Mint ·
Economy, business and finance
Elon Musk trains his political chaos machine on the U.K.
Using his social-media megaphone to roil the waters, Musk is promoting a new anti-immigration party.
LONDON—On the eve of becoming the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk was fixated on political turmoil an ocean away from SpaceX headquarters.
In one X post, he called the mayor of Belfast a “betrayer of her people.” In another, he called a British political leader “a scumbag and a traitor.”
And a post from a once-obscure politician named Rupert Lowe—whose nascent far-right party Musk had declared the only hope for salvaging Britain’s future—got more than three million views after Musk retweeted it.
The X-storm took place on June 11, in the wake of violent anti-immigration riots in the Northern Ireland capital—and one day before SpaceX’s IPO.
For years, Musk has used his social-media megaphone to boost antiestablishment parties outside the U.S., railing against “woke” politics, immigration and tech industry-regulation across Europe, South America and Africa. But no other foreign nation has drawn such frequent, sustained attention from the world’s richest man as the U.K., according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of 4½ years’ worth of his posts on X.
Musk has twice exceeded 200 monthly posts about British politics and culture wars, though the volume waxes and wanes with the news cycle. In June alone, Musk posted more than 160 times on the topic—over 10% of his posts that month. By July, he was back to his baseline, with just a few dozen tweets.
The South Africa-born entrepreneur regularly frames Britain as a failing nation that is losing its Western identity to mass Muslim immigration. He has been accused of stoking civil unrest in the key U.S. ally, called for ousting a prime minister and embraced the far-right activist known as Tommy Robinson, who was once barred from entering the U.S. for his multiple criminal convictions.
He has also used X to promote Rupert Lowe, the man he says should be Britain’s next leader. Before last year the overwhelming majority of Musk’s more than 200 million followers likely had never heard of Lowe. For much of his career, the 68-year-old toiled in the backwaters of British politics, railing against mass immigration, the European Union and traditional political parties that largely ignored him.
Overnight, Musk’s name-check boosted Lowe’s profile in Britain and beyond, providing crucial momentum in Lowe’s battle with rival Nigel Farage for control of Britain’s right wing. Musk has thrown his support behind Lowe’s political party, Restore Britain, which is pushing to deport millions of immigrants.
Despite having just a handful of staffers, the new party is polling at around 5% in the U.K., drawing followers who cite immigration as their top concern and splintering Britain’s right-leaning vote.
“I think he’s concerned about Britain,” Lowe said of Musk in an interview with the Journal. “And we’re eternally grateful to him for creating a true free-speech platform.”
The Journal analysis shows that Musk’s attention has given the already-ascendant Lowe a significant digital boost—a retweet or mention from Musk has more than twice the number of likes on average compared with an unamplified post from the same period. And even Lowe’s unboosted posts now get more than double the number of likes and views they did before Musk started mentioning and interacting with him.
Musk’s effort to reshape Britain has caused political turmoil, leaving government ministers here at a loss over how to push back without provoking a direct confrontation with the Trump administration, whom Musk has helped bankroll.
In promoting the British far right, Musk appears to have found common ground with a one-time adversary, the comedic actor John Cleese. A frequent Donald Trump critic, the 86-year-old British star of “Monty Python” fame had sharply criticized Musk over his comments about the 2025 U.S. government shutdown. Musk tweeted back: “Senility is tragic to observe.” Another time, Musk called Cleese a “retard” in a post responding to the actor’s criticism of Farage.
But lately the two have united on X over defending Robinson and supporting Lowe. When Lowe launched his political party this year, Cleese reposted Musk’s call to back Restore.
Lowe took note. “You are a true patriot, Elon,” he responded.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022. Over the next two years, he made a hard turn toward U.S. politics, a Journal analysis of his activity on the platform found, often slamming the media and Democrats’ treatment of his companies. Since then he has gone increasingly global, using the platform to boost antiestablishment parties across Europe and rail against “woke” politics, immigration and tech regulation.
Critics say Musk and X amplify extreme views and drown out other voices. “There was clear evidence of multiple occasions where Musk has manipulated information and influenced British politics,” says Andy Pryce, who until recently ran a counter-disinformation unit at the U.K. Foreign Office. This, he said, “helped stoke acts of violence in the U.K.”
U.K. officials have monitored Musk’s posts, alongside those of other X users, for national-security risks, according to people familiar with the matter, but decided not to take any formal action. Officials also mapped his output to see whether foreign state actors, such as Russia, were engaging with the posts and further amplifying them. The results of that inquiry couldn’t be learned.
The U.K. government said in a statement that it is ensuring online platforms abide by British law. “The Government’s broader counter-disinformation work is focused on identifying coordinated attempts to spread false or misleading information online, not individuals,” it said in a statement.
Neither Musk nor his representatives responded to requests for comment.
Before Musk bought Twitter, Robinson—whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon—had been banned from the platform for posts deemed to be “hateful conduct.” Musk restored his account in 2023. Robinson has served jail time in the U.K. on charges including assaulting an off-duty police officer, using a false passport to enter the U.S. and mortgage fraud. He has organized large-scale anti-immigration protests across the U.K., some of which have descended into violence.
The two men often trade posts about immigration and a long-running scandal involving the organized, group-based child sexual exploitation of vulnerable girls, many of them in government care, across England over decades. Prominent convictions in some towns involved predominantly British-Pakistani men.
Lowe, Robinson and Musk frequently accuse U.K. officials of playing down crimes against white British girls, referring to the perpetrators as “invaders.”
In a brief interview, Robinson declined to respond to detailed questions. “I find it absolutely remarkably insane that journalists are still latching onto something, someone who has given people free speech in this country,” he said. “Elon Musk has given a voice to the British public. And that voice has awakened a nation.”
Musk and Robinson also joined forces after a mass stabbing of young girls was falsely blamed on a Muslim immigrant, prompting rioters to attack a local mosque with bricks and target hotels housing asylum seekers. Hundreds of people were arrested amid rolling clashes with police.
Musk responded on X that “civil war is inevitable” in Britain because of immigration. Police later said the teenage suspect apprehended was the Welsh-born son of Christian Rwandan immigrants.
“Either: 1. Secure the borders OR 2. Have your head cut off!” Musk commented on X in July of this year in response to a post by Restore of a grainy picture of an asylum seeker who is alleged to have attacked a man with a knife in Belfast.
Musk’s paternal grandmother came from Liverpool, in northern England, and he has cited his ancestry as central to his interest in the U.K.
“I am of primarily British heritage, British ancestry. I want Britain to be greater than it ever has been,” Musk said at a London rally organized by Robinson last September, where he appeared via video link. “And what I see happening is a destruction of Britain.”
Lowe wasn’t an obvious first choice to lead a populist rescue of the British establishment.
A wealthy former banker, Lowe was for much of his career best known for his turbulent tenure as chairman of Southampton soccer club, which he left in 2009 as the club struggled with mounting debts. Lowe then went on to become an advocate for Britain leaving the European Union. He joined Reform UK, where he won a seat in Parliament. Few outside Westminster knew much about the politician.
Then he caught the attention of Musk on X.
“I have not met Rupert Lowe,” Musk tweeted in January 2025, “but his statements online that I have read so far make a lot of sense.”
With Musk’s encouragement, Lowe launched Restore Britain later that year. “X for Rupert and me has been—particularly for Rupert—phenomenal. It put him on the map,” says Ben Habib, a commercial property investor and former European Parliament member who previously supported Lowe’s political rise but has recently broken ranks.
Before Musk began interacting with Lowe in January 2025, the British politician’s best-performing posts on the platform received view counts in the low millions.
Since then, Musk has interacted with more than 100 of Lowe’s posts, driving them to tens of millions of views.
Lowe says his popularity on X owes to his decades of experience and his plan for the country, not to Musk. The two had spoken twice by summer, Lowe said, including once over Zoom.
“People accuse him of altering the algorithm and stuff,” Lowe told the Journal. “He doesn’t do that. He’s a highly principled man.”
Lowe visited Austin, Texas, over Fourth of July weekend where he met briefly with Musk, recorded a two-hour episode with influential podcaster Joe Rogan and caught a televised World Cup soccer match at an Austin bar.
On the podcast, Lowe decried a “multicultural invasion” of Europe and laid out details of a report he commissioned last year on what he described as Muslim-Pakistani rape gangs in Britain. He thanked Musk for connecting him with Rogan.
Lowe wasn’t Musk’s first favorite British politician.
From mid-2024 and through the end of the year, Musk tweeted around a dozen times about Reform’s leader Nigel Farage—mostly short, supportive responses to Farage’s posts.
Farage, a longtime Trump supporter who helped spearhead Brexit, defended Musk online against critics and described him as a crucial ally against the mainstream media.
Shortly after Trump’s re-election, Farage flew to Florida and spent an hour with Musk at Mar-a-Lago, Farage says, during which he raised the prospect of the billionaire making what would have been the single largest political donation in British history. The news caused panic among Britain’s political class and calls for curbs on foreign donations.
But the donation never came. In early January 2025, Musk ditched Farage: “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes,” he posted.
Musk wanted Reform to publicly back Robinson and welcome him into Reform’s inner circle, according to Farage. “I wouldn’t be bullied by him,” Farage says. “He is used to getting his way because he’s big and strong and powerful.”
Robinson was in prison at the time for repeating defamatory statements about a Syrian teenager, against court orders.
Two months later, Farage and Lowe publicly split, with Lowe accusing Farage of watering down Reform’s immigration policy. Reform officially suspended Lowe and stripped him of his party responsibilities. Lowe has been ambiguous about Robinson, saying the activist’s politics are his business.
Habib, the former Lowe ally, had made contact with Musk via direct message after Habib defended Robinson on X, calling him a “political prisoner.” Musk had urged Habib to start a new political party to compete with Farage, but Habib had thought it too difficult.
After Lowe’s expulsion, Habib reached back out to Musk. “I told you I think a new party in the UK would be too difficult,” Habib wrote in a message viewed by the Journal. “I am correcting myself…. Reform UK is done…. We will do our own thing.”
Two minutes later, Musk wrote back: “I’m happy to support a new party.”
Habib then launched a party he called Advance UK, but Lowe declined to participate. Lowe started Restore in June 2025 and registered it as a party earlier this year. Habib now says he can no longer support his former ally, in part because Lowe has insisted on defining “Britons” as white-only. “I’m deeply concerned by the vein of ethnonationalism that runs through his party. That is not British.”
Habib has deregistered his party, while Lowe’s profile has continued to rise with Musk’s backing.
‘Violence is coming to you’
In September 2025, Robinson invited Musk to appear remotely via video at his street march, dubbed Unite the Kingdom, in central London. Wearing a T-shirt with the words “What Would Orwell Think,” Musk called for the British Parliament to be dissolved, framing “massive uncontrolled migration” as the root cause of the country’s woes that, left unchecked, would ruin it.
“Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you,” Musk told the crowd, which stretched for blocks, drawing cheers. “You either fight back or you die.”
British diplomats made private outreaches to their U.S. State Department counterparts to protest against Musk’s appearance and his incendiary language, officials said.
Soon after, Trump headed to London for a state visit that was to include a dinner at Windsor Castle hosted by King Charles III and Queen Camilla. Starmer advisers briefed the prime minister about Musk’s influence on British politics and what they described as his fanning of extremist views.
They proposed that the next day, in a private meeting with Trump, Starmer should express concerns about Musk.
Starmer never brought up Musk. There was no point, people briefed on the discussions say. Musk was too powerful and Starmer’s center-left government, with its sagging popularity at home, had little sway over the U.S. leader.
Lowe says Musk has never given him a penny. But he has personally earned nearly $150,000 from X during his time in Parliament, financial disclosures show. It isn’t uncommon for British politicians to get paid for social media or television appearances, but he has out-earned peers on the platform.
Other Musk-linked money has flowed into the system around the edges. For example, Robinson has publicly thanked Musk for handling some of his legal bills.
A fractured right wing?
Political analysts say Musk’s support for Lowe could backfire, fracturing the right-wing vote between multiple parties and giving the ruling left-leaning Labour Party a better shot at staying in power.
Instead, the short-term concern from British officials is about Musk’s ability to foment unrest on the nation’s streets. In June, Musk again weighed heavily into British politics following the stabbing death of an 18-year-old white student named Henry Nowak. Video footage released publicly showed Nowak being handcuffed by police as he lay dying after his Sikh murderer falsely accused him of racial abuse.
“Rage,” Musk tweeted. He retweeted a Robinson post that read, “Henry was murdered by racist police policy’s[sic], that target white people,” and called for people to gather outside the police station near where Nowak died.
Police involved apologized and a watchdog investigation was launched.
Shortly after, violent riots erupted in Belfast following the brutal knife attack of a Belfast man by an immigrant, described by police as originally from Sudan or Chad and who had claimed asylum in the U.K. three years ago. Masked rioters burned cars and houses and attacked neighborhoods housing migrants.
Lowe wrote on X that all those who entered the country illegally should be deported. “Only Restore Britain can save Britain. It is the only way,” Musk said, retweeting Lowe’s remarks, in a post which has been viewed more than 25 million times.
During the rioting, Robinson was tweeting from Russia, where he shared a video of himself with Errol Musk, Elon Musk’s estranged father, following a St. Petersburg economic conference with Putin allies.
“You’re seeing England sink,” Errol Musk told the Journal, praising his son and Robinson for spreading the message.
In a special election later that month in the northern England district of Makerfield, the Restore candidate got close to 7% of the votes, draining support from Farage’s Reform UK, which came in second. The winner: Labour left-winger Andy Burnham, who quickly leveraged his new seat in Parliament to replace Starmer as prime minister.
Asked during a news conference what Lowe offered voters that Reform does not, Farage replied: “Elon Musk.”
Write to Jenny Strasburg at jenny.strasburg@wsj.com, Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky at jjw@wsj.com, Max Colchester at Max.Colchester@wsj.com and Nate Rattner at nate.rattner@wsj.com
To understand the scope of Elon Musk’s activity on X, Wall Street Journal reporters began by downloading 87,065 of his posts from January 2022 to August 2026. We used a large language model to label Musk’s posts and their accompanying context by topic. For simplicity, the model was instructed to label each post with one and only one topic, even when they straddled multiple categories. For instance, posts about the war in Ukraine were classified as being about U.S. politics when they focused specifically on American involvement in the war. Posts about the use of Starlink, a division of SpaceX, in wartime Ukraine were categorized as SpaceX. When context was insufficient to make a clear categorization, posts were placed in a catch-all “other” category. Reporters hand-verified a stratified random sample of 471 of the posts and found that the model agreed with human judgment 92% of the time. In a separate analysis, reporters asked a large language model to determine whether a post contained politically charged content and assign it one or more country labels as appropriate. This analysis required explicit mentions of country-specific names, people or institutions, so the per-month tallies are likely undercounts and may differ slightly from the findings of the topic analysis. In an analysis of two random samples from different time periods totaling 369 country-tagged posts, we found the model agreed with human classifications 96% of the time. For the week leading up to the SpaceX IPO, each tweet was hand-inspected and categorized by Journal reporters. For this sample, we excluded three replies/reposts whose original context had been deleted. The Journal also downloaded Rupert Lowe’s tweets between January 2023 and August 2026, totaling 15,862 posts. Reporters compared the number of likes and views on posts replied to or reposted by Musk versus unamplified posts. The analysis excludes 8,434 non-original posts by Lowe, including his replies to and reposts of his own or others’ content. Both Musk’s and Lowe’s posts were dated according to Eastern Time, so the dates of individual posts and the monthly totals may be slightly different when dated by their local times or UTC. View counts on all of Musk’s and Lowe’s posts are as of early September.