Friday, 10 January 2025
Friday, 10 January 2025
Elon Musk’s posts on X can be pure entertainment; in one, he compared currency speculator-billionaire George Soros with Magneto from the X-Men series.
Magneto wanted to rule the world. The far right believes Soros wants to rule the world through powerful proxies. And if you want to see anti-Semitism, you can. Magneto was a Holocaust survivor. Soros survived the Nazi occupation.
So, is Musk, the billionaire-inventor who owns the social media platform X, Professor Xavier of X-Men, out to save the world? Well, many of his fans do compare him with Tony Stark.
In the month when Donald Trump is set to take over as President of the United States, his adored “genius” Musk's provocative statements on social media are shining a spotlight on his international political alliances and feuds.
The latest revelation by Financial Times supports this. Musk has held “private discussions” with allies about how Sir Keir Starmer could be removed as UK prime minister before the next general election, FT reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.
A dive into Musk’s posts over the past few weeks reveals a growing trend of interference in the internal affairs of European nations, with countries like the UK, Germany, France, and Norway all feeling the brunt of Musk’s sharp rhetoric.
Here’s a list of his friends and enemies, according to his recent X posts. Let’s start with the enemies.
Before the FT revelation, here are some statements Musk made on X (owned by him) in the past few days:
“Starmer must go. He is a national embarrassment.”
“Starmer repeatedly ignored the pleas of vast numbers of little girls and their parents in order to secure political support. Starmer is utterly despicable.”
“Starmer was deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes. That’s what the inquiry would show.”
“Gordon Brown sold those little girls for votes.”
He also accused Starmer of complicity in the UK’s notorious child sexual exploitation scandal in which at least 1,400 children were subjected to what the BBC called “appalling sexual exploitation” in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.
The allegation was that immigrants, mostly of South Asian origin, ran the gang.
Musk has raked up the fact that Starmer headed the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008 to 2018, accusing him of going soft on immigrants for votes.
“Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and wide as possible, they’re not interested in victims — they are interested in themselves. We have seen this playbook many times… When the poison of the far right leads to serious threats… then, in my book, a line has been crossed,” Starmer said on Monday.
In early January, Musk hosted a poll asking if America should "liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government," with 63.7 per cent of respondents voting in favour.
In the last week of December 2024, Europe was on holiday. Musk wasn’t. He was busy supporting the increasingly popular Alternative for Germany (AfD), the first far-right party to win a state in the country since the Second World War.
These were some of Musk’s tweets:
“The traditional political parties in Germany have utterly failed the people. AfD is the only hope for Germany.” He attached a news article from 23 June 2024, headlined: "Woman convicted of ‘offending’ migrant gang rapists receives longer prison sentence than the rapists."
Ahead of polls in Germany next month, Musk’s support for AfD has been increasing with alarming frequency.
His posts forced German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government to issue a statement.
“The normal people, the sensible people, the decent people are far in the majority in this country. We act as if Musk’s statements...could influence a country of 84 million people with untruths or half-truths or expressions of opinion,” a government spokesperson told Deutsche Welle.
Besides Germany, Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and French President Emmanuel Macron have called out Musk. So, perhaps we can group them as his enemies.
“I find it worrying that a man with enormous access to social media and huge economic resources involves himself so directly in the internal affairs of other countries,” said Støre.
Macron said, “Who could have imagined, 10 years ago, that the owner of one of the world’s largest social networks would intervene directly in elections, including in Germany?”
Beyond loaded political statements, Musk has been advocating the use of X to understand the reality in Germany and Norway. His pitch is that legacy media lies to the people.
Some of his posts also talk about the success of Tesla in European countries.
Non-state actors in international relations are defined as multinational corporations (like Tesla, X owned by Musk), NGOs (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), crime syndicates (Russian, Italian mob bosses), and terrorist groups (Al-Qaeda). Essentially, it means non-sovereign players who influence global politics. It also includes wealthy super-empowered individuals like Elon Musk.
On Tuesday, Musk reposted two X users who claimed former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates donated $319 million to media outlets, including the BBC, and asked why no one is complaining. He shared another post that showed Gates and Norwegian PM Støre, suggesting Gates interferes in European politics.
Musk used the emoji of a “pregnant man.”
His dislike for George Soros, recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Joe Biden, is well-known even before the Magneto jab.
“He fundamentally hates humanity. He is doing things that erode the fabric of civilisation,” Musk said in an interview. “George Soros spent billions to create the fake asylum-seeker nightmare that is destroying America and Europe,” he wrote on Tuesday.
Musk posted a picture of President Biden handing over the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Darth Sidious of Star Wars. He equated Soros with Darth Sidious, a symbol of evil in the Star Wars franchise.
Ergo, it is safe to assume that leaders of centre-left parties and business magnates-turned-philanthropists are Musk’s enemies. But who are his friends?
Musk lends his support to right-wing political leaders like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán as essential to strengthening democracy. He has also backed Nigel Farage, but has also slammed the far-right leader of Brexit fame.
How does Musk see Prime Minister Narendra Modi?
Both Musk and Modi’s BJP consider Soros to be the orchestrator of conspiracies. And the BJP mirrors right-wing angst against immigrants in many places.
One of the BJP’s primary poll planks for Jharkhand, which voted in November, and Delhi, which will vote on 5 February, has been how the ruling dispensation in both states has mollycoddled migrants and infiltration.
On 7 November last year, in a boost to Musk’s Starlink, Union Minister of Communications Jyotiraditya Scindia said the spectrum for satellite broadband would be allocated and not auctioned, as sought by Mukesh Ambani and Sunil Mittal.
A month before this, Musk had posted on X about India’s satellite broadband allocation. He termed the demand made by Ambani’s Jio for shunning sector regulator Trai’s consultation paper on satellite broadband being allocated and not auctioned as “unprecedented”.
When Mittal made the pitch in the presence of the Prime Minister, Musk asked on X if it was “too much trouble” to allow Starlink to provide internet services in India.
