PARIS — Europeans are quickly learning a lesson that Americans internalized years ago: They ignore Elon Musk at their peril.

Until recently, Europe’s main challenge from Musk was mustering the means to enforce tech and trade rules on a billionaire mogul whose firms’ annual revenue exceeds British or German yearly defense spending.

The issue now is whether Musk can ride roughshod over European politics, dominating them as U.S. corporations dominated Central America’s so-called banana republics more than a century ago.

Or, more bluntly: Can Musk manipulate Germany or Britain as the United Fruit Co. once subjugated Honduras?

That should be a preposterous question, given that Berlin commands the world’s third-largest economy, and London the sixth. Yet with an escalating bout of dyspeptic tweets, the world’s richest man — who also happens to control a Tesla car factory near Berlin that is on course to dwarf any German Volkswagen or Porsche plant — has plunged both countries’ politics into turmoil.

The more urgent example is Germany, where Musk has intervened just weeks before its federal elections. Even more extraordinary, he has thrown his weight behind an anti-American, Russia-loving, climate-change-denying populist party whose leaders include Nazi apologists and antisemites, along with........

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