In the last 48 hours, the world has witnessed a moment that may reshape global politics, technology, and the balance of power for years to come.
December 5: The European Union issued its first-ever Digital Services Act penalty — a €120 million fine against X.
December 7: The owner of X — who is also a senior advisor to the U.S. President — publicly declared:
“The EU should be abolished. I’m not joking.”
Millions of views. Hundreds of thousands of likes. And the momentum is still rising.
This wasn’t a simple regulatory dispute.
It was a direct confrontation between a political union of 450 million people with €17 trillion in combined GDP… and a single individual who:
Owns the world’s largest digital public square
Advises the President of the United States
Controls satellites and global connectivity
Builds the rockets that power space infrastructure
And can move markets with just one sentence
The EU has no app store to threaten, no infrastructure to weaponize, no economic chokehold to apply. Its only real tool was regulation — and the person they targeted just told 600 million monthly users that the EU should no longer exist.
Brussels now faces a three-way trap:
If they escalate: they reinforce his narrative of EU overreach.
If they retreat: they signal that their regulations can be broken.
If they ignore him: they risk looking irrelevant.
There’s no clean escape.
The debate is no longer whether platforms have too much power —
The real question is whether anyone still has the authority to regulate them.
We are witnessing a live collision between 20th-century institutions and 21st-century technological empires.
And the tribunal?
The defendant has simply dismissed it.
What comes next has no precedent.
