Once, the chief executive of one of the world’s largest companies approvingly sharing a fabricated headline published by the leadership of a fascist party would have been news. For Elon Musk, it was just Thursday.
Unusually for Musk, his post, a retweet of the Britain First co-leader Ashlea Simon sharing a fake Telegraph headline about detainment camps in the Falkland Islands for the English rioters, was deleted shortly after being sent. In the 30 minutes it was live on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter that he bought in 2022, it managed to rack up almost 2m views.
Since the unrest across Britain began last week, Musk’s outspoken criticism of the government has surprised many. But it’s only the latest example of the billionaire’s progression down the radicalisation pathway.
After making his fortune in the dotcom boom, and growing it with his involvement in PayPal, Musk invested in Tesla in 2004, eventually becoming the company’s chief executive. For a time, Musk presented himself as one may have expected from a former software executive running an electric vehicle company: he spoke at length about the risk of climate change, while launching and investing in other projects like SpaceX, OpenAI and The Boring Company that could all be sold as matching a general vision of improving humanity’s future.
But around 2020, Musk’s public profile began to shift. He had always been a fairly engaged user of Twitter, but as the pandemic hit, he became a far more frequent poster and experienced his first brushes with the world of factchecking: breezy assertions about the danger or length of the pandemic led to calls for his account to be suspended for spreading misinformation.