America, Britain and the richest person in the world's shocking new claim

07 January

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk looks up during a ceremony to mark the re-opening of the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral, following the 2019 fire, in Paris, France, December 7, 2024. LUDOVIC MARIN/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo

Elon Musk repeatedly asserts, without evidence, that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer covered up the abuses of young girls by gangs comprised largely of British Pakistani men, in cases that date back to before 2010 when Starmer was head of Britain’s public prosecutions.

“Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years,” Musk posted to the top of his account on Friday. “Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”

In fact, Starmer, who heads the Labour government, did not cover up abuses. Instead, he brought the first case against an Asian grooming gang and drafted new guidelines for how the Crown Prosecution Service should deal with cases of sexual exploitation of children, including the mandatory reporting of child sex offenses.

Musk also calls Jess Phillips, the Labour government’s under secretary for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, a “rape genocide apologist” because she pushed back on calls for a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham, a town near Manchester.

In fact, Phillips, who has long campaigned for women’s rights, has called for a local investigation by Oldham authorities rather than the central government. Women’s rights supporters say Musk’s labeling Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” is threatening her safety.

Yesterday, Starmer warned publicly that Musk’s baseless accusations “crossed a line,” adding that “once we lose the anchor that truth matters, in the robust debate that we must have, then we are on a very slippery slope.”

Musk’s lies about the left-wing British government and his support for far-right groups are parts of an emerging pattern. Musk is also:

boosting the far-right party in Germany with neo-Nazi ties, known as Alternative for Germany (AfD), before elections early next month. Musk signaled his support for AfD in mid-December, writing in a post on X that “only the AfD can save Germany.” He also penned an oped in a German newspaper recently, describing the party as the “last spark of hope” for the country. Musk is planning an online “discussion” on X with the AfD’s leader and candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, amplifying the party’s neo-Nazi ideology.
attacking the Italian judiciary for curbing Italian Prime Giorgia Meloni’s hardline anti-asylum immigration policies. Musk has met regularly with Meloni, who has called him a friend, and appeared at a youth event for Meloni’s party.
urging support for Britain’s far-right MP Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform U.K. Party. Musk says he might donate upward of 100 million pounds ($127 million) to Farage’s group.
demanding Britain “free Tommy Robinson,” the far-right founder of the English Defence League — an Islamophobic, nationalist group and anti-immigrant agitator whom, Musk charges, is in jail for “telling the truth.” In fact, Robinson is in jail because he was found to have defamed a teenage Syrian refugee and then defied a British court order by repeating the false claims. (Robinson has been previously jailed for assault, mortgage fraud and traveling on a false passport to the United States, where he has sought to establish ties with right-wing groups.)
allowing on X inflammatory lies of a kind that incited anti-immigrant riots in Britain last July, following the killing of three girls in a mass stabbing in the town of Southport. After Britain arrested more than 30 people, Musk condemned the government for what he called an attack on free speech.
calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau an “insufferable tool” over comments Trudeau made in support of Kamala Harris, and predicted he “won’t be in power for much longer.” (Yesterday, Trudeau announced he will resign.)

As the richest person in the world, politicians everywhere now recognize his capacity to pour money into their parties and political campaigns, as he did by investing a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected.

He also owns X, formerly Twitter, which (as of December 2024) has 619 million monthly active users. He has manipulated X’s algorithm to boost his own posts, which now reach 210 million.

But Musk’s real power these days comes from his proximity to and presumed influence over Donald Trump, soon to be President of the United States.

Musk has hardly left Trump’s side since the election, meaning that Musks’s opinions (amplified by his social media platform) cannot be ignored by politicians around the world who are trying to decipher Trump’s opinions.

One prominent member of Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party is asking that Germany determine “whether [Musk’s] repeated disrespect, defamation and interference in the election campaign were also expressed in the name of the new U.S. government.”

This combination — the richest person in the world, owner and manipulator of the biggest political messaging platform in the world, with direct influence over Trump — puts Musk in the position of being able to move other nations toward the neo-fascist right.

Not for money. As it is, he has far more than any human can utilize.

Partly, it’s ideological. He calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” which puts him at odds with Europe’s and Canada’s aggressive responses to hate speech online. (Britain, Musk says, “is turning into a police state.”)

But the roots of Musk’s neo-fascism probably go deeper.

I am no psychoanalyst but I imagine that as an immigrant from South Africa, Musk is especially triggered by poor people of color moving into white nations. His father smuggled raw emeralds and had them cut in Johannesburg.

Part of his shift to the radical right also comes from Musk’s transgender child. As Musk told conservative commentator Jordan Peterson, “I lost my son, essentially,” claiming she was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus. I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.” (Musk’s daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, now 20, told NBC News that Musk was an absent father who was cruel to her as a child for being queer and feminine.)

On X, Musk continuously criticizes transgender rights, including medical treatments for trans-identifying minors, and the use of pronouns if they are different from what would be used at birth. He has promoted anti-trans content and called for arresting people who provide trans care to minors. Last July, Musk said he was pulling his businesses out of California to protest a new state law that bars schools from requiring that trans kids be outed to their parents. After Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, in 2022, he rolled back the app’s protections for trans people, including a ban on using birth names (known as “deadnames” for transgender people).

Perhaps the major reason for Musk’s recent effort to push other nations to the neo-fascist right is his newfound thirst for right-wing global politics. After effectively (at least in Musk’s mind) winning the presidency for Trump by spending more than $250 million and unleashing a maelstrom of pro-Trump and anti-Harris lies over X, he now seeks even more of an authoritarian rush.

It will not be the first time in history that someone is seduced by the thrill of unconstrained power, although it may be the first time that so much of it is concentrated in one unelected megalomaniac.

For the time being, particularly under Trump, there is little that we in America can do to constrain Musk except by boycotting Tesla and X.

Canada and Britain and other European nations, meanwhile, should, at the very least:

enact laws and regulations to prohibit non-citizens (like Musk) from financing activities that could affect their elections.
maintain, if not strengthen, laws and rules against hate speech, and ensure that they are applied to social media companies, such as Musk’s X.
refuse to contract with Musk’s Space X and its Starlink satellite division, or with Musk’s other corporations (Tesla and the Boring Company).
disengage from any joint ventures or technology transfers involving Musk, including xAI, his artificial intelligence company.
(If you’ve got other ideas, please include in the comments.)

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Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

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