Virkkunen on Tuesday took a quintessential Brussels approach to the issue, sticking to her script and spelling out the same, legalistic answer all evening: Any company operating in Europe must abide by its rules. She said she wanted to speed up the investigations under the DSA, but the work needed to be “evidence-based.”

She stopped short of any comment on how Musk has failed to stop misinformation and harmful content from spreading on X — a big contrast with incumbent EU Commission Vice President Věra Jourová, who called Musk a “promoter of evil” only a month ago and told POLITICO he “is not able to recognize good and evil.”

Dodging the Musk questions, Virkkunen also underscored a conundrum she’ll face in the coming years. One half of her mandate is to ensure European security, for which EU countries are heavily reliant on the U.S. The other half is to boost European “tech sovereignty,” which often means going head to head with American tech giants dominating social media, cloud, AI and other key technologies — and risking rubbing the U.S. the wrong way. 

A moment of truth will be when EU services wrap up their probe into Musk’s X and its content moderation policies. 

X was charged by the EU in July for breaching those rules over verified users, advertising transparency and giving researchers access to data. The Commission is currently preparing a fine that could go up to 6 percent of X’s annual global revenue — or even higher, as the Commission is considering calculating the penalty from income derived from Musk’s other companies, including SpaceX and Neuralink.

2. The great tech gap is clear

Virkkunen had no problem pointing to Europe’s many shortcomings in 5G and fiber rollout, artificial intelligence, microchips, cloud capabilities and digital skills, warning repeatedly that the bloc was “lagging behind” and faced a “widening” gap.