In 2024, Elon Musk’s attention was focused squarely on the US presidential election. But in the early days of 2025, the X owner has turned his gaze toward the UK. Musk has feverishly spent the past few days boosting disinformation and divisive rhetoric on X about Muslim grooming gangs in the UK, posting almost 200 times, a WIRED review of the centibillionaire’s output has found.
These “grooming gangs” reference an organized child sexual abuse scandal that came to light in 2014 involving gangs of British Pakastani men who abused an estimated thousands of girls in several towns in the north of England over the course of several decades.
Musk’s interest in this issue appeared to peak after a new report from right-wing news station GB News claimed the current Labour government has failed to protect the victims by refusing to sanction a government-led inquiry.
During his three-day posting binge, Musk has called for UK government officials to be hanged and jailed, demanded the removal of Keir Starmer as UK prime minister, and suggested notorious far-right activist Tommy Robinson be released from prison.
Robinson was jailed after admitting contempt of court last year for continually repeating false claims about a Syrian refugee that led to the refugee and his family receiving death threats. Musk has falsely claimed that Robinson was jailed for “telling the truth” about grooming gangs. Musk is also pushing the narrative that organized child sex abuse is carried out almost exclusively by Muslim men, when a 2020 UK government study found that was not the case.
Musk’s flurry of posts and replies comes just months after anti-immigrant riots roiled the UK, fomented by far-right activists who spread misinformation about a knife attack.
Musk’s posts, which have racked up hundreds of millions of views on X, are just his latest effort at inserting himself into UK politics. In the wake of his successful efforts to aid president-elect Donald Trump in the US election, Musk has turned his attention to supporting the right-wing Reform Party in the UK. The party is headed by Trump ally Nigel Farage; Musk met him at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in December. Musk’s public endorsement of Reform has raised questions in the UK about the potential influence of foreign donors on UK elections.
A petition Musk shared in November calling for the removal of Starmer has so far amassed more than 3 million signatures, and over the past three days Musk has interacted with a wide variety of prominent figures about the grooming gangs scandal, including mainstream UK political figures like Farage and former Conservative Party leader Liz Truss. But Musk has also boosted content from extremist figures Carl Benjamin, who was a major participant in the Gamergate movement, and Tristan Tate, who is accused of human trafficking and rape and is the brother of manosphere influencer Andrew Tate.
“They should receive the severest punishment, hang them for treason,” Musk wrote in response to a post from far-right UK lawmaker Robert Jenrick calling for the prosecution of government officials “involved in the Muslim grooming gang cover-up.”
The report that sparked Musk’s interest earlier this week claimed that Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips had rejected a request from a city council for a government-led inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham, a town near Manchester in the north of England that was one one of the areas where allegations of abuse from grooming gangs were made.
While Musk and his allies claim this is part of a larger government cover-up, Phillips actually wrote in a letter that it was “for Oldham Council alone to decide to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally, rather than for the government to intervene.” The previous Conservative-led government similarly rejected Oldham’s calls for a government-led inquiry in 2022.
Musk has called on Phillips to be jailed and called her “a rape genocide apologist.” Both Musk and Phillips did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Musk is also using the report to call, once again, for Starmer’s removal as prime minister.
“Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years,” Musk wrote on X on Friday morning, in a post that is now pinned to the top of his timeline. “Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”
Starmer, in his role as director of public prosecutions over a decade ago, actually initiated the prosecution of a grooming gang in Rochdale and introduced new rules aimed at allowing sexual abuse cases to be prosecuted.
Starmer and the UK government press office did not respond for comment, but health secretary Wes Streeting told the BBC that Musk’s comments were “misjudged and certainly misinformed.”
Musk has also drawn a number of right-wing US figures into the conversation, including accounts like Chaya Raichik, who runs the virulently anti-LGBTQ account Libs of TikTok, anti-transgender activist Riley Gaines, right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong, and disgraced former US national security adviser Michael Flynn.
US senator Mike Lee also weighed-in, writing on X: “Does the UK need to be liberated?”
“Yes,” Musk responded.
Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager and Trump supporter, repeated Musk’s narrative almost verbatim in a post on X. He then asked if the president-elect would “consider appropriate sanctions against the UK until these concerns are addressed.”
In a post on Friday morning, Musk boosted a call for King Charles to dissolve the UK parliament and order a general election. While the monarch in the UK does dissolve parliament ahead of the general election, it is only done at the request of the prime minister, and the monarch’s power is, in effect, nothing more than a rubber stamp.
