Why Elon Musk should keep out of British politics

Elon Musk has taken a surprisingly keen interest in British politics over the past few months. Since this summer’s Southport riots, the billionaire owner of X has enjoyed taking regular potshots at UK prime minister Keir Starmer. He has denounced Starmer’s Britain as a ‘tyrannical police state’, where civil war is ‘inevitable’. He has slammed Labour’s policies on everything from farming to law and order.

Recent reports suggest the tech tycoon could be about to involve himself even more deeply in British politics. On Monday, Musk met Nigel Farage at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for talks about a possible donation to Reform UK, Farage’s upstart populist party. Rumours suggest that Musk is mulling over spending up to $100million (roughly £80million) – which, while chicken feed to the world’s richest man, would amount to the largest single political donation in British history.

Both Musk and Reform have since poured cold water on this figure. Still, as you might expect given the two characters involved, many of the reactions to the mooted donation have been nigh-on hysterical. Pro-Labour journalist Lewis Goodall warned on Newsnight last night that Starmer is ‘asleep about the potential vulnerabilities in the British political system’. He then painted a bleak picture of a Musk-backed Reform flooding social media with Faragist propaganda. The Guardian’s Owen Jones has warned that Musk and Farage are plotting to ‘take over Britain’. We should be ‘afraid… very afraid’, he added. Social-media feeds, meanwhile, are currently awash with Black Mirror-style fantasies about Musk using tech and cash to brainwash Britain into installing Farage in Downing Street.

What these takes betray is, first and foremost, an incredibly low view of the voter. Cash alone is not enough to win an election, as Trump’s recent victory attests. (Harris outspent him three-to-one.) The feverish chatter about social-media manipulation is also more dystopian fiction than reality. There is no evidence that even well-coordinated ‘influence’ operations can secure election outcomes.

No doubt, the unprecedented size of Musk’s potential donation is partly what has set the cat among the pigeons, but it is hard to recall a reaction on anything like this scale regarding politicians’ dealings with other oligarchs, from Bill Gates to the Soroses to BlackRock’s Larry Fink. Big money is fine, or at least not as alarming, the line seems to be, so long as it stays within the party duopoly or is used to fund acceptable, pro-establishment causes. Shadow minister Andrew Griffith was at least honest when he pleaded with Musk to give his money to the Conservatives instead.

Still, there are good reasons to be concerned about a large, unprecedented injection of money into British politics – especially from a foreign oligarch. (Musk was born in South Africa and is now based in the US.) The prospects of populist political movements should not rest so heavily on whether they can maintain the good graces of the über-rich, especially those who have only a tenuous connection to the country they want to influence. Populist parties, in particular, need to guard against elite capture.

Indeed, a Musk mega-donation could – in some respects, at least – spell trouble for its intended beneficiary. Top-down funding and influence could take priority over grassroots organising and addressing popular concerns. In fact, the fawning over Musk among Reform MPs and influencers is already sending the wrong message. Yes, he may have some unusually populist, pro-free-speech views for a Silicon Valley billionaire, alongside some more harebrained, conspiratorial opinions, but that doesn’t mean he should be hailed as Britain’s (or the West’s) saviour-in-waiting. If Musk were to make not simply a donation, but a historic, record-breaking donation, it would be used to rubbish Reform’s populist credentials. And it would contribute to the oligarchic turn of Western politics.

So, by all means, keep up the salty, anti-Starmer tweets, Elon. But kindly keep your mega-bucks to yourself.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.