jail for spreading hate speech online.

Also, in December 2023, Musk went to Rome for the yearly Atreju conference, which is an international gathering of conservative politicians. There, Musk told the other conservative politicians there to “make more Italians to save Italy’s culture.”

After Trump won the election in November, Musk seemed to feel even more confident and began courting even more right-wing figures from around the world, including radicals in the UK.

Musk’s lobbying often aligns with his business goals, unlike Germany’s AfD’s green energy views, a distinction similar to Trump’s on the same issue.

In a news conference before going to Trump’s inauguration last month, Abascal, the leader of the Spanish party Vox, spoke out in support of Musk.

Abascal raised concerns about Elon Musk’s alleged power, questioning why it’s not allowed since he supports right-wing groups in 18 countries across six continents, except Antarctica.

Musk has supported far-right politics in South Africa, where he has had a rocky relationship with the government and President Cyril Ramaphosa. South Africa doesn’t have a big right-wing political force like many other countries do, but Musk has focused on a number of positions and policies that the party that is opposed to South Africa’s ruling party supports.

In particular, Musk has talked about the idea that white farmers in the country are the victims of a campaign of white slaughter. This is an idea that has been pushed back by officials in both the US and South Africa. Musk has also agreed with those who are against the country’s new land use laws, which let the government take land, sometimes without paying for it, when it’s not being used or when the public wants it to be redistributed. He has called these laws “openly racist.” After criticising South Africa’s land laws in a way similar to Musk, Trump signed an order on February 7 cutting off help to that country. He called them “A massive Human Rights VIOLATION.”

While Trump and other Republicans in the US have been very critical of China’s government, Musk has mostly kept quiet about politics in China, even though Tesla has a lot of operations and sales there that could be affected by how he works with the government.

Musk’s first year as the owner of X (formerly Twitter), a tool that lets him change people’s minds around the world and puts him in the middle of global disputes, happened at the same time.

Michael O’Hanlon, head of foreign policy research at the Brookings Institution, said that this kind of private diplomacy has only happened a few times in history. Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 diplomatic trips to release American prisoners in Syria and Cuba, and Elon Musk’s close relationship with Trump, complicate the current government’s understanding. Carnegie Endowment scholarFeldstein believes Musk’s foreign politics lack a clear goal and act on impulse.