On October 2, 2023, more than a year before Donald Trump’s re-election, Elon Musk shared a meme on his social media platform X that mocked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, depicting him as a petulant teen.
“When it’s been 5 minutes and you haven’t asked for a billion dollars in aid,” reads the text on the image, showing Zelensky looking sulky.
The caricature is meant to mock Ukraine’s requests for financial assistance from the United States to help with the war in Ukraine, requests which Musk believes are too frequent and too demanding.
The meme, however, didn’t come out of nowhere. The image was produced by the Social Design Agency (SDA), a Russian agency that the Russian government pays to create influence operations and cause unrest, according to an investigation by Complément d’Enquête, a show on French television channel France 2.
While there is no indication that SDA directed Musk to retweet the image, the fact that he did massively amplified the meme’s reach: it garnered more than 95 million views on his X account.
To study Musk’s messaging on X, teams from the FRANCE 24 Observers, French media outlet France Info, and Belgian media outlet RTBF analysed around 15,000 posts shared by Elon Musk between November 4, 2024, and April 4, 2025, as part of a project through the Public French-speaking Media association (Médias Francophones Publics).
In order to analyse all of these tweets, we created a computer program based on ChatGPT’s artificial intelligence (see the sidebar at the end of the article).
This enabled us to identify the hundreds of tweets that make up Elon Musk's anti-Ukraine rhetoric. The dataset was then manually analysed and verified. This allowed us to quantify the intensity of Musk’s anti-Ukraine activism and identify the communities with which he interacts.
In five months, Musk posted 373 tweets about the war between Russia and Ukraine. These included his original tweets, quotes, retweets, and his responses to other social media users. We used our AI program to classify these posts into three categories: “hostile to Ukraine”, “neutral”, or “favourable to Ukraine”, before manually verifying the results.
The overwhelming majority, 342, demonstrated a stance that was either openly pro-Russia or hostile to Ukraine. A further 22 tweets read as neutral and only nine were in some way favourable to Ukraine.
How Musk’s pro-Russia activism seems linked to the White House’s agenda
Musk’s posts on the conflict in Ukraine seem connected to the White House’s agenda.
On November 17, 2024, then-US president Joe Biden authorised Ukraine to use American long-range missiles to strike Russian territory. Mike Waltz, now the national security advisor to Donald Trump, called the decision “another step up the escalation ladder". Shortly after, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to use nuclear weapons if Ukraine hit Russia with long-range missiles
For his part, Musk expressed himself on X on November 19 (archive), approving the reactions of American political figures who were criticising the supply of missiles, such as those of Republican Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno who said that “Biden dramatically escalated the war” and Donald Trump Junior who wrote that “the American people want peace, not endless war!” In the days around November 17, Musk published 27 posts supporting Russia or criticising Ukraine.
On February 28, 2025, the Ukrainian president met Trump and US Vice President JD Vance at the White House. The meeting ended in a clash, with the Americans claiming that Zelensky wasn’t showing enough gratitude for the US aid provided to Ukraine.
Musk published 138 posts related to this turbulent visit, sharing the highlights (or in this case lowlights) of the clash along with commentary, including when Zelensky’s choice of clothing (archive) was criticised, when Trump (archive) claimed Zelensky was “gambling with World War III”, when Vance told Zelensky he was being disrespectful and when Republican Senator Lindsay Graham (archive) called for Zelensky to step down after the visit. The 22 tweets that Musk shared on February 28 alone garnered more than 489 million views.
Many of Musk’s posts directly criticise Zelensky.
”Elon Musk is picking up Putin’s narrative against the Ukrainian president,” says Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy, who has a doctorate in American civilisation and wrote the book “Trump’s words” ("Les mots de Trump" published by Dalloz.). “[For Musk], Zelensky is a dictator, even more so than Putin himself, largely because Ukraine hasn’t held elections [since the start of the war], which is totally legal during a time of war, but Musk uses that fact to criticise Zelensky.”
Positions tied to domestic political matters
Musk’s anti-Ukrainian discourse also seems linked to issues at the heart of US domestic politics, especially since the billionaire was officially integrated into the Trump administration as a special employee with the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, a body tasked with reducing the costs of government (even if Musk announced on April 22 that he would be pulling back from some of his role).
Criticising the aid sent to Ukraine could be considered part of Musk’s broader critique of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) (archive), which Musk helped to dismantle. Ukraine was the number one beneficiary of US aid and the agency.
Musk has been known to share Russian disinformation about USAID. On February 23, 2025, the X boss shared a fake news story published by Russian networks close to the Kremlin claiming that American actor Sean Penn received $5 million (€4.38 million) from USAID for visiting Zelensky. Musk said the article was “interesting”.
The billionaire has also shared other tweets criticising public figures who have openly shown their support for Ukraine, including Democratic Senator Mark Kelly (archive), whom Musk labeled a “traitor” on March 18, 2025, when he said he was in favour of US support for Kyiv during a visit to Ukraine.
Musk’s frequent interactions with X users on the American far right
Our investigation shows Musk publishes relatively few original tweets on X. Out of his 373 tweets about the war in Ukraine, 366 were replies, quotes, or retweets of other social media users.
This is how Musk tends to express himself on his platform.
"He's interacting with a community that he's built there with people who support him and who give him positive feedback,” says Jessica Yarin Robinson, a researcher at the University of Oslo who specialises in digital media.
“He is now part of a far-right populist community that existed on Twitter long before he bought the network,” Yarin Robinson says. “They’ve been present for many years but really got a boost in 2016 during the election of Donald Trump.”
Our analysis of Musk’s interactions – his retweets, quotes, and replies – shows that, in regard to Ukraine, Musk largely interacts with social media users with links to the alt-right, the American far-right.
The X boss regularly interacts with the community of far-right or “alt-right” influencers and media personalities like Mike Benz, a YouTuber known for sharing conspiracy theories. Benz, who once served in the Trump administration, has also been criticised for sharing anti-Semitic videos. Musk also interacts with the user DefiyantlyFree, who often posts about immigration or about criticising LGBT rights.
Musk also shares posts by start-up founders who have become spokespeople for Libertarian ideas or the alt-right. He interacts with David O. Sack, a South African CEO who is part of the so-called “Paypal mafia”, a group of former executives at Paypal that includes Musk. Sack joined the Trump administration last December to work on issues relating to artificial intelligence and crypto money.
Musk is also in contact with figures reputed to have close connections with Russia like Mario Nawfal, a Lebanese-Australian influencer who is known for having interviewed Belarusian President Alexander Lukachenko, a close Putin ally, and Ian Miles Cheong, a Malaysian influencer who used to write for Russia Today.
“Elon Musk doesn’t explicitly boost pro-Kremlin accounts,” Jessica Yarin Robinson explains. “Instead, we see him boosting accounts that are part of this kind of pro-Russia and anti-NATO communities, but it does not necessarily support Kremlin mouthpiece accounts. His support is indirect in tweeting and retweeting accounts that are very critical of support for Ukraine.”
Growing support for Russia
In some tweets, Musk displays explicit support for Russia and its vision of the war. On February 17, 2025, the X boss praised what he called the “competent leadership” of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during talks on the war in Ukraine held in Saudi Arabia.
Musk has not always been so anti-Ukraine, however. Early on in the conflict, in March 2022, Musk even encouraged Ukraine to “Hold Strong” after the Russian invasion (archive).
So how can we understand Musk’s pro-Russia tropism?
“Musk has been in contact with Putin for several years. They share anti-woke ideology as well as a masculinist world view,” says Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy. “Zelensky represents the old Western world. [Musk] sees the war in Ukraine as a conflict between the old Europe and his vision of the world, which is much more nationalist and anti-democratic.”
But as Musk began to forge closer ties with the American extreme right and Donald Trump, the billionaire seems to have become radicalised against Kyiv. “Elon Musk is now very aligned with the Kremlin’s narrative,” says Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy, “Especially as Trump is as well, [which shows] convergences and commonalities.”
Smidge of support for Ukraine dictated by the interests of his society Starlink
The very few times that Musk showed even the smallest amount of support for Ukraine on X were to defend the financial interests of his company Starlink, which provides a network of satellite communication for the Ukrainian armed forces.
On March 9, 2025, the Polish Minister of Defence Radosław Sikorski (archive) said that he was worried that Musk would cut the Starlink service to Ukraine and explained that Poland had already financed $50 million of the service.
The minister said that they might look for other providers. Musk began by insulting the Polish minister, before then clarifying (archive) that however much he “disagrees with the Ukraine policy, Starlink will never turn off its terminals”.
A month later, when 5,000 terminals paid for by Poland were delivered to Ukraine (archive) Musk seemed much more conciliatory.
“I hope these are helpful and peace is achieved soon. Thank you, @KGawkowski [Editor’s note: Krzysztof Gawkowski, the Polish minister of digital affairs] and Poland,” Musk tweeted, clearly pleased to have patched things up with his clients.
To study Musk’s messaging on X, teams from the France 24 Observers and Belgian media outlet RTBF analysed and categorised more than 15,000 tweets and retweets shared by his account (@elonmusk) between November 4, 2024 and April 4, 2025.
In order to analyse all of these tweets, we used a method created by researchers in cognitive science at the French higher education institute l'École Normale supérieure (check out more on the method here), which allowed us to annotate text using the ChatGPT language model.
We asked ChatGBT’s API to categorise each tweet, which enabled us to hone in on all of the tweets that Musk shared that were either hostile to Ukraine or favorable to Russia as well as those that criticised Europe and those that showed support for the European far right.
We verified the results by manually analysing each post as well.
We examined Musk’s original posts as well as the posts he shared (such as his retweets or quote tweets). We also included the transcripts of videos that he posted directly or shared from other accounts.
You can find our complete methodology here.
This article was done in collaboration with Ambroise Carton and Johanna Bouquet (RTBF) and Antoine Deiana (France Info).
Continue on to read the second part of our investigation:
English (US) · 