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In 2012, Elon Musk had just completed a business trip to London and Oxford. “Just returned… I met with many interesting people,” he wrote on Twitter. “I really like Britain!”
Fast-forward to 2024, and Musk’s views on Britain are a little different.
“Civil war is inevitable” … “Britain is going full Stalin”… “The people of Britain 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 got into spats with politicians including Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, he has amplified voices on the right and far-right online and is in talks to donate to Reform UK, according to the party’s leader Nigel Farage.
So why has Musk’s relationship with America’s closest ally apparently soured and what, if anything, does he hope to achieve?
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.
Musk also criticised Britain’s “prison overcrowding situation” on Joe Rogan’s podcast – watched 19m times on YouTube – saying we should “make Orwell fiction again”, a reference to George Orwell’s writings about dystopian society.
While free speech is not Musk’s only big issue – he appears to care a lot about existential questions around the future of humanity too – it’s a subject that the Tesla, SpaceX and X owner has repeatedly returned to.
Just a few weeks ago, in response to a tweet from a right-wing American 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 he is preparing to donate a large sum of money to the party.
Musk’s interest in UK affairs could be a reflection of how his own political beliefs have changed.
According to interviews he’s given and a recent biography, the transition of one of his children from male to female – and that child, Vivian Wilson, subsequently cutting him off from her life – appears to be one of the key turning points.
Winston Marshall, a former Mumford & Sons guitarist turned podcast host and right-leaning political commentator whose father jointly owns TV channel GB News, speculates that Musk could be picking fights because “he cares very deeply about the UK”.
Some question whether the tycoon is really as committed to free speech as he claims.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, which scrutinises social media companies, was critical of Musk’s tenure at X – prompting the tycoon to sue, accusing the organisation of misusing data and scaring off advertisers.
Its CEO Imran Ahmed called the incident “indicative of the mindset of a man who simply cannot understand that freedom of speech is a freedom afforded to all, not just to him”.
Other critics have pointed out that Musk has been careful not to criticise 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 Britain, but the country could still affect his bottom line via the Online Safety Act, passed by Parliament in late 2023.
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