Last month, prominent Irish far-right activist Michael O’Keeffe added a new follower to the 182,000 who already subscribed to his account on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
“Heads up to the Irish establishment, the world is watching,” he wrote above a screenshot showing that Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X and car maker Tesla, had followed his account.
It was a rare honour. Musk, a close ally of US president Donald Trump, only follows about 1,000 people. Most of those are world leaders, billionaires and prominent right-wing commentators.
O’Keeffe is now part of a select group of people with a direct line to the world’s richest man. He is also one of a small number of Irish people who interact with Musk on a regular basis.
Musk regularly shares or otherwise highlights O’Keeffe’s posts complaining about immigration into Ireland, many of which contain questionable or outright false claims.
This activity has not gone unnoticed by Irish officials who are concerned that the second most powerful person in the United States is getting his information about Ireland from extremist sources and then sharing that information with his 218 million followers.
O’Keeffe received the follow notification on January 9th, the same day he appeared at Waterford District Court charged with assaulting a local Syrian business owner. (O’Keeffe denies the charges. The alleged victim is also charged with harassment of O’Keeffe).
O’Keeffe lives in Waterford; the 40-year-old’s address was given as The Quay in Waterford city at his court appearance last month.
That appearance came at a time when Musk was preparing to take up a key role in Trump’s second administration.
Since Trump took office on January 20th, Musk has led the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) in its gutting of many sections of the US government. This week, he indicated plans to use Doge to audit US aid to Ukraine and endorsed Trump’s sidelining of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Given their small number, Musk’s Irish acquaintances seems to have an outsize influence on the billionaire. Even the idea of calling the agency Doge can be traced back to one of his most frequent correspondents, a young man from Co Cork: Barry O’Driscoll.
Last August, during the US presidential campaign, it was announced that Trump planned to bring Musk into his administration to help cut wasteful spending. In a tweet, O’Driscoll suggested calling the initiative “Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)”, a reference to the popular internet meme based on a Japanese Shiba Inu dog.
“That is the perfect name,” Musk responded a few hours later.
Forty minutes after that, Musk posted an AI-generated image of himself standing before a Doge-inscribed lectern.
Shortly after winning the election in November, Trump issued a statement officially naming Musk’s taskforce “Doge”.
Musk and O’Driscoll have spoken dozens of times, going back as far as 2021 based on what is publicly visible on X. In May 2023 O’Driscoll met Musk in person at the platform’s headquarters. Last year, he returned to the US where he met X’s chief executive Linda Yaccarino.
[ How will Elon Musk’s business empire benefit from his relationship with Trump?Opens in new window ]
With more than 400,000 followers on X, O’Driscoll is an online celebrity in his own right. His X handle (the username that appears on his page) is Sir Doge of the Coin and he describes himself as the “king of memes”.
He spends most of his time promoting Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on the dog meme. Dogecoin originally started as a joke but thanks in part to the support of Musk and O’Driscoll, grew to become a viable cryptocurrency with a total market value of €35 billion. Customers can even use Dogecoin to buy products from Tesla, Musk’s other big venture.
Much of the rest of O’Driscoll’s time is spent creating sycophantic posts about Musk and attacking his critics while also posting many, many memes.
He liberally uses the word “retard” to refer to himself and others. It’s mostly deployed in an ironic, semi-affectionate way, but not always.
“The Irish media are radical left retards,” he posted last December.
Despite his high-profile online presence, O’Driscoll takes care to protect his identity. He doesn’t use his real name online and obscures his face in any photographs he posts of himself, including those with Musk. (The Irish Times obtained unedited versions of these photographs.)
[ Elon Musk and his ‘super-geniuses’ reckon democracy is ripe for disruptionOpens in new window ]
A rare exception is an appearance on a video podcast for dog lovers in 2022 where he went by his real name and showed his face. He did not respond to a request for comment from The Irish Times.
O’Driscoll sometimes criticises immigration and praises far-right figures but, compared with some others in Musk’s orbit, his tweets are benign.
In contrast, O’Keeffe, who was previously described in the Dáil as a “white supremacist” and one of the online instigators of the Dublin riots, takes a harder line, frequently targeting immigrants or people who don’t appear to be white Irish.
His posts are squarely aimed at an international audience. In one post, he clarifies the Garda are the “Irish police”. The intended goal for O’Keeffe and those like him appears to be to catch Musk’s attention and have him amplify the post.
The more extreme the claim, the more likely Musk is to boost it. Last month, Musk endorsed and reposted a claim by O’Keeffe that “illegal immigrants” receive lesser prison sentences than Irish citizens.
The evidence was a screenshot of a 24-year-old newspaper article about an asylum seeker who was jailed for rape. The judge discounted the sentence, saying the defendant would find prison tougher as a foreigner.
“That’s messed up,” replied Musk.
In another post, O’Keeffe shared a video of a far-right election candidate who said her child was the only Irish person in their class of 30. Musk reshared the claim which has since been viewed 54 million times.
The billionaire does not check the veracity of such claims before sharing them. This week, he shared an image posted by a UK far-right account purportedly showing a “migrant mob” storming a Birmingham hospital with axes and blades. In fact, the image was a still from a Batman film.
Getting the attention of Musk can be highly lucrative. Frequent X users can sign up to share ad revenue from their posts, which is dependent on the amount of engagement they receive.
Users such as O’Keeffe and O’Driscoll also allow followers to pay €5.66 a month to receive extra content. O’Keeffe makes additional income through a fundraising site he advertises on his X profile. Publicly available information shows people donating as much as €250 at a time to O’Keeffe.
Another Irish poster who has interacted with Musk on numerous occasions is Keith O’Brien, a white nationalist who goes by the name Keith Woods on X. Like O’Keeffe, he had been previously banned from what was then Twitter before being reinstated when Musk took over the social media website in 2022.
A review of O’Brien’s posts suggests it was he who enlisted Musk in the campaign against the Irish Government’s proposed hate speech bill in 2023. The two also discussed their shared antipathy towards the Anti-Defamation League, a US organisation focused on combating anti-Semitism.
At least one person in the Irish embassy in Washington is responsible for monitoring and documenting Musk’s interactions with Irish accounts
However, O’Brien, a self-described “raging anti-Semite” who associates with well-known neo-Nazis and white supremacists, may be too extreme even for Musk. According to publicly available posts, Musk has not interacted with the Roscommon man on X since September 2023.
In response to queries, O’Brien rejected any characterisation of him “as an extremist or a hater”. He said his use of the term “antisemite” to describe himself was “an obvious joke to ridicule how haphazardly the term is thrown around”.
The Irish Times also sought comment from O’Keeffe.
Musk also appears to have also stopped interacting with Irish MMA fighter Conor McGregor. The two have not spoken publicly on X since September 2024, shortly before McGregor was found liable by a jury in a High Court civil case for the sexual assault of Nikita Hand who accused him of raping her in a Dublin hotel in 2018.
Musk had previously used the platform to encourage McGregor to run for the Irish presidency. “I think you could take them all single-handed,” he told McGregor in December 2023.
Ireland is just one of several European countries Musk has taken an interest in. In recent months he has been endorsing and amplifying far-right parties and figures from across the Continent.
He has enthusiastically thrown his support behind Germany’s far-right AFD party, which is set to make significant gains in the federal elections this weekend.
“People need to get behind the AfD or things are going to get much worse for Germany,” Musk said last month.
[ Germany votes: Far-right AfD looks to broaden its baseOpens in new window ]
Recognising the trend, some European far-right activists on the Continent have even started posting in English in the hope of grabbing Musk’s attention.
“Overall, there isn’t much strategy in the way Musk engages with right-wing accounts on X – he appears to be gravitating toward accounts that share his viewpoints, often on immigration, and then amplifying them,” said Kate Conger, New York Times reporter and author of Character Limit: How Elon Musk destroyed Twitter.
“He does this with accounts from all over the world, and his recent engagements in Germany are illustrative of how much his account can boost and broadcast others.”
Closer to home, Musk has demanded the release from prison of UK right-wing extremist and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson who has been in prison since October for contempt of court.
He has also reportedly agreed to fund Nigel Farage’s Reform Party in the UK, a prospect that set off alarm bells within the British government and prompted calls for a tightening of the rules around political donations.
Officials in Ireland are not quite as concerned. So far Musk has not explicitly backed any remotely viable political candidate or party. However, at least one person in the Irish embassy in Washington is responsible for monitoring and documenting Musk’s interactions with Irish accounts, sources said.
“It is somewhat a worry that a figure as powerful as Musk is getting his information about Ireland from less than reliable characters and then broadcasting this to millions of people,” said a Government source.
“We’re not ignorant to that.”
