Wealthy Guys? Musk is Pals with One of the German “Wealthy Guys” Who Own Politico!

My daily dose of feeling that I must live in an alternative universe and that the real one does not matter to anyone was provided by the Truth Social post below by the President of the United States Donald Trump.

Wealthy guys?!? And Trump is expecting Elon Musk of all people to claw this money back via DOGE?? Well, as a matter of fact, Politico is owned by Germany’s Springer media group, which is in turn indeed almost entirely owned by just two “wealthy guys”. Never mind that one of the two “wealthy guys” is in fact a woman: Friede Springer, the widow of the company’s founder Axel Springer. It’s the other wealthy guy, CEO Matthias Döpfner, I want to talk about. Döpfner and Friede Springer are reported to control 98% of the company’s shares, roughly equally split between them.

The below photo shows none other than Elon Musk with Döpfner at Springer headquarters in Berlin in December 2020.

Musk was on hand to receive the company’s annual Axel Springer Award. He used the occasion, in what seems for all the world to have been an entirely scripted exchange with Döpfner, to sing the praises of mRNA technology. See below. As my regular readers will know, Musk is himself invested in mRNA tech in partnership with CureVac and the German state.

Germany’s then Minister of Health Jens Spahn was also on hand, and just three months later (sic!) Döpfner would be presenting the company’s 2021 award to none other than everyone’s — especially the German government’s — favorite mRNA innovators Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci of BioNTech!

Döpfner is also reported to have suggested to Musk that he buy Twitter, incidentally. See the article from Springer’s own Business Insider here.

Shouldn’t someone tell Donald Trump that these guys know one another?

The ostentatiously displayed Star of David in Döpfner’s office is a story in its own right, by the way, and a can of worms that I don’t particularly want to open at the moment. But since I have seen Twitter users citing it as proof of Musk’s hobnobbing with a notorious “Zionist”, I feel I had to mention it. Yes, Springer’s German publications are reputedly “pro-Israel”, and being ostensibly and often indeed ostentatiously “pro-Israel” is, of course, raison d'État in Germany.

But one may well wonder if that commitment is anything more than precisely pro forma — among other things, in light of today’s headline in the Brussels Signal: “Politico owners Axel Springer hit as board member Varsavsky resigns over its ‘Hamas support’”.