Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella has told Elon Musk to stop interfering in the country’s politics, after the tech billionaire criticised an Italian court for blocking the transfer of migrants to detention centres in Albania built through a controversial immigration deal.

Musk, who has been picked to jointly lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” by US President-elect Donald Trump in his incoming administration, wrote on Tuesday on X that “these judges need to go”.

He was referring to judges in Rome who had ruled against Italian PM Giorgia Meloni’s initiative to outsource the processing and detention of some asylum seekers to Albania.

In a later post, the Tesla owner wrote: "This is unacceptable. Do the people of Italy live in a democracy or does an unelected autocracy make the decisions?”