One of America’s most powerful men is planning to invade Britain. That’s the most straightforward way to read the post by Elon Musk on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), in which he asked his followers if they agreed that “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government”. When an acolyte suggested Britain could become an American state, Musk mused that this was “not a bad idea”. The threat to invade followed days of posts in which Musk had called the Home Office minister Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist”, urged King Charles to dissolve parliament and expressed his desire for our Prime Minister to be imprisoned.
This is not the first time Musk has expressed a desire to overthrow the leadership of another country. In July 2020, when a Twitter user speculated that the US had had a role in the political crisis in Bolivia (which is home to some of the world’s largest reserves of lithium, used in electric car batteries), Musk responded: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
Musk seems particularly obsessed with Britain, however; he began intervening in British politics during the Southport riots last year, when he declared that civil war in the UK was “inevitable”, and now tweets many times per day about our country. Musk has a central role in the incoming US presidential administration, challenged with cutting trillions from the federal budget. Yet he is spending his time trying to take down Nigel Farage, whom he said “doesn’t have what it takes” to lead Reform, which has five MPs. To an ordinary person, this is eccentric. But in Musk’s world it makes sense, because there is something special about Britain.
The key to understanding why Elon Musk acts the way he does is to understand that for him, attention is money. Musk’s vast wealth – estimated at $437bn, at time of writing – depends on receiving as much attention as possible, and Britain contains the world’s single largest source of free attention: BBC News.
The BBC News website is by some distance the largest English-speaking news website in the world. According to analysis of November 2024 data by Press Gazette, BBC News is the only news website to receive more than a billion global views per month. Its audience is 50 per cent larger than its closest competitor (the New York Times). It reaches nearly ten times as many people worldwide as the Washington Post. In the US it has millions more readers than the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, Bloomberg, CNBC, Newsweek or Google News. Its US traffic is also growing rapidly, by 40 per cent in the past year. What we in the UK may think of as our local news website is a behemoth in the attention economy.
The BBC is cagey about how it has achieved this. It has previously declined, in response to a freedom of information request by the New Statesman, to say if it has targets for web traffic. We know from published contracts that the BBC can comfortably outspend even the largest news organisations on the means to reach huge audiences, however. Millions per year are spent on web analytics and “editorial optimisation” tools that help it appear first in search results, or to ensure its stories are shared more widely on social media. Like many other news organisations, the BBC has paid to appear as the first result in searches for national newspapers on smartphone app stores – ask your iPhone for the Telegraph app, for example, and the first search result may well be BBC News. The BBC’s in-house tool, Telescope, gives its staff insights into how to reach the biggest possible audience. The strategy that has emerged seems to include writing as much as possible about Musk.
Over the past year the BBC News website has run 179 articles about Musk (meaning those posts that are tagged with his name). Over the same period it has run 33 articles on Xi Jinping, leader of the world’s second-most populous country, and 14 articles on Musk’s fellow tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. BBC Newshas reported on Musk’s antics nearly twice as often as it has reported on the country of Bangladesh, which is home to 175 million people.
On 5 January two of the top three items across the top of the BBC News website – ostensibly the most important news for everyone in Britain – were about comments Musk had made on social media. The BBC News app sends push notifications (breaking news alerts) to an estimated audience of seven million people, considerably more than the combined readership of every daily newspaper in the UK, and these, too, feature updates on Musk’s opinions.
This firehose of attention benefits Musk in two ways. First there is advertising: every time someone looks at the X website or app, algorithms compete in a very fast, low-stakes auction – it takes a tiny fraction of a second – for a moment of that person’s time. The winning algorithm displays its advert, and for a second, until they scroll past it, the person will see a message telling them to invest in cryptocurrency or to buy some cheap shoes. A system of astonishing ingenuity has been built, using expertise and materials from across the globe, the end product of which is a flicker of annoyance on a human face. For every flicker a tiny amount of money is paid, and this adds up to billions of dollars a year.
Less direct, but far more lucrative, is the strong link Musk has created between his personal fame and the value of his publicly traded car company, Tesla. Volkswagen makes nearly four times as much revenue from selling cars, but in market capitalisation (the value of all its traded shares) Tesla is more than 30 times larger. Tesla’s stock price has risen more than 70 per cent in the past year, not because it is doing an amazing job of selling cars – sales fell slightly last year – but because it is run by Elon Musk. The same could be said of Trump Media, which has been losing money at a rate of more than $5m per month, but which is valued by the market at $7.85bn. The asset bubble created by a long period of very low interest rates and quantitative easing has led to a new kind of hyper-financialised celebrity culture, in which market value correlates with the amount of attention a person can command.
Musk will remain the main character on X – the source code for the site contains a tag, “author_is_elon”, that ensures his tweets are pushed above others – but the platform itself is losing users at a rate of about a million per month. BlueSky, which looks like Twitter/X, is growing at an exponential rate.
To maintain the world’s attention and the riches it brings, Musk must therefore continue to make himself a rolling news story, serving up outrage and provocation on the platforms that command the largest audiences. If our national broadcaster took less of an interest in Musk, he might suddenly find Britain less interesting.
[See also: The edge of anarchy]
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This article appears in the 08 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Power Gap