Memo to an increasingly unhinged Elon Musk: You’re not in charge of the world

On the eve of President-elect Donald Trump being inaugurated for a second term, his wingman – self-perpetuating businessman Elon Musk – is proving a worrying curtain-raiser.

Since Christmas, Musk has cast a shadow over European politics with salvos on various media sites.

He slammed British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, accusing him of being “complicit in the rape of Britain” during his tenure as director of public prosecutions for failing to tackle grooming gangs.

Elon Musk on the campaign trail for Donald Trump last year.Credit: AP

He also inexplicably turned on a favourite, Nigel Farage, leader of right-wing Reform UK, saying he “doesn’t have what it takes”, and has given his backing to the repulsive jailed right-wing UK activist, Tommy Robinson. Earlier, Musk threw support behind Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, known for its anti-immigrant views, as the country goes to the polls next month.

Starmer hit back, saying a line had been crossed. Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said Musk’s meddling was “not the way things should be between democracies and allies” while French President Emmanuel Macron wondered who “could have imagined ... that the owner of one of the largest social networks in the world would support a new international reactionary movement and intervene directly in elections”.

Australia has occasionally felt the damp lettuce of Musk’s unfiltered mania. In 2018, as Australians joined a team to rescue school boys trapped in a Thai cave, he notoriously called a diver who rejected his offer of assistance a “pedo guy”. Last April, Musk refused to take down video footage on X of a stabbing at the Assyrian Orthodox Church in western Sydney and then criticised Albanese government legislation to ban social media for under 16s.

Musk gave The Sydney Morning Herald a spray recently when technology editor David Swan predicted he would be forced to hand over the reins of car company Tesla after constant controversies and distractions. Musk fired back: “I predict that The Sydney Morning Herald will continue to lose readership in 2025 for relentlessly lying to their audience and boring them to death.”

Musk has no legitimacy to give the world the benefit of his takes, but then his unconstrained attention-seeking has always been as tedious as it is pathetic.

But Musk is poised for a new kind of power. He is leading the new Department of Government Efficiency to eliminate waste and reduce US federal bureaucracy, Trump’s populist pledge to drain the “Washington swamp” of “deep state” bureaucrats to restore America’s past glory.

Exactly 100 years ago, the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote an essay, The Rich Boy, which captures Musk, the world’s richest man: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful.”

Musk appears unaware of the difference between celebrity and government and, in these fraught days, there is no place in US politics for such softness and cynicism.

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