Elon Musk helped Trump win. Now he's looking at Europe, and many politicians are alarmed

abcnews.go.com:

Fresh from pouring his money and energies into helping Donald Trump win reelection, Elon Musk has trained his sights on Europe

LONDON — Fresh from pouring his money and energies into helping Donald Trump win reelection, Elon Musk has trained his sights on Europe, setting off alarm bells among politicians across the continent.

The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive has endorsed the far-right Alternative for Germany, demanded the release of jailed U.K. anti-Islam extremist Tommy Robinson and called British Prime Minister Keir Starmer an evil tyrant who should be in prison.

Many European politicians have been left concerned by the attention. Musk’s feed on his social network X is dotted with abusive language — labeling politicians “stupid cretin” and “sniveling cowards” — as well as retweets of far-right and anti-immigrant accounts.

Andrew Chadwick, professor of political communication at Loughborough University, said Musk is using X “a bit like an old-style newspaper mogul,” to promulgate his political views.

“We’ve seen Musk start to align himself much more obviously with an international movement of the far right,” Chadwick said. ”If you look at the kinds of people who Musk himself is boosting on his platform … he’s increasingly started to assemble a group of different right-wing influencers, many of them with large followings, and presenting their evidence as a basis for his interventions into European politics.”

Musk has inserted himself into politics in Germany, which is headed for a Feb. 23 election after center-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s fractious three-party coalition government collapsed.

On Dec. 20, Musk wrote on X: “Only the AfD can save Germany,” a reference to the Alternative for Germany party, which is