In 2012, the Tesla tycoon Elon Musk took a Boris bike on a tour around London, bathing in the Olympics love-in, declaring to his Twitter followers that “I really like Britain!”
Musk had good reason to be pleased that year, having made his first appearance on the prestigious Forbes Billionaire List – with a modest £1.58 billion fortune.
Twelve years later, Musk’s fortune is valued at $316.5 billion (£250 billion), thanks to Tesla becoming the world’s largest car company and SpaceX becoming the planet’s leading space launch provider. But, jarringly, his valuation of the UK appears to have gone into reverse gear.
The South-African born tycoon has used the social media platform that he bought in 2022 to warn, during the riots earlier this year, that civil war in the UK was “inevitable” and attack “Two-Tier Keir” Starmer and the UK repeatedly.
At the same time, Starmer’s government was accusing social media companies of adding fuel to the fire during the riots. Ofcom, the media regulator, said there was an “increased risk” of such sites being used to “stir up hatred” and “provoke violence”.
On Wednesday, it emerged that MPs on the Commons science and technology committee, chaired by Labour’s Chi Onwurah, intended to summon Musk for questioning over the spread of disinformation on X, formerly Twitter. He retorted: “They will be summoned to the United States of America to explain their censorship and threats to American citizens.”
The skirmishes between Musk and Labour that started in the summer appear to have been unhelpful for Starmer’s relationship with the man who has become one of Donald Trump’s closest lieutenants.
On Tuesday, Lord Mandelson, tipped to become the next UK ambassador to Washington, and one of Labour’s savviest operators, warned: “[Musk] is a sort of technological, industrial, commercial phenomenon. And it would be unwise, in my view, for Britain to ignore him. You cannot pursue these feuds. You can’t afford to do it. We should try and kick it into touch as soon as possible.”
But Musk, who will lead Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, isn’t the only member of the president-elect’s team to take a dim view of today’s Britain. Trump’s allies appear to view Britain as a cautionary tale of what happens if governments attempt to bear down on free speech – and of the effects of mass migration.
In July, JD Vance, Trump’s pick for vice-president, said: “I have to beat up on the UK,” and claimed that “since Labour… took over [the UK would be] the first truly Islamist country to get a nuclear weapon.” Last month, Vance said: “London doesn’t feel fully English to me anymore, right?”
Labour took Vance’s initial remarks as an attack on Britain’s diversity, with James Murray, the Treasury minister, saying that “in Britain, we’re very proud of our diversity”. Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, also responded: “We won votes across all different communities, across the whole of the country, and we’re interested in governing on behalf of Britain and also working with our international allies.”
And it appears that the scale of illegal migration to the UK might be influencing Musk’s views too, both of Labour and modern Britain. In September, in a possible indication of how he may view Labour, he tweeted: “Massive illegal immigration will ensure permanent one-party rule in America, just as it has done in California.
“Since the Democratic Party is soft on crime, it is also strongly favored by criminals, so their perverse, but very real, incentive is to maximize criminal immigration. Once you understand the incentives, the behaviors are easy to predict.”
The irony is that, prior to his recent criticism, the evidence of Musk’s fondness for the UK is manifold.
‘Margaret Thatcher was like my English Nana’
Indeed, in April 2013, Musk revealed that he was a fan of Margaret Thatcher. He wrote: “Always admired Margaret Thatcher – she was tough, but sensible & fair, much like my English Nana.”
He added: “Britain went from dreary to Great again.”
Musk’s “English Nana” was Cora Amelia Robinson, who was born in Liverpool and married Elon’s South African grandfather, Walter Henry James Musk.
Musk emigrated to Canada from South Africa in 1989 but eventually moved to California’s Silicon Valley and became a US citizen. In 2002, he made his initial fortune thanks to his involvement with PayPal.
Two years later, Musk would use that money to invest in motor start-up Tesla before eventually taking control of the company.
In 2008, he met Talulah Riley, the British actress who starred in Pride and Prejudice and the St Trinian’s, in a London nightclub, and two years later they would marry in Dornoch Cathedral in the Highlands.
Their marriage ended in 2016. But, in 2022, court documents revealed that during Musk’s legal battle with Twitter, Riley urged him to buy the platform, saying: “It’s very easy to exploit and is being used by radicals for social engineering on a massive scale. And this s— is infecting the world. Please do something to fight woke-ism.”
Last year, Musk tweeted praise for another British Prime Minister, describing Rishi Sunak as “an asset to the UK”, having been persuaded to attend the then Tory leader’s AI conference in London. On July 29, following Labour’s election win, Musk tweeted approvingly about a High Court decision which ruled that the previous government’s ban on puberty blockers was lawful.
Earlier that month, Musk said that he was tricked into allowing his son Xavier to go on puberty blockers before reappearing as his trans daughter Vivian Wilson and blamed the “woke mind virus”.
In a response to a tweet from JK Rowling, Musk wrote: “Thank goodness for common sense in the UK. Now this should be applied to the US as soon as possible.”
But the same day, a mass stabbing of children in Southport would provoke a fire storm of rumours about the attacker on X and other social media platforms.
The following day, protestors clashed with police in the Merseyside town and riots subsequently spread around the UK, leading to more than 1,000 arrests.
Starmer warned: “Let me also say to large social media companies, and those who run them – violent disorder clearly whipped up online… that is also a crime. It’s happening on your premises, and the law must be upheld everywhere.”
‘Arrested for making comments on Facebook! Is this Britain or the Soviet Union?’
On Aug 6, Musk, responding to reports that people had been arrested for making “offensive comments on Facebook”, declared: “Arrested for making comments on Facebook! Is this Britain or the Soviet Union?”
He later publicly criticised Starmer’s early release of prisoners, tying that policy to police action against British social media users for posts deemed to be hateful. “I don’t think anyone should go to the UK when they’re releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts,” he posted on X in September.
Then, last week, having criticised a decision by police to investigate Allison Pearson, a journalist at The Telegraph, over a year-old post on X, he declared that “Britain is turning into a police state”.
Prof Sander van der Linden, from Cambridge University’s psychology department and an expert on misinformation and social media, says: “I think Elon has become so fixated on the UK because he sees the regulation of hate speech and incitement of violence as a direct threat to his business model. Extremist content gets engagement and is monetized by influencers.”
The academic adds: “The UK model of balancing harms and benefits of free speech and stricter regulation of online safety is the exact opposite of what he is campaigning for in the US, so it is perhaps not surprising he sees the UK (and Europe) as a threat to his business model and aims to undermine domestic affairs here in the UK by stirring up division on the topic.
“I think he is clearly on a war path because he is frustrated, he has no control over the UK, and he doesn’t like being held accountable for his speech.”
‘Britain is going full Stalin’
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader with close links to Trump and Musk, disagrees, saying: “Elon has huge respect for Britain, the mother of the English-speaking world. He clearly sees the Starmer government is threatening essential freedoms built on and defended over centuries.”
Gawain Towler, a communications chief at Reform and a long-term Farage ally, adds: “From the moment that Musk took over Twitter, the liberal establishment in the US and UK have had a lot of hate for him.
“He was prepared to lose a lot of money because he saw that Twitter had taken sides in the broader political debate. He had seen how it behaved in the last US election when it removed Trump and censored free speech.”
He says: “[Musk] has had a long-term interest in the UK, where he sees essential freedoms have come from, and are written into the US constitution.
“He has an almost naïve belief in right and wrong but has been prepared to put his billions into defending that and he has been watching the UK very carefully ever since he took over Twitter.”
On Monday, Musk even waded into the row over Labour’s inheritance tax hike on UK farmers by stating: “Britain is going full Stalin.”
But, Towler insists: “This is not a Keir Starmer thing. It is a liberal establishment thing.”
What is clear is that the stakes for Starmer and his government could not be higher.
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