Elon Musk doesn't like being blocked on his own website, but he hates being ignored by the British government, which did not invite him to its prestigious International Investment Summit.
He was not invited due to his social media posts during last month's riots, the BBC understands.
"I don't think anyone should go to the UK when they're releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts," Mr Musk claimed on X.
This isn't true either, the BBC reports: "Earlier this month, the government released some prisoners to reduce prison overcrowding, but no people serving sentences for sex offences were included." Musk also posted a false claim that the UK was building "detainment camps" on the Falkland Islands for rioters.
If Musk's disconcerting interest in pedophilia only highlights why he's not invited to the best parties anymore, it's his encouraging far-right rioters in Britain last month that is the problem here. He is overwhelmingly disliked across the political spectrum there, where his behavior plays into overtly-articulated stereotypes of South African whites as truculent morons.
While he's also an admitted heavy drug user—there's just no accounting for anyone's behavior when they're always out of it—I'm still struck by the story from the new book about his purchase of Twitter. Musk got so upset that a tweet from President Biden was more popular than one of his own that he ditched Rupert Murdoch to fly back to San Francisco and have Twitter's engineers rig the site to favor his tweets.
Attending the Super Bowl as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, Musk had one of the most luxurious seats in the house, but rather than watching the game, he was glued to his phone in dismay. Both he and President Biden had sent tweets cheering on the Phila-delphia Eagles, but even though Biden had far fewer followers than Musk on the platform, the president's tweet garnered 29 mil-lion views to Musk's 8.4 million.
Livid, Musk demanded that his engineers find out why his tweet was underperforming Biden's. He left the game early to fly back to his San Francisco office, where dozens of employees were summoned to meet him on a Sunday night. Eventually, to placate their boss, the engineers tweaked Twitter's algorithm to boost Musk's posts, pushing them into users' feeds whether they follow him or not.
"In effect, Musk's tweets would have higher priority over any other post," write Conger and Mac, technology reporters for The New York Times. As they put it toward the end of the book, "A man allergic to criticism had bought himself the largest audience in the world, and hoped for praise."
Few people with real wealth or power would want this circus act anywhere near them. He knows it, too.
