Elon Musk Spent His Christmas Holiday Getting Mad Online and in a German Newspaper

The days between Christmas and the New Year are a listless, liminal time. You can catch up with family, make your mind a sunless space with video games and TV, and eat all the food leftover from the holidays. Elon Musk, the richest man who ever lived and the father of at least 12 children, is spending this time getting big-mad online about visas and publishing an op-ed in a German newspaper.

Where to even start.

In the days before Christmas, a little war broke out among the MAGA faithful and the tech billionaires who helped Trump win the election. The problem was H1-B Visas. You see, immigrant Elon Musk thinks that Americans are lazy and entitled. To help it prosper, they want to bring in more highly skilled tech workers on H1-B Visas.

“A culture that venerates Cory from ‘Boy Meets World,’ or Zach & Slater over Screech in ‘Saved by the Bell,’ or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in ‘Family Matters,’ will not produce the best engineers,” DOGE co-chair Ramaswamy wrote in a Tweet on December 26, a day most of us are so full of holiday meat that we can not move.

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if…

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 26, 2024

Ramaswamy and Musk then spent several days fighting their followers on X, the Everything App. Musk tossed around bans and recriminations with gusto in the days after Christmas, which I assume cut into his time with Path of Exile 2. Sad. A post on the day after Christmas summed up what had happened. The post said Americans were stupid. Musk agreed with it, then deleted his agreement. He said that the “hateful, unrepentant racists” should be removed from the Republic Party.

Good luck with that.

As Musk was defending himself from the trolls he’d fostered on the website he purchased for $44 billion, the world also learned of Adrian Dittmann, a man many think may be Musk.

Dittmann is a bluecheck X account that loves to defend Musk. Dittmann’s account has been around since 2021, and it’s spent a lot of that time going to bat for the embattled billionaire. The pair first appeared together in a Twitter space back in 2023. They repeated the performance during the H1-B visa dustup.

The thing is, Dittmann sounds and acts exactly like Elon Musk. The account seemingly only exists to inflate Musk’s ego and defend his various positions. When both of them are in the same virtual space, it’s impossible to tell them apart. This has led to allegations that Dittmann is an alt-account of Musk’s, something that even the estranged billionaire’s daughter believes.

The truth of Dittmann is impossible to know. This is either Musk running an alt account and boosting himself or it’s a weirdo who loves Musk so much that he’s doing an impression of him, modeling his behavior on Musk, and spending the holiday defending him online. Either possibility is too horrifying to contemplate in these strange and wandering days between Christmas and New Year.

Did you know that Germany has a parliamentary election coming up? Musk knows. Germany’s government is in crisis and the coalition that was ruling it has collapsed. At the end of February, Germans will decide the future of the country. Musk would like that future to be a hard-right turn.

The billionaire squeezed in one final controversy before the new year when he published an op-ed in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper that endorsed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Musk said that Germany is on the brink of an “economic and cultural collapse” and that AfD was the country’s “last spark of hope.”

The AfD is a party that bumbles its way into a Nazi-related controversy every few weeks. It would also, presumably, be good for Musk’s business interests abroad. Hence why he wrote the op-ed. Musk’s endorsement in the paper was so scandalous that Welt am Sonntag’s editor resigned in protest.

It’s impossible to know if any of this will matter come February when Germany votes, but it does point to Musk attempting to flex his political muscle outside of the United States. He first endorsed AfD on the day before Christmas. I wonder what he’ll do when he learns about the hateful, unrepentant racists in the ranks of the AfD.

The world’s richest man went into 2025 with the same energy he’d cultivated in 2024. While the rest of us enjoyed time with our families, finished up one final draft before seeing a Nosferatu matinee, or caught up with old friends, Musk was fighting people on the internet. The holidays are hard on some of us. Musk’s solution seems to be to post through it.