Elon Musk’s strange fixation with Britain

In 2012, Elon Musk had just completed a business trip to London and Oxford. “Just returned… met many interesting people,” he wrote on Twitter. “I really like Britain!”

Fast forward to 2024 and Musk’s view of the UK is slightly different.

“Civil war is inevitable” … “Britain is in full swing with 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 he bought it.

He has repeatedly clashed with politicians including Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, he has boosted right and far-right voices online and is in talks to donate to Reform UK, according to party leader Nigel Farage.

So why has Musk’s relationship with America’s closest allies seemingly soured, and what does he hope to achieve?

We would love to ask him ourselves, but he did not respond to our requests for an interview.

However, his X timeline does provide some clues.

The self-proclaimed “Chief Troll Officer” often exaggerates in an ambiguous manner, unclear whether he is sincere or ironic.

When he writes, “Is this Great Britain or the Soviet Union?” he doesn’t really think Britain is a totalitarian communist state, but he does. Often, he reposts content with just a single word — “interesting” — or an emoji, rather than going into detail.

In recent years, though, Musk-watchers have noticed that the kind of stuff he’s been promoting to his 200 million followers tends to come from a certain place: a worldview that is libertarian and “anti-woke”against progressives and centrists.

The shift was explicit during last summer’s riots following the horrific killing of three girls at a dance class in the north-west England town of Southport.

False rumors about the striker was circulated on X, including by far-right accounts that had been decommissioned since Musk took over the company two years prior.

As a protest turned violent and riots flared, Sir Keir issued a warning: “To major social media companies and those who run them – violent disorder, obviously whipped up online, is also a crime.

“It takes place on your premises, and the law must be observed everywhere.”

Musk responded with one word: “Insane.”

He would later state that “civil war is inevitable” and spread a false message from the leader of a far-right party that claimed Sir Keir was considering building detention camps for rebels 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” on Joe Rogan’s podcast – viewed 19 million times on YouTube – and said we should “make Orwell fiction again”, a reference to George Orwell’s writings about dystopian society.

While free speech isn’t Musk’s only big issue — he also seems to care a lot about existential questions surrounding the future of humanity — it’s an issue that Tesla, SpaceX and X own have repeatedly returned to.

Just a few weeks ago, in response to a tweet by a right-wing US influencer, making an exaggerated claim about a report from the last government on radicalisation, 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 that he is preparing to donate a large sum of money to the party.

Musk’s interest in British affairs could be a reflection of how his own political beliefs has changed. He previously described himself as a centrist and even donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but now he talks a lot about the “woke mind virus”.

According to interviews he has given and a recent biography, the transition of one of his children from male to female – and that child, Vivian Wilson, who subsequently cuts him out of her life – seems to be one of the most important turning points.

Winston Marshall, a former Mumford & Sons guitarist turned podcast host and right-wing political commentator whose father co-owns TV channel GB News, speculates that Musk could be picking fights because “he cares a lot about Britain”.

“Britain is the birthplace of liberal democracy, of many of the great philosophies that underpin America,” says Marshall.

“So then he looks over to the UK and he sees what’s been going on for years but is now escalating after the riots in August where many, many people are being given long prison terms in some cases for literally Facebook memes.”

“Facebook memes” sound pretty harmless, but these examples include – for example – a three-month prison sentence for someone who posted a meme with the caption “let’s (expletive) riot” on a Facebook group with “riot/ protest” in the name of the Southport riots.

Some question whether the tycoon is really as committed to free speech as he claims.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate, which scrutinizes social media companies, was critical of Musk’s tenure at X — prompting the tycoon to sue, accusing the organization of misusing data and intimidating advertisers. The case was thrown out by a US judge.

Its chief executive Imran Ahmed called the incident “a sign of the mindset of a man who simply cannot understand that freedom of expression is a freedom given to everyone, not just him”.

Other critics have pointed out that Musk has been careful not to criticize the president of China, a country where Tesla has huge business interests, despite Beijing’s well-documented culture of censorship.

He has far less at stake, business-wise, in the UK, but the country can still affect his bottom line via Online Safety Act, adopted by the Danish Parliament at the end of 2023. It will allow regulator Ofcom to issue huge fines to social media companies if they are found to have certain types of illegal content on their platforms.

Andrew Chadwick, professor of political communication at Loughborough University, explains that while some provisions of the bill are uncontroversial, “where it gets a bit more difficult is where this illegal content is blurred into what we might call the kind of disinformation or misinformation that we see circulating on a daily basis on social media platforms”.

This could include “racially or religiously aggravated public order offenses or incitement to violence,” he says.

The law comes with some potentially huge penalties – a fine of up to 10% of qualifying worldwide earnings.

Could it be that Musk is worried about the UK taking a bite out of X’s revenue – or even, as the law allows in some 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 director for Reform UK, says that while Musk may not have “a forensic knowledge of all the details of the backbench committee”, he “sees the bigger picture” – what reform campaigners and others describe as an insidious culture of censorship.

“You don’t always have to focus on the trees. And I think Musk sees the forest quite, quite well,” he adds.

No one can read the mind of the world’s richest man.

But it’s clear that Musk has channeled his vast wealth into influence and is now exporting his values ​​— including a mainstream American view of free speech and largely unfettered capitalism — around the world.

And one thing’s for sure – he’s not done with Britain just yet.