Elon Musk’s dad has some advice for Brits who are taking issue with the world’s richest man trying to insert himself into their politics through social media fiat.
“Just don’t listen to him, that’s all,” Errol Musk said in an interview with LBC radio Monday. “I’d say don’t worry about it. Tell him to get lost.”
After realizing he could become a White House adviser by donating $250 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign, camping out near the transition team headquarters and ranting non-stop on his social media platform X, Musk decided to stretch his wings across the pond.
He kicked off the new year with days of manic posts—many of them wrong or misleading—aimed at toppling the Labour Party government.
Musk’s attacks on government ministers, whole-hearted defense of a jailed far-right activist, and bizarre request that King Charles dissolve Parliament have gotten so extreme that even his British friends would like him to kindly pipe down about a country he doesn’t call home.
But Errol Musk doesn’t see a problem.
“People don’t have to listen to what he says,” he said in the interview Monday. “I mean he’s just a person. The fact that he has money or something, he’s a billionaire or something to that effect—I mean, hundreds of thousands of people are tweeting the same things or saying the same things as he is.”
Those other people, of course, don’t own the platform. Elon Musk has more than 211 million followers, and researchers have found that X’s algorithm boosts posts from his account and from users with whom he agrees.
Then there’s the fact that Musk doesn’t just propose things; he’s so rich he can donate mind-blowing sums of money to try to make them a reality.
He’s reportedly toying with the idea of donating up to $100 million to Britain’s conservative Reform Party. A single $100 million donation would be worth almost as much as all political donations across all parties combined in the U.K. in 2023, which reached a record 93 million pounds ($116.8 million), according to The Guardian.
And yet Musk appears to spend less time agonizing over the financial implications of a nine-figure donation than the average person spends agonizing over whether they spent too much on money on take-out last month.
Which makes ignoring Musk’s political takes a tall order. Money, of course, talks.
