White Musk: X owner interviews Uncle Donald at the dinner table

"They try to paint me as a far-right guy," Elon whined, "which is absurd because I'm making electric vehicles and solar and batteries." Not only that, he had stood in line for six hours to shake Barack Obama's hand. Leftie bona fides if ever there were.

A penny for Donald's thoughts at that point. Likewise, when Elon said he had never been much involved in politics. Yet rather than swat him away, Trump of Trump Tower praised Musk's "fertile mind" and the way he embodied the American dream.

At that point, the dam looked like breaking. "In your business, everything you do is obsolete," Trump suddenly blurted. "Well, not the tunnels. But everything is obsolete. Even your rocket ships, like, a month later, they're obsolete. You find a better way to… the only thing that's not obsolete is a wall and a wheel."

Ah, walls. The famous wall of his 2016 campaign. The wall that Joe Biden had not yet built but Trump would. The wall to keep the Central Americans out of North America. Nothing says advancement like a wall.

Presumably, for Musk to join the big Trump group hug, he would have to design and quite possibly build a better anti-Latino wall, and reinvent the wheel, for the purpose of breaking butterflies. Still, at least Uncle Donald likes tunnels.

Taking the 'T' off the table

At times, this felt like two huge egos trying to chat casual for the sake of convenience at a family Christmas lest they not be thought nice by the kids.

Both had big shiny cars outside and both had planted their keys firmly on the table. Except that Musk was now surreptitiously trying to take his off the table, because Uncle Donald had noticed the stylised 'T' of the Tesla logo and now had widened eyes.

From a stand-in-line Obama hand-shaker to a rookie Republican is an arduous climb for the moderately well-off. For billionaires, it is doubly steep.

To reach the summit, you must exemplify the zeal of a convert, burn every bridge to those who once thought you progressive, and give the awkward semi-racist uncle at the dinner table a slice of primetime (and a reactivated account).

Musk has always been erratic, quirky, or "contrarian", to use his preferred word (although, like 'maverick,' this term usually denotes a rightward shift).

But those with green credentials smell a foul odour emanating from Musk these days and are now ditching the EV's he sold them in case they, too, get infected.

There is even a bumper sticker now available to ashamed Tesla owners that reads: "I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy."

Musk is as unlikely to mind as he is to mince his words, which happens to be one of his saving graces. In his recent spat with a faceless Brussels bureaucrat who warned Musk that the EU would act against "any negative effect of illegal content," Musk replied: "Literally f*** your own face." Well, that's one way to say it.

Wading in on rioting

Now that Musk has let Trump back onto X/Twitter and endorsed his campaign (though not yet been seen wearing an assassination-attempt ear patch), he seems keen to use a few new phrases and poke a few new nests. The sort of thing the uncle would approve of.

For Bruce Daisley, a former Twitter boss, Musk should be arrested for inciting violence, after Musk's reaction to the far-right riots in the UK following the murder of three girls by a 17-year-old with Rwandan parents.

Wrongly informed that the killer was a Muslim immigrant, a mob descended on the town and surrounded the local mosque, which they attacked, as they did the police officers sent to defend it. "Civil war is inevitable," Musk wrote.

Soon, similar outbursts of violence flared in cities across the land. In several, the police took a battering. In a taxi the next day, travelling through Bristol, one of the affected cities, I was struck by the lamentations of the driver.

"English people don't appreciate what they've got," he said. "You have peace here. Why fight the police? Politicians, they're the ones to blame." He had good reason to value peace: he had recently arrived from Sudan. 

Police and politicians

As Musk was predicting civil war, Britain's own Trumpian politician Nigel Farage was questioning police tactics. For him, there was "the impression" of two-tier policing: Black or pro-Palestinian demonstrators are given pastries, while white anti-immigrant protesters are taken to the Tower.

Far from "an impression", this is in fact a small but perfectly formed conspiracy theory of the kind some of Nigel's associates have been known to pedal, yet Priti Patel, one of his Conservative Party admirers (and a current leadership candidate), echoed the idea, albeit choosing to use the word "perception" instead.

Priti is a former Home Secretary, one of the UK's most senior cabinet ministers with responsibility for, among others, policing and immigration. You don't need rival right-wing parties when you have former Home Secretaries.

Unsurprisingly, the police were unhappy with the insinuation that they take sides when it comes to the law. Britain's most senior police chief, Mark Rowley, was so incensed that he snatched at a reporter's microphone when asked.

By then it was too late. The insinuation was doing the rounds, most notably on the platform of Trump's 'nephew'. "Two Tier Keir," Musk wrote, in cackling reference to the new British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.

Dog foghorn politics

Not content with pithy three-word epithets, Musk then amplified a false claim that Starmer would take convicted rioters to the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. With thugs in the north of England stopping cars at junctions to check if the drivers were white, some Brits wished he would, but that is beside the point.

Later, Musk flashed a picture on X showing four interested Black men behind a sofa on which a petite white girl is seated, under another picture of a chief constable seated at a table with three interested Muslim elders around him. "Found this pic of the UK justice system," Musk wrote on 10 August. Less dog-whistle, more dog foghorn.

Initially, No. 10 Downing Street dismissed Musk's civil war remark as having "no justification". When Musk began goading Starmer, No.10 ignored him. Starmer was the grown-up calling for a "mature conversation" with social media companies to limit malicious content. With Musk's new leanings, alas, there seems little chance.

Finn McRedmond of the New Statesman called Musk "a man whose cosmic ambition is matched only by his base puerility." Presumably Musk would suggest that Finn "literally gets base with her face".

After X refused to censor footage of a stabbing in a Sydney church, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called Musk an "arrogant billionaire" choosing "ego and showing violence over common sense". Musk partially withdrew the footage then wrestled with Canberra in court.

Ship listing to the right

He appears to be captaining an ever-lighter ship. Since the riots, there has been an exodus of Britain's ruling Labour Party politicians from X, heading instead for the sunlit social media uplands of Threads or BlueSky.

Armed with algorithms to ensure his tweets reach far and wide, Musk is fast becoming 'Super-Troll', a man with unlimited money but limited sense, accusing the likes of US allies (and their elected leaders) of not liking those who don't like immigrants.

The UK's Technology Secretary Peter Kyle told The Times that social media impacted "not just public discourse, but actual facts on the ground". The hotel in Rotherham housing asylum seekers that rioters set ablaze, for instance.

One of the Labour government's first actions was to terminate an unborn UK policy whereby asylum seekers who reach Britain would be flown to Rwanda in east Africa, roughly 7,000km away, for processing.

Musk's 'back in my day…'

When talking to Trump, Musk referred to his own origins and quipped that he himself was an immigrant, albeit a legal one. By opening that door, he was asking Uncle Donald to tell him all about his shiny new car outside.

"Elon, what's happened is unbelievable. You have from Africa, from the Congo, they're coming. From the Congo. And 22 people came in from the Congo recently and they're murderers." No evidence for this claim was required.

"It's just not possible for the United States to absorb everyone from Earth or even a few percent of the rest of Earth," concurred Musk. "It's just not possible."

Musk is an open supporter of ex-Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson, someone seen as close to those accused of mainstreaming the 'great replacement theory,' an idea that indigenous whites are being replaced by non-white immigrants. The further to the right you go in US politics, the more prevalent this theory. 

Back in November, Musk responded approvingly to a tweet reading: "Everyone is allowed to be proud of their race, except for white people, because we've been brainwashed into believing that our history was some how 'worse' than other races. This false narrative must die."

Musk wrote: "Yeah, this is super messed up. Time for this nonsense to end and shame ANYONE who perpetuates these lies!"

This was on the back of calling an anti-Jewish tweet, which accused Jews of undermining Western civilisation through support for immigration, "the actual truth".

Of course, white supremacy has changed since the apartheid system Musk was born into and which ended when he turned 20. Nowadays in America, even a Black man can wear a 'White Lives Matter' shirt, as did rapper Kanye West in 2022.

Shaking it upside down

Musk has railed against what he calls the "woke mind virus". The views of apartheid were decommissioned through a process of truth and reconciliation. Were they? Or were they, in fact, just repressed? If so, where are they today? Still decommissioned, or increasingly commissioned?

White Musk seems hell-bent on something. Having turned X/Twitter on its head and shaken all the woke out of it, he may now want to do the same to Britain's justice system. Presumably, if turned upside down and shaken, all the anti-immigrant rioters recently jailed for bricking police and torching hotels would be back on the street, free once again to stop cars at junctions, looking for non-whites.

It is strange that a man who has so much wealth, more than anyone else who has ever lived, and whose brain is indeed "fertile", should be so keen to join this particular Trumpian gang at this particularly dangerous time.

Still, "strange" is no bad word in Musk's eyes. And besides, it is as funny as it is dangerous watching him jump through Uncle Donald's hoops.