Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz surprised many as he called out billionaire Elon Musk by name in a rare outburst last night, blasting his interventions in the German election campaign as "disgusting".
The CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX,Musk, has repeatedly thrown his weight behind Germany's far-right AfD party.
Over the weekend, he joined the party's campaign launch event via video link, telling supporters that there was "frankly too much of a focus on past guilt" in Germany and that the country needed to "move beyond" it.
Scholz told journalists on the sidelines of a campaign event in Berlin on Tuesday evening:
“I disagree completely with Elon Musk and what he is doing, I’m so angry about Elon Musk intervening for the far right and Elon Musk also not acting adequately to this killing of so many Jews… this is the historic responsibility we will continue to take in the future as well".
Musk's intervention came just a day before Germany commemorated the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp in Auschwitz.
Scholz noted that media owners had been trying to influence German politics since "the 19th century", but said the novelty of Musk's approach was that he was trying to promote "right-wing politicians all over Europe."
"And this is really disgusting, and it is not good for the democratic development in all the European Union," Scholz added.
His comments marked an escalation after he called Musk's interventions "unacceptable" and a danger to the "democratic development of Europe" earlier this month, but stopped short of naming Musk specifically.
