Elon Musk's X Fined €120 Million By EU In First Content-Law Penalty

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 failed to properly set up an advertising repository, it said in a statement Friday. The fine wasn’t based on the revenues of his vast private business empire in space, infrastructure and neuroscience that regulators had considered targeting. 

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.

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 was the first non-compliance decision” under the DSA and the precedent will help speed up future investigations, EU digital chief Henna Virkkunen said at a briefing Friday with reporters. “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. 

Under the DSA, which took effect in 2023, the bloc can slap online platforms with fines of as much as 6% of their yearly global revenue for failing to tackle illegal content and disinformation or follow transparency rules. The commission official said the fine was based on the “principle of proportionality” rather than revenues.

The commission had previously indicated that revenue from Musk’s entire private business empire could be the basis for a fine. SpaceX is the biggest part of Musk’s private businesses, with projected 2025 revenue of $15.5 billion. That compares to about $2.3 billion in advertising sales X is expected to bring in this year, according to Emarketer.

The EU is also probing several other major US tech firms — including Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, and Meta Platforms Inc. — under the DSA and the Digital Markets Act, which aims to prevent companies from abusing their dominance. 

The bloc recently fined Apple and Meta under its digital antitrust rules €500 million and €200 million, respectively. It has also issued costly penalties against other firms, including more than $8 billion in fines against Google and a separate order for Apple to pay Ireland back taxes of €13 billion under traditional competition law.

The EU still has to make decisions on several other potential DSA breaches that were part of the X probe and could result in additional future fines. Investigations into more serious concerns about X’s policing of illegal content, election disinformation and use of Community Notes haven’t yet reached the commission’s preliminary-findings stage.

Musk has said in the past that he intends to challenge any fine in court, which could delay the payment of the fine for several years.