Elon Musk wants to take legal action against ZDF. Image: keystone
Elon Musk wants to take legal action because of ZDF’s reporting on statements he made. The broadcaster speaks of a “misunderstanding”.
June 16, 2026, 04:18June 16, 2026, 04:34
Christoph Cöln / t-online
The US entrepreneur Elon Musk has announced that he will take legal action against the broadcaster over ZDF’s reporting on statements he made in the wake of the xenophobic protests in Northern Ireland. “Legal action is being taken against ZDF because of its outrageous lies,” Musk said on Monday evening in his online service X. Previously, the German journalist Julian Reichelt had criticized a ZDF program on
Last week, Musk used his online service The X owner had joined Robinson’s calls for protests across the UK and wrote to his 240 million followers on X: “Only if we protest repeatedly and loudly will anything change.”
In view of Musk’s statement, Reichelt described ZDF as a “fortress of lies”. Musk did not “call for the hunt for migrants,” as the broadcaster claimed, the publicist explained. Rather, these are “propaganda lies”.
Protests in Northern Ireland were accompanied by right-wing extremists
Reichelt later shared a photo on X that presumably shows ZDF’s response to Reichelt’s allegations. The statement says that the wording was “imprecise and therefore misleading”. Reichelt, on the other hand, spoke of “blatant lies” and called for ZDF to be “smashed”. Musk responded to Reichelt’s post by announcing that he would take legal action against the German broadcaster.
There have been violent anti-immigrant protests near Belfast on several evenings since last week. The police used water cannons against demonstrators who were throwing stones. Vehicles and houses were set on fire. Right-wing extremist activists called for the demonstrations. The trigger was the publication of a video of a brutal knife attack, for which a Sudanese migrant is blamed.
Reichelt is editor-in-chief of the online portal “Nius”, which is classified as right-wing populist. He was editor-in-chief of the “Bild” newspaper until autumn 2021. Elon Musk always stands out because he regularly shares content that uses anti-immigrant or nationalist narratives. He not only partially supports right-wing extremist parties such as the AfD, but also convicted right-wing extremists such as the British political activist Tommy Robinson.
The media-critical non-profit organization “Center for Countering Digital Hate” based in London announced that the trillionaire Musk shared Robertson’s posts on X and thereby generated 64 million views. According to the researchers, this was crucial in fueling the protests in Belfast and other Northern Irish cities.
Musk: “No more guilt”
Musk has repeatedly caused a stir in the past with controversial appearances and statements. In 2024, he was allowed to publish a guest article in “Welt am Sonntag”, which belongs to Springer Verlag, in which he made untested claims about Germany and relatively unambiguously called for the AfD to be elected. SPD politician Matthais Miersch said at the time that it was “unacceptable that foreign billionaires are trying to influence our political landscape and in doing so support parties that undermine our democratic values.”
Musk also caused a stir at Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025 with a gesture similar to the Hitler salute. Recently, X has been posting more and more posts about the white race. Observers counted more than 600 posts related to white supremacy ideology in the past few months alone.
“Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” wrote the Tesla and SpaceX CEO in January in a post that received more than 17 million views and 150,000 likes. In February, Musk explained that “there has been unrelenting hatred and toxic propaganda against any white person, heterosexual person or man in the West for more than a decade.” And he added: “No more guilt. ENOUGH.”
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