Elon Musk’s Bizarre, Frightening Obsession With Britain

Opinion|Elon Musk’s Bizarre, Frightening Obsession With Britain

In Britain, the summer of 2012 — when London hosted the Olympic Games with a stunning opening ceremony — is a beacon of nostalgia. In November of that year, Elon Musk visited the country on a business trip, where he rode a bike around the capital. “I met with many interesting people,” he later wrote on Twitter. “I really like Britain!”

His views, to put it mildly, have evolved. Since last summer, when the Labour Party won a landslide majority, ending 14 years of Conservative government, Mr. Musk has accused Britain of going “full Stalin,” being a “tyrannical police state” and sliding toward an “inevitable” civil war. He spent much of January posting, re-sharing and replying to hundreds of posts on X, the social media platform he bought in 2022 and subsequently renamed, that were critical of Britain. He accused senior government figures of covering up sexual abuse committed by grooming gangs and asked his followers whether “America should liberate the people of Britain” from their government.

Some might shrug this off as mere provocation, yet Mr. Musk’s interest in Britain goes beyond trolling. Not only is he clearly engaged with the country’s politics — he is a vociferous champion of the anti-immigration party Reform U.K. — but his fixation is also part of an emerging narrative on the American right that paints Britain as a boogeyman. Most important, it amounts to an aggressive pursuit of his own political agenda, extending his influence overseas. Mr. Musk’s obsession with Britain is really an obsession with his own power.

Mr. Musk’s attention most noticeably turned to the United Kingdom last August, when anti-immigrant riots broke out across England and Northern Ireland. Rioters tried to burn down hotels where asylum seekers were housed and attacked mosques, migrant-owned businesses and police officers. The unrest was set off by misinformation online claiming that the teenager who murdered children at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in northern England was a Muslim migrant. Central to this torrent of Islamophobic disinformation was X, where calls for violence were amplified.

Keir Starmer, the newly elected prime minister, appeared to call Mr. Musk out. “To large social media companies and those who run them,” Mr. Starmer said at the time, “violent disorder, clearly whipped up online, that is also a crime.” Mr. Musk took the bait. He branded the remarks “insane” and spent the following weeks spreading the nickname “two-tier Keir” — a reference to the conspiracy theory that there is a “two-tier” system of policing in Britain, in which white people are punished more harshly than minority groups. He even shared (then deleted) a fake headline that claimed Mr. Starmer’s government was building “emergency detainment camps” for the rioters.

Since the summer, Mr. Musk’s comments about the country have become even more extreme. In September, he falsely accused the Starmer government of “releasing convicted pedophiles from prison in order to put people in prison for Facebook posts.” He has repeatedly championed the cause of Tommy Robinson, a far-right, anti-Islam British activist with a slew of criminal convictions currently in jail for repeatedly breaking an injunction. During a posting spree at the start of January, Mr. Musk called for a government minister to be imprisoned, for new elections to oust the prime minister and for Mr. Starmer to be charged for complicity in the “rape of Britain.”