What, as they say, is Elon Musk’s deal? There will be a lot of justifiably righteous commentary about his hijacking of the debate around sexually abused girls in the north of England this week, but why this particular meltdown and why now?
On Tuesday, after attacking Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips, the world’s richest man waxed lachrymose about his British “Nana”, a woman identified as Cora Amelia Musk, nee Robinson, and the mother of Musk’s father, Errol. Errol Musk, you may recall, grew up to father two children with his own stepdaughter, so perhaps poor Elon has simply been triggered?
Lest the point need making again: Elon Musk has thrown in his lot with Donald Trump, a man legally defined as a sexual predator, so we can assume that his end goal here is not to improve the lives of girls and women. Along with Mark Zuckerberg, who announced in a video address this week that Europe is “institutionalising censorship”, Musk has pre-existing beef with Britain and Europe over their toughening stance towards platforms that violate content laws. After the riots in England and Northern Ireland last August, Starmer warned social media platforms that users promoting misinformation that led to violence would face prosecution, the kind of public telling off that drives Musk round the bend.
So, he doesn’t like the guy. Still, it doesn’t explain why this particular topic of historical child sexual abuse, and the failure of local police to investigate it, has sent Musk so comprehensively over the edge. The language of his posts on X this week has been tinged with hysteria – “rape genocide” – and a sort of Victorian sentimentality vested in vaguely trouser-rubbing phrases such as “defenceless little girls”.
Hanging on by his fingernails, Musk has, eventually, grown so transported by rage that he’s evoked poor Nana Cora, summoning an image of his granny back in the day in Liverpool, where, he writes, she cleaned houses – though one likes to think she was also a little match girl, and possibly a chimney sweep. She could, suggests Musk quite madly, have been “one of the poor working-class girls with no one to protect her who might have been abducted in present day Britain”.
In the world the rest of us occupy, the abuse of girls in the north of England was very real, and there have been real and extreme injustices detailed by journalists and campaigners such as Julie Bindel, in her groundbreaking report in the Times in 2007, a source that Musk has not, for some reason, chosen to cite. As he must know, making accusations of child sexual abuse is one of the quickest and most effective triggers of sanctimonious outrage, a call to arms for a certain kind of man who loves to defend women in the abstract but may, to put it politely, struggle with them in real life.
The combination of lurid and sweeping accusations, sloppy treatment of facts and violent language puts Musk’s commentary on the British child abuse scandal squarely in line with other recent incitement-of-the-hate-mob episodes, including the Pizzagate “paedophile ring” conspiracy theory and the satanic child abuse panics of the deeper past. That there are real victims in this case makes the uses to which Musk is putting them even more grotesque.
What remains strange about Musk is the wolfish enjoyment he appears to derive from these kinds of skirmishes. This is the standard attitude of the troll, but there is something else going on here that has nothing to do with the topic at hand and everything to do with Musk’s David Brent-like ambition to be perceived not just as a tech genius but, at root, as an entertainer. It’s clear from Musk’s outpourings that he isn’t simply trolling; he is, in his own mind, content-providing. He wants attention, but it can’t be just any attention. It’s like the A-list actor who picks up a guitar and forms “a band”, which the people around him – “yes, Johnny, you’re a legit rock star! You’re a music legend!” – put their backs into pretending is real.
There is no need for Musk to do this. As has been said in a million business and tech podcasts, he used to give a good impression of being relatively normal. It seems absurd to have to say this, too, but he is also, you know, interesting. He is not the private equities guy who no one wants to get stuck with at a dinner. And yet his feed on X is a salad of low-grade standup, reposts of anti-George Soros content, spitty outrage and endless photos of his Massive Rockets. It’s desperate, and sad, and given the size of his platform, dangerous.
It is also, surely, a kind of madness, chasing the highs of owning the libs on X when your other job is conquering Mars. Let’s all pray for an imminent breakthrough in long-distance rocket technology so that Musk can get back to the thing he is good at – and leave the discourse and the rest of us alone.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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