For Eric Mina, a YouTuber based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the appropriate response is awe. “Look at all the things he’s accomplished!” he says. “He’s not trying to make a buck. He wants to be an interplanetary species and he’s actually going forward and doing it. That’s not the normal type of thinking that people have. They think: personal gain. He’s thinking bigger than that. So yes, he’s going to seem like he’s from another world.”

What’s interesting about these assessments is that as hyperbolic as they may be, they’re not entirely wrong. Elon Musk is indeed in a separate category from the other 2,700 or so billionaires on the planet in many respects. One is quite simply that he is the richest of all of them. Indeed, on Friday, following the stock market debut of his company SpaceX, he became the world’s first trillionaire. According to the Informa Connect Academy, which tracks the fortunes of the bariatrically wealthy, there are others on track to follow: the Indian tycoon Gautam Adani, the Indonesian mining magnate Prajogo Pangestu, the French luxury boss, Bernard Arnault, etc. But as with landing on Mars, one feels that being first is what counts.

But Musk is “a different type of billionaire” in other senses too. One is the fact that his power is not merely financial. His portfolio of interests cuts across technology, energy, transportation, space, communications, biotech and, of course, politics. As of 2020, SpaceX has provided Nasa’s taxi service to the International Space Station. It is, as Musk reminded Joe Rogan in an interview last year, in the business of intercontinental ballistic missiles. “I invest in apocalyptic technologies, didn’t you know?” Then there are his Starlink satellites, which provide internet access to over 12 million subscribers worldwide including in remote and war-stricken areas such as Ukraine. There is his Neuralink project, promising a brain-human interface. And there is X, formerly Twitter, which, despite a mass exodus of users since Musk’s takeover, remains the world’s most popular news site, a data source for his Grok large-language model, and a megaphone for Musk’s political views — bought with the express intention to destroy parts of the public realm that he didn’t personally like, or which conflicted with his own ambitions.

For Guido Alfani, an economic historian at the University of Bocconi in Milan, this is all highly unusual from a world historical perspective. Alfani is the author of a history of the super-rich from antiquity to the tech age, Midas to Musk, if you will, entitled As Gods Among Men. He examines the power and influence of figures such as Alan Rufus, who commanded a fortune equivalent to £130 billion back in 11th-century England, and the Gilded Age banker J.P. Morgan whose cash reserves were so vast, he was able to save America from a disastrous bank-run during the 1907 Knickerbocker Crisis. Alfani has no qualms in asserting that Musk is the richest person ever to have lived.

“Historically speaking, today’s super-rich are not only much wealthier in absolute terms but in relative terms too,” Alfani tells me. “If you compare Elon Musk’s wealth to the wealth of the median household in the US today, it is a much greater difference than, say, the difference between Cosimo de Medici and the average Florentine household in the mid-15th century.”

The main reason for this is to do with globalization. Travel, and therefore trade, he explains, used to be really difficult. The wealth of the Medicis was geographically contained to the area around Florence with some limited trade overseas. Today, economic activity takes place on a global scale, which means more markets, more customers, more rewards. One way to look at that would be, in the past, every village had a rich person. Now we all live in one supersized global village, we all share the same rich people and they are accordingly supersized. (We share the same village idiots, too).

So, according to Alfani, the emergence of a figure like Musk isn’t so surprising. The arc of history bends towards the rich becoming much richer with only occasional ruptures: the Black Death, say, or the Second World War. Musk is only the latest, digital-age iteration of the trend and, he presumably hopes, its continuation: “I’m going to colonize Mars,” he is reported as saying in Walter Isaacson’s hagiography. “My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.”

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Indeed, it is precisely this multiplanetary ambition that guided the $1.77 trillion valuation of SpaceX. Musk has become a trillionaire not because of what he has done but because of what he promises to do. As seasoned Musk-skeptic Brett Arends has noted, SpaceX actually loses about $2 million per hour; the only part of it that brings in proper revenue is Starlink, which basically amounts to a fancy mobile phone provider. So why the $1.77 trillion valuation? Well the SpaceX prospectus has promised investors “the establishment of a lunar economy and interplanetary industrialization… space tourism and cargo transport to the Moon… in-orbit manufacturing, passenger transport to the Moon, passenger and cargo transport to Mars, energy production on the Moon and Mars, manufacturing capabilities on the Moon and Mars, and asteroid mining.” Arends isn’t convinced, pointing out that “the company plans to target markets that may not even exist using technologies it does not have”.

Still, whatever doubts and misgivings remain, it’s hard seriously to maintain that Musk isn’t also an extremely impressive entrepreneur. There are, indeed, libraries worth of content parsing his teachings (“Always break down problems into their fundamental truths and reason from there”). Whether through his obsessive attention to detail or through mythmaking genius, Musk has, after all risen to the top of the dominance hierarchy of the age. However, what concerns Alfani is that in all past eras, there were more constraints on the men who managed this. “In the Medieval and early modern period, well into the 19th century, there was much more of a divide between the political power of the nobility and the economic power of the commercial class,” he says. “There has always been a suspicion of the rich getting involved in politics. That suspicion still exists — but it’s exceptionally weak compared to the past.”

Nor did any figure of the past enjoy anything like the veneration that Musk inspires — such craven abasement, such we-are-not-worthy sycophancy. As Wil Waldon, a space enthusiast who presents the Elon Musk Podcast tells me: “There are people who — no matter what Elon does — they are going to follow him to the ends of the Earth. They would die for this guy. They think he can do no wrong.” He has had experience of this first hand. Waldon’s primary interests are space and cars; Musk is extremely consequential in both industries, but Waldon’s interest in him is downstream of his interest in engineering. But should he suggest on his podcast that SpaceX engineers such as William Gerstenmaier and Mark Juncosa maybe deserve a little more credit; or that the Tesla Cyber Truck is less than a work of aesthetic bliss, he will be “destroyed in the comments”.

Again, this kind of thing is new, says Alfani. In the Gilded Age through to the Roaring Twenties, there was gossip, speculation, fictions about figures like John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. “But there was nothing like the same tendency to consider these people as superheroes or as models to be followed. This is new. And this connects to the fact that we’re more willing than at any other point in history to accept their direct involvement in politics.”

Alfani dates his own interest in the subject back to 1994, when Silvio Berlusconi, then Italy’s richest man, was elected prime minister. “At the time, this was unprecedented in a Western democracy,” he says. Now, the idea of the extremely wealthy becoming either directly involved in politics as candidates (see Trump) or indirectly as cheerleaders (see Musk) has come to seem banal. Indeed, the average wealth of American gubernatorial and mayoral candidates has been rising for years. Of the many factors that cost Rishi Sunak the 2024 General Election, his being a centimillionaire by marriage was fairly low down on the list.

Should this concern the rest of us? Well, according to Oxfam, 60% of humanity has grown poorer since the Covid year of 2020, while the billionaire class has become 34% richer. The five richest men more than doubled their earnings in this period, adding $464 billion to their wealth. It’s no surprise that anti-billionaire politics is proving increasingly salient. The recent launch of the Global Justice Fund by the star French economist Thomas Piketty and others — proposing a global wealth tax of 20% on billionaires — is one attempt to try to move from mere handwringing to a plan of action.

Ingrid Robeyns, a philosopher based at the University of Utrecht who has spent years studying the ethics of extreme wealth, believes we need to go much further. In her book Limitarianism, she makes many arguments against extreme wealth: it’s catastrophic for the environment; it engenders corruption; and, indeed, it’s not much good for the rich themselves. Musk doesn’t exactly seem a model of contentment, does he? But one of the simplest arguments is quite simply that such disparities of wealth are not fair. “There’s a deep philosophical argument that it is morally undeserved,” Robeyns says, because so much of what determines whether someone becomes extremely rich — not rich but extremely rich — are matters of luck,” she says. “Luck can never be a basis for moral reward.”

Our ancestors were arguably more clear-sighted about the connection between wealth and luck. It’s right there in the word “fortune”. In the past, wealth was more likely to be inherited rather than earned — a luck of birth. Actually, that’s still often the case: around one third of the Forbes billionaires are heirs. However, of the so-called “self-made” billionaires, there is still a widespread perception that their fortunes are natural byproducts of their ingenuity. “He is the ultimate example of meritocracy,” one Musk fan had insisted to me. “He started with nothing. Now he has multiple empires.”

Robeyns has little time for such arguments. “The distribution of income and wealth isn’t just the result of what individuals do, but also of our institutions. It’s to do with how we organize markets. Technology markets are winner-takes-all markets. But we’ve also seen a shift in the political economy that makes it much easier for them to accumulate their fortunes. The ideology legitimizes their actions.”

Nor does she buy the argument that without Musk, we would be collectively impoverished, without electric cars and spaceships. “The thing to ask is: what are all the companies that would have flourished if Musk had not built Tesla?” Musk has, for example, spent billions lobbying against an entirely practical and logical high-speed train link between Los Angeles and San Francisco and in favor of his own Hyperloop project — which, rather like the idea of mining asteroids, remains in the realm of ludicrous science fiction.

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The aspect of this that concerns Robeyns most, however, is this ease with which financial power can be turned into political power. “Musk paid $44 billion to buy his own private social media platform, he financed it through selling his own shares, and he is using that platform in various ways to undermine democracy,” she says. “If you believe in the principle of political equality, you need to build very solid walls between the world of finance and the sphere of democracy.”

I try to put these arguments to Musk’s cheerleaders. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are having none of it. “The whole trillionaire thing? What does that matter?” says Mina. “Anyone can be a trillionaire if you can push the stock up that high.” Anyone!

Barney Whiter, a former accountant who now runs a personal finance site called The Escape Artist, and a Musk superfan, feels that Musk’s achievements speak for themselves. “No one has rolled the dice as many times as him and every time he rolls a six.” Dice? Doesn’t that suggest that luck plays a role? He doesn’t think so. “Have you seen the videos of the Falcon coming into land?” He begins to laugh. “You don’t have to be an engineer to see that as a mindblowing feat without parallel in history. Nasa has outsourced its entire space program to one guy. It’s comparable to the US military hiring someone else to run the army!”

Isn’t that worrying? Some guy? An entire space program? And how has he felt about Musk’s interventions into British politics? Musk has boosted the far-Right hooligan Tommy Robinson and the ultranationalist Restore Britain Party. As English towns were trashed after the Southport riots, and more recently following the Belfast and Southampton attacks, Musk has fanned the flames, spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories, tweeting “civil war is inevitable” and attacking Keir Starmer.

Whiter thought all that was brilliant. “I mean, dude. Yeah. Elon Musk is facing down the UK Prime Minister. He’s completely unafraid of the head of state of a G7 country!”

Whatever one thinks of Starmer, he is, in the end, beholden to the British public. Musk is a foreign billionaire beholden to no one but his shareholders. The Harvard historian Jill Lepore coined the term Muskism to describe his peculiarly apocalyptic worldview, which coalesced when he was growing up with an abusive father in Apartheid South Africa. Muskism is “an extreme, extraterrestrial capitalism, where stock prices are driven less by earnings than by fantasies from science fiction”, Lepore has argued. It is clearly a huge part of his image. Musk has consistently positioned himself as a character from a Marvel comic or Star Trek.

At the same time, he is well versed in geek lore which just happens to be the lore of the internet. He jokes, he memes, he positions himself on the side of fun. He commands the village square. But another way that he is in tune with the internet is the way that despite his stratospheric wealth and success, he positions himself as an outsider, an underdog, a victim. This is how John Stringer of the Tesla fanclub sees him, anyway — as a victim of unfair discrimination and criticism. “The Biden administration has attacked him. It snubbed him. They didn’t even invite him to the EV summit in 2021!” The fact that Musk makes billions from government contracts doesn’t change the assessment. Musk is, in his eyes, doing the government — all of us — a favor. “His companies are doing the most for humanity out of any companies on the planet. People think of him as the richest person in the world… But I have that history with him.”

There are others, though, who feel a little moderation is due. Waldon began to feel misgivings around 2018, the year of the infamous “pedo” case, and now says that he is deeply conflicted. “He always posted a lot and generally the tone was aspirational. It was about this lovely collective of humanity moving to this better place. Recently he has been pushing more of an agenda. Some people love the rage. Personally? I just want the old Elon back.”

A Musk superfan would say, but he is saving humanity! He’s taking us to space! Robeyns directs my attention to a meme Musk shared which depicts armed guards holding back a crowd of desperate, apparently non-white humans as animals board an “Ark of Space”. “‘Starship takes beings of Earth to Mars’, was Musk’s caption.

It was a joke. But as so often with Musk, maybe it also wasn’t a joke. “When he talks about what’s he’s doing for ‘all of us’, who is this all of us?” asks Robeyns. “The rhetoric that he’s spreading on X is not about all of us as equals.”

But his admirers don’t seem to see themselves as his equal. They see themselves as his inferiors. They see all of us as his inferiors. And they’re happy with that; happy merely to live on the same planet as such a God. I ask Whiter if he takes inspiration from Musk in his own life. “No,” he responds testily. “He’s a genius. I’m not a genius. It’s like a dog comparing itself to a human.”

And yet Musk is a human too. A peculiar human. A gifted human. But in the end, a flawed human operating in a flawed system, just like any of us. And the system that has granted him his ridiculous wealth is, after all, not some natural state of affairs. It is a manmade thing, an arbitrary game, a collective fiction, and its rules could just as easily be remade any way we can imagine.

And not just any old bikini deepfakes, even though many AI platforms are capable of creating them. It’s easy to do: you just say to the AI “Put her in a bikini” and the politician, celebrity, or — sometimes — child is suddenly wearing only a bikini. Yes, it’s creepy. But also striking is the way Labour’s ire is laser-focused on Grok, the AI attached to X, formerly Twitter. It’s also striking how, despite pleas from campaigners for years on the platform’s abundance of obscene material, it’s only now that Labour is swinging into outraged action. So grievous is the danger posed by its bikini deepfakes in particular (including of Starmer), that the Government now plans to outlaw them, even as it’s  threatened to ban X from Britain altogether.

This is where the political expediency bit comes in. In Starmer’s shoes I too would be itching for an excuse to ban X. Under Musk’s ownership, the site has made Starmer’s political life a misery, more or less from the moment he entered Downing Street, from stirring the pot during the Southport riots to amplifying the grooming scandal to the point that Labour were forced to respond with the Casey review. And the response to the review, again largely convened on X, forced Starmer to promise the national inquiry his party is now doing its best to avoid delivering.

This is a far cry from pre-Musk Twitter, which was a liberal-dominated hub of respectable media-class opinion, one with a direct line for governments and intelligence services seeking speech-control influence. But since Musk bought the site in 2022, it’s morphed by degrees into something far more pungent and anarchic, where Right-wing voices predominate and many of the former progressive Twitterati have fled to the Bluesky echo-chamber or simply quit posting.

This has not been an improvement in every respect. I don’t miss the sanctimonious tone of old Twitter, but it was more playful. Even so, the rambunctious Right-wing X is politically significant, not least in being the sole large-scale digital exception to the general rule that major institutions are controlled by the Left. As such, the site plays a pivotal role in UK politics. Whether feeding the “posting to policy pipeline”, or drawing attention to ham-fisted efforts at propaganda or speech control, X convenes so large and vocally anti-Starmer a subset of the British Right that we can hardly blame Keith for wishing, like Henry II, that someone (in this case Ofcom) would rid him of this turbulent website.

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So is this just about Starmer’s ailing premiership? Yes and no. He’s at the helm of a regime that is, in its entirety, holed below the waterline by the subversive uncontrollability of digital public life. He can hardly be blamed for lashing out at a website whose denizens, and owner, so obviously loathe him. But the proposed ban is best understood as part of a wider war — as was the killing of Thomas à Becket.

Henry II had his Archbishop murdered in 1170 in the course of a dispute over the competing political and spiritual prerogatives of Crown and Church: a contest that obliged both parties to turn to the Pope in Rome for arbitration. And today Starmer finds himself at the mercy of not exactly a religious but certainly a cultural force, one whose extra-territorial leader also has an agenda that doesn’t always (or even very often) align with Starmer’s own. There is of course nothing very holy about Musk, or the trolls of X. But the contest over bikini deepfakes points toward a larger-scale struggle, with cultural, political, and economic dimensions and between overlapping Old and New World jurisdictions.

The field on which this is generally litigated is “free speech”, typically referred to as if it were an abstract moral value. But while there surely is a moral dimension to free speech, in an information age the power to free or control “speech”, and to determine what counts in that definition, is of immense political and economic consequence.

We are, in other words, once again litigating the extra-territorial reach of something intangible, much like Henry II. But in the intervening period Britain also gained her own territorial empire: and then lost it again, at the hands of our own former colony, in a way that also provides lessons for our situation now. In 1941, the British Empire, struggling against the Axis, was obliged to negotiate for aid from its secessionist progeny America. A key dispute within the negotiations was over “imperial preference”. This was a set of tariff arrangements enacted within the British Empire which gave preferential trading rights to polities that were part of the Empire. This so gravely disadvantaged American trade that its dissolution was a cornerstone of mid-century US foreign policy. Britain gave up on imperial preference and secured American aid.

I mention this not to re-litigate long-dead geopolitical quarrels, but to draw a parallel with the broader context of Starmer’s proposed ban of X. This modern argument doesn’t concern physical trade in goods, but the rules under which the digital kind are permitted to circulate. Many of these “goods” — including everything that happens on X — fall broadly under the heading of “speech”. In such a context, who gets to set the rules on “free speech” is obviously every bit as important as the 1941 battle over who gets to determine tariffs across British imperial territories.

As things stand, the digital “imperial preference” favors the polity in which the internet was first developed: the United States.  The question of geography is notoriously vexed when it comes to trade. Even determining who has tax and regulatory jurisdiction over (say) a pile of grain in a warehouse forms the topic of intense negotiations between trade experts. Intangible goods are still more complex, though: when a website can be served in multiple physical locations simultaneously, who gets to regulate it?

Extensive material and political interests rest on how this question is settled. And this is the real geopolitical backbeat to Starmer’s feud with Elon Musk: a backbeat that, in truth, encompasses not just Britain but also the EU to which Starmer clearly wishes Britain still belonged. It’s a feud currently playing out in a series of bitter skirmishes between the White House and the EU, as well as, in microcosm, between Musk and Starmer.

Recently, for example, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions against foreign individuals or institutions involved in censoring US digital properties: a clear shot across the bows of European politicians who believe they have a right to censor US websites and fine the companies  where these are served on EU territories. In the pandemonium that erupted following Rubio’s announcement, pro-EU supporters pointed out that no such challenges had been issued against Russia or China, despite these polities firewalling large portions of the American internet in its entirety.

But this is precisely the rub. Do the European states want to be as detached from the US as Russia and China, or not? There is no freedom of speech battle between these polities and the US, because neither Russia nor China tries to control what’s published on American platforms (at least, not openly). They just block them, and build their own platforms. By contrast, European states seem happy for America to supply its digital platforms, even as European politicians demand a say in how they are regulated. It’s as though 20th-century Canada was demanding, on the basis of its extensive wood and paper exports to Britain, a veto over everything published in London.

Until relatively recently, this relation of center and periphery was broadly mutually beneficial — not least in that it enabled American politicians to route round inconvenient constitutional clauses at home, in regulating the internet. Under Biden, the State Department encouraged and fostered European online speech controls, as a means of developing censorship tools both unconstitutional in the USA but nonetheless applicable domestically where desired, and aligned with an overall policy of digital speech control. I’m old enough to remember when something being illegal somewhere in Europe could result in its being deleted altogether from X even if the poster was in the USA. In effect, the Biden regime used Europe as a way of offshoring politically sensitive speech controls, somewhat like Guantanamo Bay offshored the torture of suspected jihadists.

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Now, though, priorities have changed — much to the bewilderment of Europe, which now has a well-developed censorship architecture but has discovered its American sponsor suddenly in a different mood. Even so, they have pressed on: two heavy-hitting US websites, X and Cloudflare, have already been threatened with fines under, respectively, the EU’s Digital Services Act and Italy’s “Piracy Shield”. The US-based forum 4chan has also been slapped with fines under Britain’s Digital Services Act. All have responded, essentially, “GFY”. Starmer’s threat to Musk on the deepfake image-making falls in the same category. It is an attempt to exert sovereignty in a space that’s both nominally open, but also in practice wholly dominated by American “imperial preference” — in the context of an American presidency taking a radical new direction.

Seen thus, the actual contest becomes clearer. Is Europe an American imperial subject, or a rival imperium? If it’s part of the empire, then obviously it doesn’t get to regulate its hegemon. If Europe is an imperial rival, it can hardly expect to demand its opponents supply services even as Europe dictates the terms. This is the real subject of the ongoing diplomatic wrestling-match over “free speech”, censorship, and regulatory frameworks such as the EU’s Digital Services Act and Britain’s Online Safety Act. If Britain, or any other European entity, really wants information sovereignty outside the American imperium, the only route there is the one now threatened by Starmer: banning American digital properties entirely from our territories, the way Russia and China do.

Does Starmer really want to go there? Does any EU state? This is perhaps uniquely difficult for Britain to answer. Geographically and economically speaking, Britain is closer to Europe, which accounts for around 41% of UK exports in 2024, compared to 18% for the US. But linguistically and culturally we’re closer to the USA. To take just one of countless examples, the BBC pays scant attention to EU politics, but Trump only has to raise an eyebrow and it’s front-page news.

In this context, can we really imagine an Atlantic firewall? I doubt it. Back in 1170, ridding himself of Thomas à Becket backfired badly on King Henry; I suspect that ridding himself of this turbulent X would prove similarly unpopular with the British media and political class. And yet our cultural, linguistic and digital enmeshment with an increasingly unpredictable US regime has introduced an acute new set of tensions. It is difficult to see how they can be resolved peacefully. But let us hope they can be. Having seen one bikini’d AI Starmer, I have no desire to see any more.

But now his time in the White House is drawing to a close, and Musk has announced that from now on, he will be spending more time with his businesses (including Tesla, SpaceX and the social network X). Not, you’ll notice, the traditional retiring politician’s promise to “spend more time with his family” — which in Musk’s case would be tricky, given that he doesn’t have anything like a traditional family.

In Fight Club, the narrator complains to Tyler Durden about having an absent father: “Every six years, he goes to a new city and starts a new family.” Durden responds: “Fucker’s setting up franchises.” And “setting up franchises” essentially describes Musk’s attitude to fatherhood. He’s known to have at least 14 children with four women, although according to sources who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, it’s probable that the actual number is far higher.

Of course, Musk doesn’t use the word “franchise” — he prefers the military metaphor of having a “legion” of children. The mothers of his many children, meanwhile, use another word: “harem”. They talk about being dragged into “harem drama”, as Musk plays favorites and uses his financial power to punish or reward. After one of the babymamas pushed back against a gagging clause that would have prevented her from speaking negatively about him (but not the other way around), he cut her monthly stipend from $100,000 to $40,000.

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Which all suggests that Musk has a pretty terrible attitude to women: they’re there to procreate and to take orders. With one exception: his mother Maye Musk enjoys a privileged role in the court of Musk. She has an apparently close and protective relationship with her son: after the WSJ article was published, she responded to the allegations about the treatment of her grandchildren by calling it “dishonest” and flagging the journalists who wrote it to an X account called “@Ifindretards”.

Musk reportedly uses privacy deals to stop the mothers of his children from publicly associating themselves (or their children) with him. Meanwhile, Maye socializes with the wives and daughters of the Republican elite: a seat next to Melania at a Mar-a-Lago dinner party, a luncheon with Ivanka, a ride on Air Force One. She’s the nearest thing Musk has to a first lady.

She’s also apparently free to capitalize on her family as much as she likes. Maye would, presumably, disagree with the idea that she owes her status to her son. She has her own profile as a model — now 77, she appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue in 2022. She is, incongruously, especially popular in China, where she’s regarded as a “silver influencer” and is in demand for lucrative partnerships with local brands.

She has, inevitably, written a book, which promises “Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success.” And, equally inevitably, she also offers a self-help course where you can learn her “five rules for life”. It is silly to think that anyone would be fascinated by this if Maye wasn’t the mother of the richest man in the world, but it’s equally silly to assume the benefit only goes one way. Maye lends Musk something that he could never have without her: humanity. Without her, it would be impossible to think of Musk — with his collection of children, his nativist fixations and his obsession with the letter X — as anything other than alarmingly weird. Maye brings a softening lifestyle angle to the dynasty: think of her as “GoopX”.

She even has a backstory that recasts Musk, with all his (kindly) eccentricities, as an object of sympathy. According to her autobiography, she left Musk’s father Errol because he was abusive (Errol denies this). The backstory to the backstory, however, is less helpful: Maye’s father Joshua N Haldeman, who died when Musk was two, was a white supremacist and antisemite who opposed democracy and believed there was a “a strong possibility that South Africa will become the leader of White Christian Civilization”. 

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Racism is not a hereditary trait (even though it would be funny if it was), and the fact that Haldeman held those opinions tells you little about his descendants. But it’s a useful reminder that the Musk family tree has been political for several generations, and Maye is a political player in her own right. As Wired reported, she’s used her social media posts to support Musk’s lobbying efforts on behalf of his businesses in China, and her own visits to the country (she claims to go almost every month) have been celebrated by members of the Chinese government. 

Until her son’s embrace of Trump 2.0, Maye’s American presence was non-partisan — at her most firebrand, she was the kind of girlboss Democrat who went to Hilary Clinton fundraisers. But as her son’s ambitions converged on Trump, so did her posting. Increasingly, she used her accounts to boost Musk’s interests, which meant boosting Trump. (If she’s sore about Trump’s tariff war potentially affecting her relationship with China, it hasn’t affected her loyalty.)

Musk loves a classical reference, so here’s a new one for him to enjoy. If his children are his “legion”, then Maye is the Livia to his Tiberius, in the style of Siân Phillips in I, Claudius. She is the savvy operator who can make up for his deficiencies, the proxy who can act on his behalf while pretending all to be doing nothing more than “mothering”. She can be his attack dog, and call it maternal instinct — though it’s notable that she doesn’t post about her other two children nearly as often. 

A power mother is a great asset (just ask the Kardashians). That’s true both publicly and privately. Maye is the one who is allowed to speak truth to her son’s power: she told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that “the danger for Elon is that he becomes his father”, and grows absorbed with conspiracies and delusions of grandeur. Whether he listens to her is another thing, but at least he didn’t fall out with her — which is what happened to Sam Harris when he demurred from the Musk line on covid. Naughty boys listen to their mothers.

But for Musk, Maye is also a bit of a reputational liability. Musk believes intensely in masculinity: “Men are made for war. Real men, anyway,” he texted to one of the mothers of his children. He has used his enormous riches to create a private world where women are maximally disposable, to be purchased for their reproductive value and maintained at a safe distance.

Meanwhile, Maye is out there telling people to “stop being mean” to her son, as though he were a weedy kid being bullied in the playground and not a billionaire who until recently had the power to direct the US budget. Men might be made for war, but Maye Musk is perfectly capable of fighting her son’s corner. Musk seems to be long beyond relying on women, but really he’s the ultimate mama’s boy.

I don’t know if these particular photos made their way to the internet. But I do know that there are thousands of similar images out there in the virtual world, where, like pornography, murder videos follow you everywhere. It didn’t used to be this way: in the not-too-distant past, if you wanted to see a mutilated dead body or a violent killing, you’d have to trudge off to a video store to rent out Faces of Death. Now, you just need to go on X, where, since Elon Musk took over the platform in October 2022, “death porn” is all over the timeline whether you like it or not.

Over the last year, I have come across footage on X of a brutal stabbing of a homeless man on a street, a marauding terrorist attack in a concert hall, a stabbing rampage at a shopping outlet and, on Christmas Eve, a woman being burned alive on a New York subway train. And I didn’t even go looking for it.

Axel Rudakubana, however, was looking for it. His interest in online death porn was not merely curious but resembled a fixation. Of the tens of thousands of documents that Merseyside police sifted through on his digital devices, many related to war, terrorism and genocide, and included graphic images of dead bodies, victims of torture and beheadings. He had also downloaded (at least twice since 2021) an Al-Qaeda manual which contained an entire section on how to use a knife as an offensive weapon. On the morning of the massacre, as if to ready himself for the violence he was about to unleash, he searched for a video on X showing the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel at a church in Sydney last April.

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There is no single profile of a mass killer, beyond the fact that the vast majority are male. But there are recurring patterns. In addition to harbouring a desire to kill, most have a voracious interest in killing itself as well as in the lives and psychology of famous killers. There are several reasons for this: reading about a killer or watching CCTV footage of their atrocities holds up a mirror to their own dark desires, which I suppose makes them feel less alone in the world and less pathologically deviant. It also gives them a template for how to carry out a murder. Perhaps, too, would-be-murderers take a vicarious pleasure from watching or reading about killing, insinuating themselves in the minds and bodies of infamous death-takers.

In fact, many mass killers are highly competitive, often with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the body-counts of previous mass killers and a grudging admiration for the big-hitters. The aspiring American jihadist-now-jailbird Mohamed Alessa, for instance, was clearly envious of the mass murderer Nidal Malik Hasan, saying: “Freaking Major-Nidal-shaved-face-Palestinian-crazy guy, he’s not better than me. I’ll do twice what he did.”

Rudakubana has rather a lot in common with Jake Davison, Britain’s last infamous mass killer, who went on a shooting rampage in Plymouth in August 2021. Like Rudakubana, Davison had been diagnosed with autism, had a history of violence, had previously been referred to Prevent, and had no clear or known motive for carrying out his atrocity, much less a guiding ideology. He also shared with Rudakubana an obsession with weapons — in his case, firearms — and an empathetic interest in the minds and actions of mass killers.

It is not really surprising, however, that mass murderers are obsessed with violence. What is far more disconcerting is the idea that so many apparently ordinary people share their revolting fixations. From Plato to Burke, classical writers have long acknowledged the strange attraction of atrocious images. “Plato appears to take for granted that we have an appetite for sights of degradation and pain and mutilation,” remarked Susan Sontag, who wrote at length about the subject. “There is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue,” Burke observed in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful, “as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity.” That was in 1757, well before the Netflix true crime special came into its own.

Never was this clearer than during the age of ISIS execution videos, which, though of course popular among the group’s supporters, found a devoted fandom among the self-described “death addicts” and trolls who slum it on internet shock-sites. While researching a book on the subject, I discovered that those who watch gory videos — and they’re a diverse bunch — do so for a whole range of reasons: to satisfy a morbid curiosity about death; to feel a strong emotion; to crush deep-seated fears around death and violation; to learn something about the dark corners of the world; to neutralise feelings of complacency or boredom; or to test their courage.

Others take a sadistic thrill in seeing other people suffer. No one I interviewed quite put it in that way, but one American woman in her early 20s — let’s call her Nicola (not her real name) — came close to articulating this. “I have always been interested in gore and I guess the ‘dark things’ ever since I can remember,” Nicola told me, specifying that her “favourites” were “wood chipper deaths and brutal torture”. “I don’t think I can give you a true answer as to why I enjoy it besides that I just do,” she explained, adding: “I get tingly when I see something different.”

Should atrocity videos be left to feed this desire for gore and brutality online? “Let the atrocious images haunt us,” Susan Sontag said in 2004, arguing that they perform the “vital function” of showing the evil of “what human beings are capable of doing”. Two decades later, nobody needs reminding of the presence of human evil because its extremities are now filmed and shared so widely on the internet.

Gore fans insist that this is a good thing; that atrocity videos are a form of reality news that documents crimes against humanity and can be used to bring perpetrators to justice. But even the most brazen gore fan would have to admit that watching a mass beheading is a strange way of keeping up with the news. And it’s hard to be entirely sanguine about the sheer volume of this kind of material now available online, and the ease with which so many people, including children, can access it.

Even the most trenchant free speech advocates are now expressing concern about what all of this is doing to us. Matt Walsh recently told Joe Rogan that “when I go on social media I’m constantly seeing these horrific videos of people dying… it feels like a relatively recent development”. “It’s got to mess with your mind.”

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One sure way in which it messes with your mind is by warping it, tricking you into thinking that the world is far more violent and insane than it actually is. This is compounded by the highly selective way in which people tend to watch and share atrocity material. If all you do is watch videos of the destroyed bodies of countless Palestinian children killed in Israeli airstrikes, you might risk becoming desensitised to this horror. You might also start to think that Israelis and their supporters are evil. Similarly, if all you do is watch videos of African migrants robbing or stabbing people, then you might start to think that all African migrants are criminals or potential ones. As for the gore fans I interviewed, most confessed that they had a pessimistic, if not outright cynical or “blackpilled” view of the world after years of watching atrocity videos.

So did online body-horror mess with Axel Rudakubana’s mind? The easy but unconvincing answer is that it not only messed with his mind, but that it drove him to murder. This assumption draws on a long-standing and empirically paper-thin thesis about the malignant effects of violent media that is ritually invoked whenever some troubled individual commits an act of horrifying violence that defies sense and comprehension. The chief problem with this explanation, however, is that vast numbers of people have been exposed to violent media, while only a tiny number commit acts of terrible violence.

The more likely scenario is that Rudakubana’s mind was already profoundly warped to begin with, and that it was his pre-existing moral deformation that animated his interest in mass murder. Perhaps, for a time, inhaling dark matter on the internet gave him some sort of cathartic release from wanting to act on his sadistic desires. This is a less comforting explanation as it suggests that censoring information about atrocities or banning images or videos depicting them — as the government is now calling for in the wake of Rudakubana’s conviction — would likely not have stopped Rudakubana. Thrilled by thoughts of death and omnipotence, he would probably have found other outlets to indulge his perverse impulses — until he could contain them no longer.

Other users have followed suit, with an exodus of accounts from X to Bluesky, a social media platform that resembles in style the pre-Musk Twitter. Taylor Swift fans are flocking in their thousands and former CNN anchor Don Lemon posted a lengthy statement outlining his own reasons for relocating. The official account of the Clifton Suspension Bridge and Museum posted a similar statement, which has led to candlelit vigils and a mass outpouring of public grief.

After the Guardian’s announcement, many users were quick to point out that misinformation, far from being the publication’s chief concern, appears to be its speciality. Since Musk has introduced “community notes” to X, journalists who post falsehoods or misleading articles have quickly been corrected. Inevitably, the Guardian has been slapped with community notes on numerous occasions, which might help explain its decision to withdraw. On its website, the Guardian proudly boasts that it “delivers fearless, investigative journalism — giving a voice to the powerless and holding power to account”. But whether its executives admit it or not, the publication has developed a reputation for extreme ideological bias.

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The frequent “community-noting” on X suggests that this reputation is not unfounded. For instance, when the Guardian posted a piece entitled “England riots: how has ‘two-tier policing’ myth become widespread?”, notes were quickly added to provide links to the various articles in which the Guardian has asserted that “two-tier policing” based on race and sexuality is rife. When it published an article entitled “How many more children like Sara Sharif will be killed before smacking is banned?”, the community notes quickly explained that the victim had not merely been smacked, but had suffered extreme beatings and multiple forms of torture. All such hideous acts are, of course, already illegal.

The political theorist Patrick J. Deneen has argued that ideology always fails because once its inherent “falsehoods become more evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and the lived experience of human beings under its domain”. Those currently scurrying away from X are effectively retreating from the battlefield of ideas envisaged by John Milton in his Areopagitica (1644) in which Truth and Falsehood are seen as antagonists. “Let her and Falsehood grapple,” he wrote, “who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

I was the subject of the Guardian’s misinformation tactics only the other week. Reporting on a short course on the “woke” movement that I will soon be teaching at the New College of Florida, the Guardian described me as a “controversial British media personality and culture warrior”. It is of course entirely predictable that culture warriors would brand their critics as “culture warriors”, but quite how my consistent defence of liberal values is “controversial” is anyone’s guess.

The article’s author, Jason Wilson, went on to claim that I am guilty of “courting rightwing opinion” because I have been interviewed by Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson. I have also appeared on shows hosted by Left-wing commentators such as Hugo Rifkind and George Galloway, but thus far I have not been accused of “courting leftwing opinion”. Perhaps Wilson is simply unfamiliar with the concept of engaging in dialogue with people of opposing views?

Wilson further claimed that the course at the New College of Florida had been “reinstated”, which is odd given that it had never been cancelled in the first place. But the most egregious factual inaccuracy came when Wilson, in pointing out that I have written for Spiked, described the magazine as “hard-right”. Spiked began its existence as Living Marxism, and has consistently supported free speech, the values of democracy and liberal immigration policies, while vehemently opposing all forms of racism and white nationalism. Mislabelling Spiked as “hard-right” is either outright dishonesty or staggering ignorance. It’s what happens when journalistic standards are subordinated to propaganda.

The crowning moment of Wilson’s inadvertent self-satire was when he admitted, in light of my forthcoming course on the “woke movement”, that he had been actively searching for non-profit organisations which might qualify as members. He writes — and I am not making this up — “The Guardian’s search of IRS non-profit records indicate that while there are some 20 nonprofits with the word ‘woke’ in their names, none have reported any income in their most recent filings, and most appear to be inactive.” Wilson genuinely seems to believe that one can only subscribe to an ideology if it is registered with the government and has applied for tax exemptions. This is a species of literal-mindedness so colossal that it must surely be eligible for some kind of award.

On reflection, I got off lightly. A far more egregious example of the Guardian’s mendacity was the controversy over the Wi Spa in Los Angeles in 2021. A video of a woman who calls herself “CubanaAngel” on Instagram was posted online, in which she could be seen complaining to the staff about a naked man in the women’s jacuzzi area. The man in question, Darren Agee Merager, was a registered sex offender with previous convictions for indecent exposure, and it was alleged that the complainant at the Wi Spa had seen him semi-erect. “So it’s okay for a man to go into the women’s section and show his penis around the other women, young little girls — underage — in your spa?” she had said to staff, who defended his right to be there on the grounds of self-identification.

Josephine Bartosch outlined the sequence of events in an article for The Critic. After the video went viral, protests outside the spa were organised by women’s rights campaigners. These were quickly smeared as “far right” and mobbed by so-called “anti-fascist” protesters. The Guardian, having spent years promoting the notion that womanhood is an identity category rather than a biological reality, and having faced allegations of driving female journalists from its staff for their gender-critical views, then produced two articles in quick succession that implied CubanaAngel’s complaints were a hoax. The writers claimed that the incident “provided clear evidence of the links between anti-trans and far-right movements”, while Guardian columnist Owen Jones called the entire incident a “campaign of lies”.

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Even when it emerged that Merager had been charged for indecent exposure at the Wi Spa, the Guardian continued to conflate the female protesters with the far-Right agitators who had turned up to exploit the situation. As Bartosch puts it, “For all the Guardian’s handwringing about #metoo, when it comes to believing the women who complained about Merager’s crime, rather than ‘giving a voice to the powerless’ they pretended his victims didn’t exist. Women like CubanaAngel are ideological inconveniences.”

The combination of Musk’s successful Twitter bid and a forthcoming second term for Donald Trump has curdled many once sensible minds. Those who were comfortable with the echo chamber that Twitter had formerly established, where users were routinely banned for pointing out that no human being has ever changed sex, are now looking for an alternative. It is the psychological equivalent of the “safe space” mentality, one which led Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy to establish a “Self-Care Suite” after Trump’s victory. Here students could isolate themselves and process their trauma by playing with Lego, drawing with crayons, and bingeing on milk and cookies.

And now we have the digital milk and cookies of Bluesky, where users can be shielded from the disorientation that occurs where plurality of opinion is permitted. Such online echo chambers are of course largely to blame for the escalation of political tribalism that we have seen in recent years, and also for the sense of shock that many experience when elections don’t go their way. While it is true that Musk has reinstated accounts on X that post some genuinely objectionable material, this is the price one pays for an open marketplace of ideas.

This desire to avoid any challenges to one’s ideological certainties is becoming more widespread, and there is a sense in which we are entering a new phase in the culture war. I am not celebrating the departure of activists to Bluesky, because I would rather hear their views and see them participate in these important debates. By insulating themselves from criticism, and seeking platforms where their misrepresentations will not be flagged, the Guardian and its ilk are doing themselves no favours. If they are serious about their goals, they should reconsider their resolution to speak only to those who will unquestioningly cheer them on. Those who withdraw from the debate stand no chance of winning it.

To the presumed horror of the English tourist board, Elon Musk has joined in, taking a break from trying to set off nuclear bombs on Mars by putting a metaphorical one under the discourse here instead. According to him, the UK is now beset by “two-tier justice” and “civil war is inevitable”. Over the past fortnight, he has sent out a stream of posts and memes, deriding various attempts by Starmer and his Director of Public Prosecutions to strike fear into the hearts of would-be miscreants, by telling them of the grave consequences they face for carrying out riots or inciting them online.

And it is the latter that has got Musk especially worked up. Communications offences in UK law have long included sending “grossly offensive” and “indecent” messages, as well as obscene and threatening ones. Last year’s Online Safety Act also criminalised knowingly false messages intended to cause “non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience” without “reasonable excuse”. Meanwhile, the Criminal Justice Act generally requires that racial or religious hostility be treated as aggravating factors in criminal conviction, resulting in heavier sentences than otherwise. Pleading guilty also means the decision can be faster than when guilt has to be established at a trial.

Accordingly, there have been some swift and draconian-looking judicial decisions over the past few days for Musk to highlight for his avid followers, contrasting them with apparently lenient criminal cases involving immigrants to the UK. “It’s 2030 in the UK, & you’re being executed for posting a meme…” goes one typically restrained post. Retweets have included memes merging the British police with the SS, and one jokily showing Starmer as a Nazi — a bit unfair when you remember it was the Conservatives who brought in the Online Safety Act in the first place.

Another meme, comparing a photo of an extremely blonde woman surrounded by black men in their underwear with another of a white policeman in the midst of Muslim community leaders, went out with the words: “Found this pic of the British justice system.” Immediately underneath, he wrote: “This meme could get you 3 years in prison in the UK (actually)”. One assumes Musk is partly worried about his business model: also according to the Online Safety Act, Ofcom now has the power to fine him 10% of a year’s worth of “qualifying worldwide revenue” for what users get up to on X.

Soberly raised, there are various angles one could use to attack the moral legitimacy of giving someone three months in prison, say, for the use of two emojis on Facebook — a brown face next to a gun — or for writing “blow the mosque up with the adults in it” in an online community group. You could question the use of aggravating factors in sentencing about speech. You could argue that illegality should depend on establishing a causal link between a particular post and an instance of violent unrest, rather than just positing a vague counterfactual. Many racist posts on social media during times of rioting are caused by the riots rather than the other way round, yet the system doesn’t reflect this.

Alternatively, you could argue that the fast-paced, vaguely dispersed, algorithm-triggered and impulsive nature of most social media messaging means it often doesn’t meet the bar for traditional notions of intentional harm or threat. Hitting two emojis and pressing “send” into the universe looks importantly different in this respect, say, to writing a letter, addressing it to someone, and putting a stamp on it. But Musk doesn’t seem interested in discussing such complicated matters, preferring instead to flex what his former spouse Talulah Riley calls his “naughty Twitter fingers” instead.

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It’s not that the vision of the UK being projected around the world at the moment has no truth behind it. As Carl Jung said of projections generally: “It frequently happens that the object offers a hook to the projection, and even lures it out.” The UK unambiguously has two-tier policing, at least in one sense: it has aggravated offences and non-aggravated ones. We also have a judicial system focused on maintaining public order and so likely to engage in example-setting, and politicians across the board who agree that visibly harsh sentences have a generally deterrent effect.

After a decade of institutionally adopted white guilt in many quarters, it is indeed possible that sometimes the judiciary punishes white offenders disproportionately relative to other ethnicities for the very same crimes — though cherry-picking individual decisions to compare them, as Musk and others are doing, is a terrible way to establish this as true. What does seem clear is that elements of the establishment are markedly more at ease castigating white working-class people than non-white ethnic groups, including where speech inciting racial and religious violence is concerned.

For instance, pro-Palestinian marches last year, though mainly peaceful and engaged in legitimate political protest, included instances of nakedly antisemitic speech that provoked few outraged op-eds on the Left about harms to British Jews. But then again, some subsequently overbearing criminal prosecutions prompted few objections from the normally free-speech-loving Right either, with many of them exaggeratedly describing the protests in their entirety as “hate marches”. People often say they want neutrality, but it’s tempting to conclude they just want a system that doesn’t enable their political enemies to succeed — and that’s not the same thing.

And the same apparently applies to Musk too. He didn’t seem such a big fan of free speech when his employee Martin Tripp spoke to a journalist about environmentally and financially damaging waste-management practices at the Tesla plant in 2018. Back then, Musk accused Tripp of “sabotage” and personally instructed others to hack his phone and emails, while a Tesla spokesman falsely claimed that Tripp was intending to come to the factory to commit a mass shooting.

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Equally, although the billionaire has this week complained on X about British judges sending citizens to prison for fighting the police, in his conversation with Donald Trump on Monday, he decried various cases in the US where insufficiently substantial sentences had been handed down for attacking cops. He also seemed to understand the principle of general deterrence, at least by broad analogy: for in the same conversation, he said: “It’s worth emphasising to listeners the immense importance of whether the United States President is intimidating or not intimidating, and how much that matters to global security… because there’s some real tough characters out there.”

But while Musk is busy conjuring exaggerated phantasms of Britain, what fantasies are we projecting upon him? Progressives who once lauded him as an ecological revolutionary, marshalling tech to save humanity, now see him as a pantomime villain who must be stopped at all costs. This week, for instance, former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf called him “one of the most dangerous men on the planet” responsible for “the most wicked evil possible” in amplifying “far-Right white supremacist ideology”. As usual, this sort of hyperbolic overstatement produces defensive overcompensation from the Right, with some conjuring up a noble warrior saving liberal values and the West, one shitpost at a time. No mention tends to be made of the way his platform’s algorithms continue to monetise polarisation and forever culture wars on a scale of which Putin would be proud.

In the three-part BBC documentary broadcast about him last year, his evidently affectionate ex-wife Riley was more realistic, recalling how financial success made a sudden difference to how people responded to Musk: “Elon went from being ridiculed, to suddenly his word was gospel.” Now, she reported, “everyone listens to everything he says… I’ve had people say to me ‘oh I met Elon and I could tell he was a genius because he seemed a bit distracted and he was clearly thinking great things’, and I’d be thinking, really? He probably just didn’t like you or he was probably a bit bored.”

The unpalatable truth for those who would idolise Musk is that he’s as limited, self-interested, and hypocritical as the rest of us. The unpalatable truth for those who demonise him is that they are too. In fact, we are all “two-tier”, though it would be good if our justice system was not. Reality will always outstrip Manichean projections, whether about the world’s richest man or the state of the UK.

Musk’s revelation came shortly after Thierry Breton, the EU’s censorship czar, announced the Commission’s preliminary findings that X’s new “blue check” verification system was in violation of the DSA. Given that anyone can now subscribe and obtain a “verified status” — unlike before Musk when the platform arbitrarily decided who was worthy of the coveted blue check — this, he stated, undermines users’ ability to make informed decisions about account authenticity.

The Commission also accused X of “fail[ing] to provide access to its public data to researchers”, as mandated by the DSA. It urged the company to address such breaches or face a fine up to 6% of its total worldwide annual turnover, which was approximately $3.4 billion in 2023. Failure to comply could result in X being banned from operating in the EU altogether.

The line trotted out by the Commission is that this all about “transparency” and protecting users from deception and disinformation. But the truth, as Musk suggests, is that this is really about the EU’s desire — and the DSA’s ultimate goal — to secretly control the online narrative. So much for transparency.

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This mission to censor has been backed up by Mike Benz, a former Trump official and cybersecurity expert who has alleged that “granting researchers access to X’s public data” isn’t quite as benign as it sounds. In fact, it’s a cover for the EU’s attempt to “use the DSA to force X to restaff the censorship squad fired when Elon took over”. Elon got rid of the team because, as the Twitter Files revealed, their sole purpose was to act upon government requests for censorship. Hence Benz’s claim that these “researchers” are actually “political operatives”. Musk reposted Benz’s analysis with one word of comment — “Exactly” — adding that if the EU pursues an enforcement action against X, he will take them to court.

The language and accusations are nothing new. The ground rules for this battle were laid the moment Musk took over Twitter and tweeted “the bird is freed”. Breton immediately replied: “In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” with a reference to the DSA, which had been officially signed into law that same month.

Even though Musk initially pledged to “respect the future European regulation”, the honeymoon didn’t last long. In May 2023, he pulled out of the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, which started out voluntary but was subsequently made de facto legally binding under the DSA. This triggered an investigation, in December, into whether the platform violated the DSA in areas such as “risk management, content moderation, dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers”. Last week it concluded that it did, hence the latest showdown.

It’s hard to see how Musk can win this battle. Especially considering that his pro-free speech stance hasn’t just put him toe-to-toe with the EU, but also with a number of other governments around the world. Musk has attacked “takedown” requests in Brazil, India, Australia and Turkey and has even challenged some of these demands through national courts. In almost every case, however, the platform has ended up complying with governments’ requests. Indeed, a report from last year showed that under Musk, X had approved more than 80% of censorship requests from governments.

So even as Musk publicly challenges the EU, he is removing posts — as many X users have lamented — because of non-compliance with the DSA. On 10 October, for example, days after Hamas’s attack, Breton issued a warning to Musk over alleged “disinformation”; X responded by immediately removing or flagging tens of thousands of pieces of content.

Accusing Musk of hypocrisy, however, would be to miss the point. Complying with these requests is often the only way that the company can continue to operate — and at least Musk, unlike the other major platform owners, has brought online censorship into the open. The publication of the groundbreaking Twitter Files, remember, revealed the shocking level of collusion between the US administration and social media companies.

More to the point, though, X, despite the censorship, remains the only platform where information is allowed to flow relatively freely. Indeed, it remains the single biggest threat to the establishment’s desire for full-spectrum information control — and that is why they are coming down on it so hard. But one man, no matter how rich or powerful, cannot be expected to single-handedly stand up to some of the most powerful governments in the world — let alone to the European Union, the world’s most influential supranational institution.

There’s also another factor to consider. The global attack on free speech isn’t just the whim of out-of-control, power-hungry politicians and bureaucrats. It’s a systemic problem that relates to the structural decay of liberal-democratic institutions, particularly in the West. As our societies degenerate into de facto oligarchies controlled by increasingly delegitimised political-economic elites, this manipulation of public opinion — not only through propaganda delivered via traditional mass media channels but also, increasingly, by policing and micromanaging the public conversation taking place on social media platforms — has come to be seen as an imperative for keeping the status quo safe from the threat of democracy. This is compounded by the growing militarisation of the geopolitical context, which requires an even more compliant populace given its political and economic consequences.

It’s no coincidence that the censorship-industrial complex started emerging in the second half of the 2010s. This was the time when the West was rocked by an unprecedented “populist” backlash against globalisation and the neoliberal order — Trump, Brexit, the Yellow Vests, and the rise of Eurosceptic parties and movements across Europe.

It was also when the path of future confrontation with Russia was being laid in Ukraine — and when Nato started developing the hybrid or cognitive warfare doctrine, which conceptualises the management of Western public opinion as an integral part of warfare. As Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s former Secretary General, put it in 2019: “Nato must remain prepared for both conventional and hybrid threats: from tanks to tweets.”

The Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the first mass deployment of online censorship, bought Western elites some time. But not for long. Today, a “populist” backlash is once again engulfing the West: Right-populist parties are surging across Europe, and Trump is on course to winning the next US election. Meanwhile, escalating tensions in Ukraine have detonated into a no-longer-so-proxy war between Nato and Russia. From the perspective of Western elites, this all calls for a doubling down on the censorship regime, with a major difference: online censorship used to occur behind closed doors, extra-legally and in a context of plausible deniability of behalf of governments; today it is being institutionalised and constitutionalised through tools such as the Digital Services.

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Elites conveniently justify their censorship in two ways: by constantly expanding the scope of “hate speech” to cover almost anything; and, more ominously, by rebranding critical opinions, especially on foreign policy and geopolitical matters, as “disinformation” or examples of foreign interference. It’s no coincidence that the European Commission’s first-ever DSA report was entirely focused on the question of “Russian disinformation”. Tellingly, the report puts “Kremlin-aligned accounts” — potentially any account that is critical of Nato — almost on the same plane as accounts that are connected or associated with the Russian state.

This deliberate blurring of the line between illegal and harmful speech, and between critical opinion and foreign propaganda, is central to the censorship regime, as it effectively allows EU elites to determine what hundreds of millions of Europeans can or cannot say and read online. It’s state-sanctioned censorship, plain and simple. And it should come as no surprise that the greatest threat to free speech today comes from the EU: the bloc’s entire institutional edifice, after all, is geared towards constraining democracy, by transferring power to unaccountable elites largely insulated from the demos. In turn, the top-down imposition of unpopular policies on the people of Europe inevitably engenders opposition, which then requires the suppression of free speech to counter the backlash. It’s a vicious feedback loop.

This sort of mass censorship should really be understood as a desperate oligarchy’s last line of defence — and no one encapsulates this oligarchy better than Breton himself, a former businessman and military and intelligence contractor turned technocrat-in-chief. If this were a movie, one couldn’t imagine a better choice than him as the arch-enemy of the populist rabble rouser Musk. But it isn’t a movie. This is a struggle that will define the future of democracy for years to come. And if we expect Musk to fight for the rest of us, we’ve already lost.

It’s been a while since anyone would believe any ascribed quote on Twitter. In my trembling little bubble at least, people have been saying the site is clinically dead for at least two years — although admittedly I do follow a lot of tired, cynical journalists. And let me tell you, they are mad as hell, and they are not going to take it anymore. In real terms, freelance rates are lower than they were in the last millennium. No wonder so many of them decided the only route to solvency was to monetise themselves. Those of us who remained on the Twitter mothership during and after the pandemic watched an exodus of solo shuttlecraft head into the new media business-model troposphere. There they remain in geo-stationary orbit, a flotilla of atomised Substacks.

Everyone seems sort of resigned now to social media becoming less interesting and to us all spending less time on it. Nothing lasts forever. Twitter went from agreeable agora (c.2008) to brittle umbrage mill (c.2012) to enraged existential mobclash (c.2016) to a colourised trench-warfare horror scene. Then, it was sold.

It felt odd. Twitter always had the illusion of being, not publicly owned exactly, but common land at least. It was just there, like the roads and parks and pavements and internet. Suddenly it was worth $44 billion? Oh, but there was worse to come. The self-acknowledged Coolest White Guy on Earth had bought the site. And, excitingly, there was even worse to come. Artificially Intelligent Caligula was about to implement his Plan:

Phase 1: Sack all non-suck-ups and losers.
Phase 2: Wipe 70% off market value (totally cool, hold your nerve bro).
Phase 3: Invite back all the weird angry people previously banned.
Phase 4: Change name from Twitter (lame) to X (super-cool, mysterious).
Phase 5: Introduce frequent ad hurdles to acclimatise users to revenue grooming.
Phase 6: Introduce blue-tick charge to acclimatise users to subscription fracking.
Phase 7: Kick back. Wait for the world to deal with radical vibe shift.

It’s a far cry from those calm, underpopulated early days. Remember being on Twitter then, when it felt like everybody was in a social media sitcom. Silly puns and harmless banter — on one level, it seemed a shortcut to sophistication. There you were at some psychedelic Algonquin Round Table, wisecracking with preposterously accessible famous people as if you belonged there. Bloody hell, Caitlin Moran just retweeted a gag of mine and I’ve got 500 new followers! Ooh, Stephen Fry liked something I said and now I’ve got people in my timeline saying things like “Ahoy old chap!” Oh good, Piers Morgan’s alerted his adoring fans to some crack I made about Test Match Special and now I’ve got a dickhead with numbers for a name saying something horrible about a photo of my baby granddaughter.

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At another level, it was an infant-school playground with randoms tearing around making friends in a hurry. I started to follow a very wide spectrum of people interested in comedy and music and politics and beyond. I now look back to 2008 and realise that the overwhelming majority of my current non-professional friends were made then, on Twitter. We’d meet occasionally in Soho pubs, and everyone was exactly like the online version of themselves.

Maybe it was possible to build a social media community, but how would that work? By simply assembling a genial cross-section of liberal-Left Twitter? No. In a real community, you’re not shouting about Daily Mail headlines in the street. You have no idea what Sheila over the road’s views on Self-ID are, or what the builder at number 36 thinks about Just Stop Oil. I mean, you have an inkling. But their precise positions are not articulated in pithy, unequivocal one-liners in block capitals filling their front windows. I don’t know what your street’s like, but the most we’ve had around here was a Not My King sign and a missing tortoise poster.

The golden age of Twitter, like that of the fabled pre-war Edwardian version, was simply a long summer with benevolent weather. 2009 was the turning point for me. We still had a Labour government, just. My carefully curated Twitter circle was a model village of civilised people, insulated from the hateful wrongness of the outside world. Then, as now, the one thing Twitter was really good at was breaking news, which was the usual slurry of national misery and international catastrophe, with little shards of personal tragedy.

And, inevitably, tragedy sometimes happens to people you don’t like. David Cameron’s six-year-old son Ivan, who had severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy, died suddenly. Cameron paid a moving tribute to the NHS staff who had cared for him. Prime Minister Gordon Brown (weird, typing that phrase) had himself lost a child, and spoke on behalf of all of us when he offered heartfelt condolences.

Well, nearly all of us. By then Twitter encouraged people to bark their own brutal truth to power. One of the people I followed tweeted with a shrug that the net result of Ivan Cameron’s death was one fewer potential Tory in the world. I stared and stared at it, trying to discern some reflexive, ironic meta-joke I hadn’t quite understood — but no, that was the whole tweet. Child’s death, silver lining. I told the person that it was a horrible thing to say. They refused to apologise, and explained that they struggled with tone. Who was the real victim here?

Clearly, if I could be shocked, it was because I had been hypnotised by the geniality of my magic circle. Perhaps following a few arseholes would give me some perspective. After all, we don’t like everyone in an actual community, do we? Even people we like wind us up now and then. Maybe mixing a few bad people into my Follows would make this illusory community more “real” somehow. I started with a few easy ones, including the exotically named Iain Martin, my alternative-reality centre-Right counterpart. I was always getting abused for something he’d written; he’d got mistaken for me a few times.

But I wanted to see what it would be like if you followed only terrible people. For a month, I went experimentally dark. I followed Westboro Baptist church members, Holocaust deniers, Islamophobes, homophobes, all the phobes, all personally wounded by the injustice of “these people” just being in their eyeline. Misogynists were everywhere, social media affirming the warning Germaine Greer had sounded half a century earlier — that women have very little idea of just how much men hate them. Now, they had a very keen understanding of exactly how much. There were men, hating them graphically, cruelly, dismissively, in plain sight.

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Sometimes, I tried engaging. A few of the hateful people were perfectly civil. I had several conversations with a cheerful woman from Sarah Palin’s office who had every sympathy for me, living in England under the yoke of Marxism. She told me how the NHS worked (death panels, population control) and how Birmingham was a Sharia state. No guns, that was our problem.

Not many of the other accounts I followed seemed to do light conversation. Confederate Nazis called me the worst thing they could think of (gay) and wished unimaginative ill upon me, with unimaginative swearing. Someone even went to the trouble of opening a Twitter account in my name, simply to post me warnings. The just-for-you revenge Twitter account became a thing. The nastier ones, as always, were targeting women, set up by men obsessed with their former partners. I had my own for a while, bless him. Definitely a him. He followed only me, posted to only me. By the time he sighed his last message, he seemed exhausted by the whole enterprise: “I hope that everyone you ever loved is dead.”

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It’s tempting, of course, to project my own weary old man’s vibe shift — weltschmerz to ennui — onto the blank, threadbare screen. The renamed site may be under new management, but everyone seems to be doing that Unicode “shrug” emoji, expecting not a renewal but a gentle unmooring. Approximately nobody is ever going to call it X. Twitter will remain a vital channel for mutual support groups, for campaigners, for people plugging their work. But honestly, in terms of human interaction, it was always faddish. That was its point. It was born to die.

Twitter and I are losing interest in one another; it can’t even be bothered to pester me with vaguely relevant ads. Like many others, I’m just running down the clock now as it enters its Sunset Boulevard phase. It’s slowly leaving me, not the other way round.