(Bloomberg) — Elon Musk’s X social network was slapped with a lower-than-expected €120 million ($140 million) fine for violating the European Union’s controversial content-moderation law, in a move still set to raise tensions with the White House over free speech and tech regulation.
In doling out the first ever penalty under the Digital Services Act, the European Commission concluded that X’s paid-for blue tick symbol misled users, the platform stonewalled giving researchers access to data and it failed to properly set up an advertising repository. The fine wasn’t based on the revenues of Musk’s vast private business empire in space, infrastructure and neuroscience that regulators had considered targeting.
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The fine is a tiny fraction of Musk’s $467 billion wealth and comes after months of intense pressure from Donald Trump, who has repeatedly attacked the bloc’s harsh fines and attempts to regulate American tech companies. Despite the relatively light penalty, the standoff exposes a deepening divide over digital sovereignty and what constitutes fundamental rights like free speech and privacy in the internet age.
“The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage,” US Vice President JD Vance said in a post on X before the fine was announced.
Spokespeople for X and the White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
While the probe began in December 2023, it took on more political significance as Musk backed Trump’s campaign and was a close adviser to the president as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency for several months at the start of his current term.
“This has nothing to do with censorship, this is about transparency,” EU digital chief Henna Virkkunen said at a briefing Friday with reporters, adding that the precedent will help speed up future investigations. “It took time because our teams wanted to make sure that we had a strong legal basis.”
X has 60 days to come up with solutions to fix the issues and 90 days to implement the changes, or it could face additional fines, a commission official said.
The fine will be delivered to Musk and xAI, his artificial intelligence lab that competes with OpenAI that acquired the X platform earlier this year, according to the official.
