‘His Goal is Chaos. And It’s Coming’: UK Columnist Warns Elon Musk Will Boost Violence in US After Inciting Race Riots in England

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and controversial owner of X, was the focus of a scathing op-ed in The Guardian over the weekend, which warned Musk appears to be intentionally inciting chaos.

Carole Cadwalladr, a reporter and feature writer for the Observer, penned an article published Sunday titled, “Inciting rioters in Britain was a test run for Elon Musk. Just see what he plans for America.”

In the piece, Cadwalladr pulls no punches in describing the Jan. 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol as the “good old days” as the billionaires in our current “reality” have been “unchained” and will not only no longer act as safeguards for society but as accelerants adding to the fuel that burns it down.

“Because back in the golden days of 2020, tech platforms, still reeling from a public backlash, had at least to look as if they gave a shit,” she writes, adding:

Twitter employed 4,000-plus people in “trust and safety”, tasked with getting dangerous content off its platform and sniffing out foreign influence operations. Facebook tried to ignore public pressure but eventually banned political ads that sought to “delegitimise voting” and scores of academics and researchers in “election integrity” units worked to identify and flag dangerous disinformation.

Cadwalladr explains that the world is in a “significantly worse” situation now and for Americans to understand just how dangerous the information environment is today they only need to look at the U.K. She went on to argue that much like Brexit, the U.K. is yet again “the canary in the coalmine.”

“The same transatlantic patterns, the same playbook, the same figures. But this time with a whole new set of dangerous, unchecked technological vulnerabilities to be exploited,” she argued, adding:

In Britain, the canary has sung. This summer we have witnessed something new and unprecedented. The billionaire owner of a tech platform publicly confronting an elected leader and using his platform to undermine his authority and incite violence. Britain’s 2024 summer riots were Elon Musk’s trial balloon.

He got away with it. And if you’re not terrified by both the extraordinary supranational power of that and the potential consequences, you should be. If Musk chooses to “predict” a civil war in the States, what will that look like? If he chooses to contest an election result? If he decides that democracy is over-rated? This isn’t sci-fi. It’s literally three months away.

Cadwalladr is referring to Musk — who has endorsed Donald Trump — hyping race riots in the U.K. by sharing disinformation like altered headlines saying that the British government was readying “detainment camps” for anti-immigrant protestors. Musk went so far at one point to post that “civil war is inevitable,” which many took as a call to arms.

Cadwalladr ended by chronicling how X, formerly Twitter, has gutted “its trust and safety team,” as has Meta, TikTok, Snap, and Discord. “In 2020, these efforts seemed pathetic, paltry, inadequate to the scale of the threat. Now they’re gone, just as the tools are becoming even more dangerous,” she wrote, warning that AI has emerged as a tool for manipulating the masses at the same the social platforms are no longer extensively monitoring content.

She ends with an ominous warning, “But what Musk – the new self-appointed Lord of Misrule – has done is to rip off the mask. He’s shown that you don’t even have to pretend to care. In Musk’s world, trust is mistrust and safety is censorship. His goal is chaos. And it’s coming.”