DOJ Formally Asks to Join Musk's Fight to Kill EU's $136.5 Million Fine on X

Since the European Commission fined X €120 million ($136.5 million) in December 2025, the case has moved from Brussels bureaucracy to a full-blown transatlantic legal fight. On Thursday, September 24, the U.S. Department of Justice formally asked the EU's General Court to let it intervene on Elon Musk's side, backing X's effort to have the fine thrown out entirely.

Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, who heads the DOJ's Civil Division, didn't mince words. "The European Commission inappropriately attempted to expand its regulatory authority to reach American companies not present or operating within its jurisdiction," he said, according to Reuters. He added the U.S. "will not tolerate the European Commission engaging in regulatory overreach to try and control American engines of innovation and economic growth."

Brussels ran a two-year investigation under its Digital Services Act and found X violated transparency rules, used "deceptive design" in its paid blue-checkmark verification system, and denied outside researchers access to public platform data, according to Gulf News. That's the first sanction ever issued under the DSA, a law that took full effect in 2024 and can carry penalties up to 6% of a company's global annual revenue.

President Trump called the fine "censorship." That's a stretch worth flagging. The commission's own findings, as reported by Gulf News, center on data transparency and a misleading verification badge, not on what content X allows or removes. Whether that distinction matters legally is exactly what the General Court will now have to sort out, with the DOJ weighing in as a third party.

The fight has already had real diplomatic consequences. Gulf News reports that a few weeks after Trump's censorship comment, the State Department sanctioned five people, including former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, who oversaw the DSA's rollout. That's a notable escalation, moving this from a corporate legal dispute into an active point of friction between Washington and Brussels.

X's own conduct complicates the narrative that this is a straightforward standoff. The company filed its appeal against the fine in February 2026, arguing the decision violated its due process rights. But in July 2026, the European Commission accepted X's plan to fix the violations anyway, according to Gulf News, including wider researcher access to advertising data, subject to an independent audit. X also quietly relabeled its blue checkmarks "premium" instead of the verification framing regulators objected to.

So X is suing to kill the fine while simultaneously doing what the fine demanded. It's a company hedging: comply now to avoid further penalties, keep fighting the underlying fine on principle and cost.

The European Commission's position, as characterized by multiple outlets including CNBC and Reuters, is that its laws "do not target any nationality" and are simply defending "digital and democratic standards" the EU says should be the global benchmark. The DSA also applies to European platforms and non-American companies like TikTok. But it's also true that X is the first and, so far, only company hit with a DSA fine of this size, which is exactly the kind of fact that fuels Washington's argument that American tech is being singled out. Neither side's claim is proven or disproven by that fact alone. It's a fair question the case doesn't resolve.

Musk's financial and political ties to Trump are impossible to separate from the optics here. He's backed Republican candidates and Trump's own campaigns, and now has the full weight of the DOJ arguing his company's case in a foreign court. Critics of X, including rights advocates cited by Reuters, have separately flagged rising hate speech, misinformation, and nonconsensual sexual content on the platform since Musk's 2022 purchase. These concerns exist independently of this specific DSA violation and aren't the subject of this fine.

The EU's General Court has not set a date for oral arguments or a ruling. Until it rules, the fine stands unpaid and unenforced, and X keeps implementing the compliance measures Brussels already accepted in July. Whether the court grants the DOJ's request to intervene at all is itself an open procedural question that could take months to resolve.