Elon Musk is helping to destroy the West
He isn't saving the West. He's doing the exact opposite
The world’s richest man is a thin-skinned megalomaniac defined by his ignorance, deceit and bigotry.
The interview Elon Musk gave to The Economist was certainly revealing. It helps underline why the West is in crisis - which it is.
The interview was conducted by the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes. Musk evidently realised it had gone disastrously, because afterwards he denounced her as “a traitor to the West, plain and simple”.
Now, I would not describe anyone as a “traitor to the West”. As it happens, the elite faction represented by The Economist has played a significant role in plunging the West into crisis: championing an economic order which enriches a tiny minority while hollowing out communities, cheering disastrous wars and treating Israel’s genocide in Gaza as an unfortunate public-relations problem.
But Musk and the far right have promoted the biggest lie of our time: that Muslims, migrants, refugees, trans people and the so-called “woke left” are responsible for the West’s decline.
They are not.
Muslims did not design an economic system which sucked wealth and power upwards while leaving millions condemned to insecurity and falling living standards. Refugees did not invade Iraq, destroy Libya and devastate Afghanistan, humiliating Western military power and spawning chaos across entire regions. Trans people did not deregulate finance, smash trade unions or privatise essential services. The “woke left” did not arm Israel as it obliterated Gaza, completing the West’s moral collapse before the eyes of the world.
The West’s elites did that - including Elon Musk.
The far right which Musk actively promotes is now manipulating the resulting anger, directing it away from those who possess wealth and power and towards people who lack either. At the same time, the authoritarian apparatus forged by the so-called “war on terror” is rebounding against Western societies themselves, with dissent increasingly criminalised and democracy placed under threat.
This is what I explore in my forthcoming book, The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It. The subtitle has a deliberate double meaning. The West’s rulers have lost their dominance - and, as Musk demonstrates, many of them appear to have lost their minds, too.
Musk’s civil war fantasy
A running theme of Musk’s interview was that Britain is overwhelmed with violent disorder.
He denied stating that Britain was collapsing into apocalyptic disorder - and yet has repeatedly tweeted that civil war in Britain “is inevitable”.
Notably, he tweeted this during the August 2024 violent uprising by far-right and racist extremists in the UK:
Then, there really was violent disorder - driven by those who views on migrants, refugees and Muslims not dissimilar to his own.
This was when these elements jumped on the horrific Southport murders - and attempted to burn asylum seekers alive in hotels, attacked mosques, assaulted people of colour in the street, tried to drag migrants from cars, attacked the homes and businesses belonging either to minorities or people suspected of being migrants - we could go on. It was a pogrom.
In a speech broadcast to a protest organised by far-right criminal Tommy Robinson, he said:
This is a message to the reasonable centre, the people who ordinarily wouldn’t get involved in politics, who just want to live their lives. They don’t want that, they’re quiet, they just go about their business.
My message is to them: if this continues, that violence is going to come to you, you will have no choice. You’re in a fundamental situation here.
Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die, that’s the truth, I think.
How can this not be understood as incitement?
But Musk’s portrayal of Britain as falling into violent bedlam because of migrants, refugees and minorities is false.
Homicides in England and Wales have fallen to their lowest level in almost 50 years.
The murder rate in London is at the lowest level ever recorded. Admissions to hospital because of assault, knife assault, bodily force, blunt objects and firearms have plummeted.
Violence is much lower than in the US. There it has fallen, too, albeit from much higher levels.
Britain has certainly experienced a massive increase in immigration and become far more diverse over the last few decades. Yet, at the same time, violence has plummeted.
The real danger is that the far right persuades enough people that society is being overrun by violent foreigners, whipping up the fear and fury which produces actual mass disorder.
Musk accuses Minton Beddoes of living a “cloistered existence”. That’s almost certainly true - yet what world does he believe he inhabits? He is literally the world’s richest man, and admitted he hasn’t even visited the UK for years.
“Normal people”
When challenged about his support for the far right, Musk insists that these are simply “normal people” who want “secure borders, safe cities and sensible spending.”
Yet this completely erases the actual reality of the far-right movements he supported.
Consider Restore Britain, the far-right party led by Rupert Lowe which Musk has enthusiastically promoted.
Restore proposes deporting legally resident foreign nationals if they live in social housing, claim benefits, cannot speak English or supposedly “fail to integrate” - an disturbingly elastic category which could mean almost anything. Lowe has declared that “millions and millions” must leave or be made to leave.
He has also threatened to use the state retrospectively against officials, judges and politicians who he claims placed “dangerous third world savages” in British communities.
Prominent members of Restore include neo-Nazis, Hitler sympathisers and advocates of ethnic cleansing.
These are not “normal people” being unfairly maligned by elite journalists.
They represent a mortal threat to democracy in Britain and across the West.
A straightforward question
Minton Beddoes asks Musk a very simple question: is he anti-Muslim?
He could simply answer “no”.
Instead, after pausing at length, he says that he opposes people entering countries with “antithetical views”, and then announces that he is against rape and murder.
What is he saying here exactly? Asked whether he is hostile towards around two billion of his fellow human beings, he immediately jumps to talking about sexual violence and killing.
Musk says he opposes people with beliefs he says are “antithetical” to Western values. But his beliefs are antithetical to mine. I believe in democracy, equality, solidarity and the redistribution of wealth and power. He promotes authoritarianism, far-right extremists and racialised conspiracy theories.
So how do we define these shared Western values exactly?
The vast majority of human beings oppose rape and murder, wherever they were born and whatever faith they hold. Many of those arriving in Western countries are fleeing such violence - including violence that was unleashed or intensified by Western wars.
Yet Musk takes two crimes overwhelmingly condemned across humanity and attaches them, without prompting, to a question about Muslims.
Loathed
When Minton Beddoes tells Musk that people loathe him, his response is to cite his quarter of a billion followers on X.
YouGov’s British tracker finds that just 21 per cent of people like Musk, while 62 per cent dislike him - a net rating of minus 41. According to YouGov in the US, 33 per cent viewed him favourably and 53 per cent unfavourably, putting him 14 points underwater.
Musk suggests that actually it is the media who are hated.
There are very good reasons to be angry at the Western media. Media outlets are mostly the playthings of a tiny number of rich moguls. Elite journalists routinely present the interests of the wealthy as basic common sense. Much of the media cheer on disastrous foreign wars, economic policies which benefit the rich at the expense of ordinary people, and redirect anger away from those with wealth and power towards migrants, refugees and Muslims.
But that makes the media very much like Elon Musk.
He is not angry because establishment journalism serves the interests of the powerful. After all, he is one of the richest, most powerful human beings on earth.
He is angry because he doesn’t believe that they go far enough in promoting the bigotry he promotes.
The West really is in crisis. Its economic model has imposed stagnation, decline and misery on millions. Its military adventures have produced disaster after catastrophe. Its ruling class has forfeited its authority, while its complicity in Gaza has destroyed any remaining illusions in its moral leadership.
But Muslims are not to blame. Refugees are not to blame. Trans people are not to blame. The left are not to blame.
The West’s own elites are to blame - and now rich men like Elon Musk are exploiting the ruinous consequences.
In doing so, he promotes far-right movements which threaten already deeply compromised democracies.
Elon Musk is not a prophet warning us about the fall of the West.
He is helping to bring it about.
Really. I know who's "free speech" I'd like to ban. But only because he's so tedious. I recognise his South African heritage has given him some funny ideas, but can't he fix his own problems first. His ketamine habit might be a good place to start. Frequent recreational use has been linked to cognitive effects including impaired memory, delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance. Hmm. Sounds familiar.
I just heard a replay of an early Goons show on Radio Four Extra titled the First Albert Memorial On The Moon. The introductory speech, voiced by Peter Sellers, could have been the 19th century H. G. Wells sci-fi hokum Musk spouts. It was actually quite shocking how similar they sounded. The man’s a wilfully ignorant dangerous fool.
The West seems to be trapped in a re enactment of the 60s movie Dr Strangelove.
Where is a Cervantes when he is most needed ?