Elon Musk and Far-Right German Leader Push Wild Hitler Theory

Elon Musk and a German far-right leader appeared to come to a truly bizarre agreement during a livestreamed X chat Thursday: Adolf Hitler was a communist.

Musk had been plugging the chat with the AfD (Alternative for Germany) co-leader Alice Weidel for days, and given his recent penchant for right-wing views—and public backing of the party—it was hardly a surprise that the pair hit it off.

What was a surprise, according to Wired, was how “deeply weird” the conversation got. And among the strangest lines to come out of the chin wag was that Musk and Weidel reckon Hitler, the fascist dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945, was in fact a communist.

However, on day one of coming to power, Hitler banned the Communist Party of Germany.

Hitler’s autobiography— Mein Kampf—is packed full of anti-communist views. In it, he encouraged nationalism and anti-communism. Hitler even outlawed socialism, and executed socialists and communists en masse. In 1933, the Dachau concentration camp held socialists and leftists exclusively.

He also invaded the communist flag-bearer, the Soviet Union, in June 1941. In the book, Hitler also presents himself as the leader of the extreme right and also rails against Marxism, which he believed was a Jewish conspiracy with designs on weakening the “Aryan race” and Germany.

“[Hitler] was a communist, and he considered himself as a socialist,” Weidel said, in response to Musk probing links between the AfD and Nazism reported on in the press. Scandal-plagued former AfD EU pick Maximilian Krah told journalists in May last year that SS members weren’t automatically “criminals.” The AfD has also been accused of clandestine meetings where mass deportation of non ethnic Germans, including citizens, was discussed.

“The biggest success after that terrible era in our history was to label Adolf Hitler as right[-wing] and conservative, he was exactly the opposite,” Weidel said. “He wasn’t a conservative, he wasn’t a libertarian, he was a communist, socialist guy, and we are the opposite.”

“Right,” Musk responded, in typical one-word fashion, appearing to agree. Later on, he conjured up another word to bolt on to the end, when he said “yes, exactly,” after Weidel claimed Hitler’s “success” came from controlling German media.

“You know what Adolf Hitler did? He switched off free speech. He controlled the media, and without that he would have never been successful,” she said, referencing the fact that the EU was keeping an eye on the chat to see if it contravened Digital Service Act rules. Agencies wanted to determine if the conversation was artificially promoted to voters in Germany ahead of next month’s snap election.

Elsewhere during the “love in,” as Wired also dubbed it, the pair discussed the existence of a God, life on Mars, and, of course, how “future Martians” will one day save the Earth.

Weidel is hoping to succeed Olaf Scholz as German chancellor, but that looks unlikely to happen next month. Even so, the AfD is in second place with about 20 percent in the polls, far from being discounted as just another populist spike.

Musk, who has spoken out in favor of right-wing figures like Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage in the U.K. and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, tried to justify his zeal for the AfD—and Weidel in particular—in an opinion piece for a German newspaper last month.

Musk wrote: “The portrayal of the AfD as rightwing extremist is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Please!”

German intel agencies see it differently. The AfD has been classified as a potential extremism case at a national level since 2021.

The Daily Beast has asked Musk to clarify his position on Hitler and his views. There was no response at the time of writing.