Photo by 10 Downing Street
Image caption Last year Musk was warmly welcomed by Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. This year the Labour government has not invited him to an investor forumAbout the article
The UK government has not invited the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to its Global Investment Forum, in response to his posts about the anti-immigrant riots in England in August, the BBC has learned.
At the very end of July and the beginning of August, following the murder of three girls in a dance club in the city of Southport, riots broke out in various cities in England, organized by radical nationalists dissatisfied with mass immigration.
Elon Musk has commented on these events on his X network, formerly Twitter, predicting a civil war in Britain and verbally attacking Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Keir Starmer has high hopes for this year’s Global Investment Summit, aiming to attract tens of billions in foreign investment to the country.
Musk attended the forum last year and then became the star of November’s AI Summit, holding a “fireside chat” with then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
The BBC has asked the British government and Elon Musk for comment and is awaiting responses.
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During the August riots, for example, Musk posted (but then deleted) disinformation that the British government was building concentration camps for rioters in the Falkland Islands.
His comments at the time were described by members of the UK government as “indefensible” and “quite reprehensible”.
The BBC has reason to believe that this is why Musk was not among the hundreds of the world’s largest investors invited to the summit on October 14.
The previous Conservative government tried to woo Musk and showed him various suitable sites for a Tesla battery factory.
Musk, however, built his “Gigafactory” in Germany, near Berlin, and explained in the press that he made this decision partly because of Brexit, that is, Britain’s exit from the European Union.
Max regularly attends a similar investment forum in France. In July, before the Paris Olympics, he was among those attending a business lunch with President Emmanuel Macron.
After buying Twitter, Musk lifted the block on various radicals, including British radical nationalists.
The British government is considering tightening the Online Safety Act after the August riots, which were sparked by disinformation about the Southport murder that spread across social media.
Who is Elon Musk
Elon Musk is currently considered the richest person on the planet. Bloomberg estimates his fortune at $228 billion, Forbes magazine – at $244 billion.
The bulk of this amount is made up of shares in the electric car manufacturer Tesla: Musk owns more than 13% of it.
In addition, half the world has been enthusiastically following the achievements of Musk’s space company, SpaceX, for many years.
Musku was born in Pretoria, South Africa, but became a US citizen in 2002.
He is now 53 years old, but he became a successful programmer and businessman back in the 1990s, and world famous in the early 2000s, when he created SpaceX and Tesla with $100 million received for shares in the PayPal payment system.
Musk did not reveal his preferences in American domestic politics for a long time, calling himself “half-Democrat, half-Republican” — but at the same time claiming that he voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, that is, the presidential candidates from the Democratic Party.
In recent years, however, Musk has become a fan of Republican Donald Trump. In the current election campaign, he is officially endorsing Trump, who has promised him a post in the administration.
