Under rabble-rousing Musk, life on Mars would be grimUnder rabble-rousing Musk, life on Mars would be grim

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer must be secretly happy to see Amazon plan the launch of a UK satellite broadband service that could challenge Starlink. Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and biggest shareholder, may be one of the most powerful businessmen on the planet, but he has largely kept out of British politics. The same cannot be said for Elon Musk, the man behind Starlink.

Professedly no fan of institutions, Musk is an outspoken advocate of direct democracy. But that didn't stop him on Twitter – or X, as he prefers – from reaching out to the British monarchy, one of the oldest and most undemocratic institutions of them all, and asking it to call a UK general election just six months after the last one. Starmer, the Labour leader elected in July, is a tyrant, Musk said in one of his recent tweets (Xs?), suggesting the US could always indulge its penchant for regime change.

It's worth examining what led to all this in a Friday-afternoon piece – readers, be warned – that admittedly lacks an overt link with telecom industry issues. X matters to telcos and their suppliers as one of the best-known services that rely on data connectivity, while Musk's entrepreneurial involvement in artificial intelligence, satellites and other technologies means he has huge relevance for the telecom sector. Any stakeholder should be deeply concerned by his recent antics.

Musk's talk of liberating the UK is no doubt hyperbolic, but it's also not very funny when it comes from such an increasingly powerful individual – not only the world's wealthiest man, by some measures, but also the owner of its most unfettered social media platform and soon to be a major US government figure. Alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, he will chair the unintentionally Kafkaesque-sounding Department of Government Efficiency, a Trumpian institution set up to cut the red tape generated by other institutions.

Doge, the acronym it forms, was incidentally the title used by the medieval rulers of Italian city states like Venice. Trump is likely unaware of that detail, but Musk was evoking even older Italians just a few days ago when he briefly changed his X handle to Kekius Maximus. If he had wanted a Latinate name with a size reference, Biggus Dickus would surely have been more fitting.

His last few days of online activity seem to have fully exposed the moron side of the Musk brain, the part prone to the contradictory and irrational outbursts of a hormonal teenager, the gobshite for whom free speech is not some hallowed principle but a license to be as offensive as humanly possible. He has shown nothing of the brilliant technology innovator and instead displayed all his worst instincts and characteristics in his deeply misguided politicization of a UK child abuse scandal that took place years ago.

Is it stupid or sinister? Musk will know, like any skilled demagogue, that the righteous indignation he has poured into his online rhetoric will excite his legions of angry followers. And whatever he says about algorithmic integrity and creating a digital town square where anybody is free to say anything they like, Musk looms in X with his soapbox and megaphone, egging on the spittle-flecked mob, whichever way you turn.

Rule Britannia is out of bounds

Lately, he has promoted himself as the investigative citizen journalist who exposed a state and mainstream media coverup of widespread child abuse by Muslim gangs operating in Oldham, Rotherham and other English towns. It may seem remarkable that a man who is supposed to run several multibillion-dollar ventures and simultaneously be launching a US government program was able to pull this off. Yet the timestamps suggest posting on X has become a full-time occupation for Musk. He also "broke" his story without apparently visiting the towns in question, conducting relevant interviews, cultivating sources or carrying out much in-depth research – the activities a mainstream investigative reporter would expect to perform as part of the daily job.

More importantly. the coverup in which the mainstream media was supposedly complicit received the full attention of the BBC, not to mention other journalistic institutions, more than ten years ago, as this link proves. Musk, it seems, weighed in only after reading a recent report on the scandal by GB News. It's an institution, like the BBC, that employs traditional journalists. But it's a younger one more politically aligned with and, therefore, acceptable to Musk. Its report picked up on a request that Oldham Council made some months ago for a government inquiry into what happened. It was rejected in October by Jess Phillips, a minister in Starmer's government, who controversially thought the council should take the lead.

Musk is not wrong to be outraged and disgusted by some apparent failures within local councils and police to investigate at the time. The charge is that authorities were afraid of appearing Islamophobic or racist. This would obviously be no justifiable excuse, and it raises many troubling questions about government conduct. But the possible explanations for it, unacceptable as they sound, had already been identified as far back as 2014, thanks to reporting by the BBC and other outlets. This, not Musk, ultimately led to prosecutions as well as the more recent calls by Oldham Council for a full investigation.

Whatever reasons Phillips had for thinking this should not be led by central government, her decision was all Musk needed to demand her imprisonment and the release of Tommy Robinson, a dedicated Islamophobe currently serving a jail sentence for contempt of court. Yet Robinson's conviction is unrelated to the child abuse scandal. His most recent crime was to repeat false allegations about a 15-year-old Syrian schoolboy and refugee. Previously, he has also been prosecuted for stalking and assault (specifically kicking a police officer in the head in 2004 and headbutting someone in 2011). "Free Tommy Robinson," said Musk on X, portraying him as the victim of state oppression.

This was too much even for Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Reform Party that Musk if not many Brits would like to see in power (it picked up just 14% of votes cast in July). After Farage distanced himself from Musk's views on Robinson while defending the X owner as a free-speech champion, Musk resentfully withdrew his support. "The Reform Party needs a new leader," he tapped just hours later. "Farage doesn't have what it takes."

That online dumping of Farage will have amused political opponents. But some of Musk's other posts in recent days are not at all funny. At least one is borderline racist. On January 2, a simple "Wow," one of Musk's favorite interjections, was attached to another user's post, which read: "Remember that Labour created Britain's first Pakistani Muslim peer from Rotherham, and he was later convicted for sexually assaulting children." Lord Ahmed, the peer in question, was found guilty in January 2022 of abuses carried out in the 1970s, when he was a teenager, and jailed for five and a half years.

But his crimes did not come to light until many years after they were committed. That they finally did was thanks partly – once again – to a BBC investigation. There has never been any suggestion the Labour Party knew of his guilt before it gave him a peerage. The "Wow" in that case would have been self-explanatory. As it stands, the "Wow" reads like an endorsement of the commentator's implication that Labour was at fault for creating a "Pakistani Muslim" peer in the first place. Besides doing this, Musk has recirculated a post that claims Starmer said girls under the legal age of consent had made "informed choices." The quote is a fabrication.

It's the freakiest show

Some three and a half years ago, Musk appeared by video link for a keynote interview during the slimline COVID-19 edition of Mobile World Congress, when only a few thousand executives bothered to attend in person. Talking specifically about his Starlink program, he gave us erudite Elon as opposed to moronic Musk, the big thinker with ambitions to revolutionize satellite communications and reach Mars. But his more recent interventions in social media and politics suggest the red planet colonized by Musk would be no dream society for many Earthlings.

Musk would conceivably be head of state or president or perhaps both, given the unlikelihood there would be an excess of political roles. His enthusiasm for direct democracy and contempt for public-sector institutions presumably means there would be no independent courts or civil-service bodies or other unelected but expert officials, the well-oiled machinery of Earth's functional democracies, deemed a necessary check on the power of elected representatives some 140 million miles away.

The sole intermediary between Musk and his Martians would be X, a tool enabling citizens to communicate directly with their leader. There was a glimpse of how this might work in Musk's recent online poll asking if "America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government." Nearly 2 million votes were eventually cast, with 58% of them saying yes, surely a big enough majority to justify a military invasion, assuming US forces have not been overstretched by activities in Greenland, Panama and possibly Canada.

Speech on Mars would not only be free but also deliberately aggressive enough – as citizens take their example from Musk – to rule out any chance of the political compromises that still occasionally happen back on Earth. But even most free-speech activists on the home planet draw the line somewhere. Realizing that what constitutes outright discrimination or incitement to violence is often debatable, Martians would vote to decide. "Go and kill all people with green eyes" would probably not be allowed. "We'd be better off without people who have green eyes," or similar formulations, just might.

Yet Musk, as an elected political leader, would be unconstrained by the laws that pinion his peers back on Earth. Evidence here is supplied by a message he posted about Giorgia Meloni in November. The Italian prime minister wanted to deport illegal immigrants but was blocked by the judiciary, which ruled it would violate their human rights. "This is unacceptable," railed Musk. "Do the people of Italy live in a democracy or does an unelected autocracy make the decisions?" On that basis, Meloni, the people's chosen one, should be free to do what she wants – deport, defame, silence, execute.

Welcome to Planet Musk.