Billionaire Elon Musk inserted himself further into Western politics in 2024 with his game-changing support for Donald Trump. He then turned his attention to the UK, threatening to boost Reform even further. But at the start of 2025, his X timeline has become even more awful than it usually is. And even his own artificial intelligence, Grok, can’t justify his wave of fascist fake news.
Maybe it was the US Empire taking off its disguise by fully defending Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Or perhaps it was Trump’s victory in the US elections, which promised to give Musk a deregulating role. But the X owner now clearly feels he can do whatever he wants, without any consequences. Because he seems to be dedicating his timeline to spreading racist disinformation, confident that he won’t be held accountable.
Elon Musk’s own AI calls him out
The billionaire has been helping to revive racist lies about child sexual abuse. And on 5 January, he amplified a post from fake-news account Visegrád 24 that relied on misleading and discredited statistics. But as X‘s AI Grok explained:
The claim in the X post is largely inaccurate and misleading. The percentage of Pakistani men in the UK is misrepresented, there is no “Cockbain report” that supports the specific statistics provided, and the statistics on the ethnicity of gang rape perpetrators do not align with credible research or governmental reports. The Home Office findings and scholarly critique by Cockbain and Tufail suggest that the majority of group-based child sexual exploitation offenders are white, contradicting the narrative presented in the post.
The post was apparently referencing a controversial, misleading report from the questionable Quilliam Foundation.
Expert Ella Cockbain called it “a case study in bad science”, which “single-mindedly promoted a simplistic position based on shoddy research and apparent self-interest”.
The real problem
A much more reliable “two-year study” by the Home Office, however, “concluded that there is no credible evidence that any one ethnic group is over-represented in cases of child sexual exploitation”. As experts wrote in the Guardian:
there are no grounds for asserting that Muslim or Pakistani-heritage men are disproportionately engaged in such crimes
They said:
We need finally to accept what credible research has been telling us for years: that child sexual abuse is not a “Muslim problem” but is endemic to virtually all communities. Look at the numbers: the sheer scale makes the ubiquity of abuse inevitable. An estimated one in 13 adults in England has been sexually abused as children. In 2019/20, police across the UK recorded more than 73,518 sexual offences against children, and the Home Office review itself reminds us that only around one in 10 victims actually disclose child sexual abuse to an official at the time.
And they added:
Child sexual abuse is the product of a complex interplay of patriarchy, power, exploitation, opportunity and disregard for children.
They also stressed:
We need to address the woeful under-funding of the relevant community, healthcare and violence-against-women services, and we need to address repeated systemic failings that are being neglected. There must be a genuine political commitment to tackle all forms of sexual abuse, and one that prioritises investment in services and communities.
What Elon Musk really wants
Musk, like most super-wealthy individuals, would love to end all regulation that gets in the way of their obscene profits. It is the mentality that once led him to insist:
We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.
And it’s why he asked this week if:
America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government
He can see that the Tory-Labour political establishment in Britain has paved the way for the pro-deregulation Reform. He knows that an increase in Reform’s popularity would benefit him, and he knows the racist dogwhistles that engage many of Reform’s supporters.
That’s why he’s focusing on spreading disinformation at every turn right now – not because he really cares about child sexual abuse, but because of the possibility of fuelling the possible victory of the far right in the next UK elections.
Featured image via the Canary
