EPA
Elon Musk has been very involved in British affairs lately
In 2012, Elon Musk had just taken a business trip to London and Oxford. “Just got back… Met a lot of interesting people,” he wrote on Twitter. “I really love Britain!”
Fast forward to 2024, and Musk's views on Britain are a little different.
“Civil war is inevitable”… “Britain is at the mercy of Stalin”… “The British people have had enough of a tyrannical police state”.
These are just some of his recent comments on X, as he renamed the site after purchasing it.
He has repeatedly fallen out with politicians including Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, has amplified right-wing and far-right voices online and is in talks to donate to Reform UK, says leader of the Nigel Farage party.
So why has Musk's relationship with America's closest ally apparently deteriorated and what, if anything, does he hope to accomplish?
We'd love to ask him ourselves, but he hasn't responded to our interview requests.
Its X chronology, however, offers some clues.
The self-proclaimed “Chief Troll Officer” often exaggerates ambiguously, without knowing whether he is sincere or ironic.
When he writes: “Is it Britain or the Soviet Union? he doesn't really mean that Britain is a totalitarian communist state, but that's also the case. Often, he reposts content with a single word – “interesting” – or an emoji, rather than going into detail.
In recent years, however, Musk watchers have noticed that the kinds of things he promotes to his 200 million followers tend to come from one particular place: a libertarian, “anti-woke” worldview. , opposed to progressives and centrists.
“What is happening in the UK?
This shift was made explicit during last summer's riots, following the horrific murders of three girls at a dance class in Southport, northwest England.
False rumors about the attacker circulated on X, notably through far-right accounts that had not been banned since Musk took over the company two years earlier.
As a protest turned violent and riots broke out, Sir Keir issued a warning: “To the big social media companies and those who run them, violent unrest, clearly instigated online, is also a crime.
“This is happening on your premises and the law must be respected everywhere.”
Musk responded with one word: “Insane.”
PA Media
Musk made several comments about the Southport riots last summer
He later declared that “civil war is inevitable” and broadcast a false message from the leader of a far-right party, claiming that Sir Keir was planning to build detention camps for rioters in the Falkland Islands. By the time he deleted the post, it had been viewed more than a million times.
Musk also criticized Britain's “prison overcrowding situation” on Joe Rogan's podcast – watched 19 million times on YouTube – saying we should “make Orwell fiction again”, a reference to George Orwell's writings on dystopian society.
While free speech isn't Musk's only big issue – he also seems to care a lot about existential questions around the future of humanity – it's a topic that Tesla owner SpaceX and X came back several times.
Just a few weeks ago, in response to a tweet from a right-wing American influencer making an exaggerated claim about a last government's report on radicalization, he commented: “What is happening in the UK?
And he may be planning to do more than tweet. He was recently pictured with Farage and Reform UK treasurer Nick Candy amid reports he is preparing to donate a large sum of money to the party.
Why Musk cares about Britain
Musk's interest in British business may reflect his own evolving political beliefs. He previously described himself as a centrist and even donated to Hillary Clinton's campaign, but he now talks a lot about the “woke mind virus.”
Based on interviews he has given and a recent biography, the transition of one of his children from a boy to a girl – and that child, Vivian Wilson, subsequently cutting him out of his life – seems be one of the key turning points.
Winston Marshall, a former Mumford & Sons guitarist turned podcast host and right-wing political commentator whose father co-owns the GB News television channel, speculates that Musk might fight because “he cares very deeply about the U.K. “.
“Britain is the birthplace of liberal democracy and many of the great philosophies that underpin America,” Marshall said.
“So he looks to the UK and sees what has been happening for several years, but now in a crescendo after the August riots, with many, many people sentenced to long prison terms for Facebook memes in certain cases.”
“Facebook memes” seem harmless enough, but these examples include – for example – a three-month prison sentence for a person who posted a meme with the caption “riot (expletive)” on a Facebook group with “riot/protest ” in the name during the Southport Troubles.
Reuters
Musk meets former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at AI summit in November 2023
Some wonder if the mogul is really as committed to free speech as he claims.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, which reviews social media companies, criticized Musk's tenure at X – prompting the mogul to sue, accusing the organization of misusing data and scaring off advertisers. The case was thrown out by a US judge.
Its CEO Imran Ahmed called the incident “revealing the mindset of a man who simply cannot understand that freedom of expression is a freedom afforded to everyone, not just him.”
Other critics pointed out that Musk was careful not to criticize the president of China, a country in which Tesla has huge business interests, despite Beijing's well-documented censorship culture.
Its commercial stakes are much lower in Great Britain, but the country could still affect its results via the online safety law, adopted by Parliament at the end of 2023. It will allow the regulator Ofcom to impose huge fines on Internet companies. social media if they are found to have certain types of illegal content on their platforms.
Andrew Chadwick, professor of political communications at Loughborough University, says that while some of the bill's provisions are uncontroversial, “where it gets a little trickier is when this illegal content gets mixed up with what we might call the type of disinformation or misinformation that we see circulating on a daily basis on social media platforms.”
This could include “violations of public order aggravated by racial or religious reasons or incitement to violence”, he says.
The law comes with potentially heavy penalties – a fine of up to 10% of eligible global turnover.
Could it be that Musk is worried about Britain eating into some of X's revenue – or even, as the law allows in certain circumstances, blocking access to the site in the UK?
Defenders of the law argue that it has nothing to do with censoring free speech. Gawain Towler, former press chief of Reform UK, says that while Musk may not have “in-depth knowledge of all the details of the backbench committee”, he “sees the big picture” – what reform activists and others describe as a creeping culture of censorship. .
“You don't always have to focus on the trees. And I think Musk sees the forest very well,” he adds.
No one can read the thoughts of the richest man in the world.
But it's clear that Musk has channeled his vast wealth into influence and now exports his values — including a mainstream American vision of free speech and largely unfettered capitalism — around the world.
And one thing is certain: he is not done with the United Kingdom yet.
