French president says joint EU debt is essential to economically compete with US and China
France’s President Emmanuel Macron speaks during a G20 Leaders’ Summit plenary session at the Nasrec Expo Centre in Johannesburg on November 22, 2025. Photo: AFP
French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday cited state support for Elon Musk’s Starlink as an argument for public investment in European industry, provoking a response from the world’s richest man after calling him “over-subsidised”.
Speaking at an industrial summit in the Belgian city of Antwerp, Macron argued for a “Buy European” competitiveness approach, and for massive investment partly financed through joint borrowing by the European Union.
“If you look at the US, you have a lot of private money… but you have a lot of public money” too, he said.
“Everybody is fascinated by Starlink… But if you are lucid, Mr Musk is probably one of the guys in the world who has had in his pockets the most… billions of dollars of the American taxpayers in order to be subsidised,” he added.
Also Read: ‘Addiction is profitable’: Meta, Google stand trial over social media effects on children
“Elon Musk is first an oversubsidised guy by the federal agency in the US,” he said, calling the approach “super-innovative”.
The French leader earlier said that more joint EU debt was the “only way” to compete on an economic level with rivals such as the US and China.
Musk quickly hit back on X, the social media platform he owns, at Macron’s remarks about him, responding that European states subsidised their industries more than the US did.
“If you add up all the government funding Tesla and SpaceX have ever received, it is only about 1% of the combined value of the companies,” he said.
“In contrast, if you do that with US and European major aerospace companies, the government money they have received *exceeds* 100% of their value!”
At the beginning of February, French police raided the offices of Elon Musk’s social media network X, and prosecutors ordered the tech billionaire to face questions in a widening investigation, amid growing scrutiny of the platform by authorities across Europe.
The raid by the Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime unit and Musk’s summoning — which could further increase tensions between Europe and the US over Big Tech and free speech — are linked to a year-long investigation into suspected abuse of algorithms and fraudulent data extraction by X or its executives.
In a statement, the Paris prosecutor’s office said it had broadened the scope of its investigation following complaints over the functioning of Grok.
The French probe will now also investigate alleged complicity in the “detention and diffusion” of images of a child-pornographic nature and the violation of a person’s image rights with sexually explicit deepfakes, among other potential crimes.
