Musk v Britain: Sudden interest in UK reveals the tech power struggle

For those wondering why Elon Musk, the tycoon newly infamous for his stiff-arm salutes, developed a sudden ferocious interest in the UK this month, the answer may lie in an arcane piece of online media legislation working its way gradually towards fruition.

- Julian Borger

In a ferocious flurry of posts on his X platform days before formally joining the Trump administration, the world's richest man portrayed Britain as a dystopian "police state" run by a "tyrannical government" in which young working-class women are routinely kidnapped off the streets by gangs of immigrants. He went further, singling out the prime minister, Keir Starmer, for being "deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes" and described Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding, as a "rape genocide apologist".

A Financial Times analysis of Musk's tweets and retweets in the first week in January found that 225 out of Musk's 616 were about UK politics. Much of his focus appears to have been on rape cases in northern England more than a decade old involving men of Pakistani descent.

Musk has explained his interest by pointing to his British-born grandmother, Cora Amelia Robinson. He said his "nana" was "one of the poor working-class girls with no one to protect her who might have been abducted in present-day Britain".

Gawain Towler, a former head of communications and strategist for the Reform UK party (which Musk has enthusiastically backed) argues the mogul feels an attachment to Britain. Musk's second wife, Talulah Riley, is British, and some of his children are Anglo-American.

"Musk looks at the UK as a sort of distant homeland," Towler said. "He sees Britain as Athens to America's Rome, and he worries about it." He said the timing of Musk's intervention in UK politics was a matter of coincidence.

Political and media analysts argue the timing of Musk's political assault is intended to put pressure on UK authorities as they work to codify the Online Safety Act (OSA), an effort to regulate online platforms. The OSA became law in 2023 but has yet to be implemented. How that is done is due to be decided by the spring.