Elon Musk: Seduced by Unbridled Power


Musk’s relentless targeting of the Labour government is part of a sinister plan to destabilise it.

According to a report citing people familiar with the matter, Musk has been weighing how he and his allies can destabilise the Labour government and has sought information about building support for alternative British political movements to force a change in government.

In a recent report, an analysis of the entrepreneur’s feed, The Financial Times found that “Musk – whose attacks on the British prime minister and senior politicians have become more scathing over the past week – has amplified or responded to a handful of X accounts that have posted extensively about the handling of historic sex crimes in the country.”

“The posts seem to have encouraged Musk – who has more than 211 million followers on X and has used his online pulpit to support conservative cultural stances, to step up his attacks on Starmer and UK safeguarding minister Jess Phillips,” the report added. Over the past week, calling Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” and “wicked witch”, Musk alleged that Starmer and her failed to hold leaders of sexual grooming gangs in England to account because the perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage.

According to The Financial Times, “several believe that a small cast of conservative-leaning British commentators and analysts based in the US are shaping views about the UK among the wider milieu of Trump’s allies.”

“There is a pretty right-wing libertarian UK émigré network in the US who are feeding a lot of this,” said one British government official, adding that they were free speech advocates linked to right-wing US think tanks that are projecting an image of the UK as “uber woke”.

Bruce Daisley, former head of Twitter’s operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, succinctly said, “Musk has seemingly become the first tech leader to fall down the rabbit hole of radicalisation by his own product.”

Can the US constrain him if he is so seduced by the thrill of unbridled power?

(Nabanita Sircar is a senior journalist based in London. She tweets at @sircarnabanita. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)





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