After an eventful five years, the EU’s most colourful commissioner is leaving Brussels. From fighting Elon Musk to buying Covid vaccines, abusing his boss to announcing the death of NATO, Euronews takes you through some career highlights.
In a surprise move, European Commissioner Thierry Breton today (16 September) announced his resignation, following an apparent call by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for France to change nominees.
Breton is leaving office in a blaze of fury, alleging “questionable governance” under von der Leyen’s leadership, and that she went behind his back to get French President Emmanuel Macron to find an alternative candidate.
Breton, a former private-sector CEO and minister who began as EU internal market commissioner in 2019 after the sudden withdrawal of MEP Sylvie Goulard, made plenty waves in office.
His portfolio expanded widely, covering topics from tech rules to critical materials and from covid vaccines to space laws.
But he had plenty of personal vendettas too: taking aim at people from big tech chiefs to his own colleagues, including his own boss.
Here’s a few of his most memorable moments.
Fighting Elon Musk
Breton most recently made headlines because of an online spat with Elon Musk, owner of X, the social network formally known as Twitter — and his contretemps with the world’s richest man was brewing for a long time.
Breton went to Austin, Texas, in 2022 to discuss the EU’s new online platform rules, the Digital Services Act (DSA), with Musk in person — but it seems their friendly relationship didn’t last long.
“In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” Breton said a few months later in a social media post on — where else — Twitter, sending Musk a clear warning about his newly purchased network whose logo was a bird.
One year later, in December 2023, Breton’s team was investigating X for non-compliance with the EU’s DSA, which binds big online platforms.
In August of this year, Breton also very publicly reminded Musk of his DSA obligations, just as Musk was interviewing US Republican candidate Donald Trump live on his platform.
Breton’s decision was heavily criticised and seen by some as interference in a foreign election — and turned out to be not to have been coordinated with his colleagues at the Commission.
It also gained Breton an expletive-laden reply from Musk.
Breaking the mining taboo
In 2022, Breton urged Europe to mine more critical raw materials, to ensure it was keeping pace in the vital resources needed for electric vehicle batteries and other technology.
The bloc was depending too much on imports as demand soared, and geopolitics became increasingly unstable, Breton said.
ADVERTISEMENTThe EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act sets a target for the EU to process at least 40% of its annual consumption by 2030 for any raw materials deemed critical or strategic.
Yet mining in Europe is “still a taboo at present,” Breton said at the time.
Monsieur Vaccins
Despite health never being in his portfolio, Breton took a major role managing the Covid-19 crisis.
In February 2021, he was named to head up the Commission’s “Task Force for Industrial Scale-up of COVID-19 vaccines”, as production faltered across Europe.
ADVERTISEMENTHis strong ties with business leaders may have helped as he sought out new partnerships and map industrial sites to boost production — leading to him being dubbed “Monsieur Vaccins”.
But Breton accompanied his task with plenty of newsworthy stunts too. He pushed Netflix boss Reed Hastings to cut bandwidth use as a spike in online meetings suddenly clogged the internet, and controversially blocked vaccine exports to Australia.
“NATO is dead”
In 2020, Breton met Donald Trump in Davos, Switzerland — and Breton’s account of the meeting, told years later, sent shockwaves through Europe.
The Republican allegedly told the French Commissioner, “You need to understand that if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and support you,” before adding, according to Breton, “NATO is dead.”
ADVERTISEMENTThat revelation sparked a series of reactions from European leaders worried over the lack of an independent defence strategy, including from the EU’s foreign policy and defence chief, Josep Borrell. President of the European Council Charles Michel said that “reckless statements” about NATO “only serve Putin’s interests.”
A telco shakeup
One of Breton’s legacies is a planned overhaul of telecom rules — although it still hasn’t happened yet.
Breton, himself a former CEO of France Télécom, was the mastermind behind the long-awaited Digital Networks Act, set to be presented by the incoming Commission.
The initial discussions and public consultations – which closed last June – led to a heated debate between telecom operators and streaming services.
ADVERTISEMENTBreton – who has been criticised for being too much in favour of the telecom industry – said in a blog post that telecom operators need scale and agility to adapt to innovations like the cloud, but that national markets hold them back.
“Too many regulatory barriers to a true telecoms single market still exist, on spectrum acquisition, consolidation, legacy networks, security, and so on,” Breton wrote.
He questioned whether the telecoms sector can fund the necessary investment, and cites fragmentation as a reason for the shortfall. Member states, in turn, asked for proof for the need for new rules, and for evidence that backed the Commission’s numbers.
Piepergate
Tensions between Breton and von der Leyen, although no secret in the Brussels bubble, broke out into the open in April 2024.
ADVERTISEMENTVon der Leyen had proposed to appoint MEP Markus Pieper, from her own German centre-right party, to a lucrative Commission post as envoy for small and medium-sized business (SMEs).
Breton, responsible for EU SME policy, led the internal backlash, supported by fellow Commissioners Josep Borrell, Paolo Gentiloni, and Nicolas Schmit, who criticised the lack of transparency and collegiality in the decision-making process.
The idea that von der Leyen had passed over two well-qualified female candidates for the €17,000-per-month role also sparked outrage in the European Parliament, where MEPs accused her of political cronyism.
Under mounting pressure, Pieper announced his withdrawal just one day before he was due to take up office, a move Breton immediately praised, and the post remains vacant.
ADVERTISEMENTChallenging his own boss
Arguing with Elon Musk is one thing: fighting your own boss is quite another.
Such fears didn’t hold Breton back, though.
In March, Breton questioned whether von der Leyen had support from her own European People’s Party to serve as a Commission president for another term, after EPP members chose her as their lead candidate by 400 votes to 89.
“Despite her qualities, Ursula von der Leyen was outvoted by her own party … The EPP itself does not seem to believe in its candidate,” Breton wrote on X, questioning whether the centre-right party should lead Europe for five more years.
ADVERTISEMENTIt was, to say the least, a questionable move for Breton’s career, but also raised ethical concerns, given the Commission’s internal guidelines on using social media accounts for personal campaigning.
