Elon Musk loves responding to posts on X with heart emojis. He’s sent dozens this year alone, often in response to people praising his cars or directly to his mother’s posts.
But this week, Musk sent a heart emoji to Tommy Robinson, the far-right Islamophobic activist from the United Kingdom. Though Musk largely ignored UK politics this year while working in the US government at his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he appears to be back across the pond, spending his money and using his platform to elevate far-right extremists.
“A HUGE THANK YOU to @elonmusk today. Legend,” Robinson wrote on Monday, following the first day of his two-day trial for a charge related to counter-terrorism law at Westminster Magistrate’s Court in London. Robinson claimed this week that Musk had funded his defense.
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was charged under the Terrorism Act after he refused to give police access to his cell phone in July 2024 while trying to leave the UK. Prosecutor Jo Morris told the judge this week the police believed “there may be information relevant to acts of terrorism” on the phone at the time. Robinson has pleaded not guilty and claimed the stop was unlawful. A decision in this case is due next month.
In a video posted on X ahead of the trial this week, Robinson said Musk had agreed to fund his defense. Robinson did not say how much Musk was contributing to his defense fund, but Mark Stephens, a prominent British solicitor who has in the past served as legal counsel for Julian Assange, tells WIRED that if he were covering Robinson’s entire defense, Musk’s bill would come to “easily half a million pounds [$665,000], maybe more with appeals.”
Robinson and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Musk posted incessantly about British politics at the beginning of the year, until his focus was consumed by DOGE. But, following his stormy departure from Washington, Musk’s focus on Europe is once again creating chaos. WIRED analyzed data provided by BrightData that shows a significant dropoff in the number of posts Musk made about the UK after January of this year. After he left DOGE in May, Musk’s posts about the UK increased dramatically again in August.
Experts believe Musk’s current outpouring of support for the UK’s far right is part of a possible concerted effort to destabilize the region politically to prevent onerous regulations—such as the EU’s Digital Services Act or the UK’s Online Safety Act—being used to punish X.
The Digital Safety Act, which was passed in October 2022, requires large social media platforms like X to take timely action to moderate disinformation on their platform and remove illegal content, including hate speech. The Online Safety Act in the UK requires platforms to remove illegal content while also imposing strict age verification checks. Failure to meet these requirements could cost X huge fines—up to 6 percent of revenue under the DSA. The platform could even be blocked entirely in the region. When Musk posted “The bird is freed” in 2022 after he took over the platform, Thierry Breton, then EU commissioner for internal markets, quote-tweeted: “In Europe, the bird will fly by our [European Union] rules,” adding the hashtag #DSA.
Still, one of the first things Musk did at Twitter was gut the company’s trust and safety team. Musk also granted a “general amnesty” to accounts previously banned for harassment, abuse, and spreading misinformation.
Robinson, who was previously a member of the fascist British National Party (itself a group that splintered from the National Front, which was founded after being influenced by the British Union of Fascists) and a cofounder of the anti-Islam English Defence League, was one of the most prominent accounts seeking reinstatement. He was permanently banned from Twitter in 2018 for violating the platform’s “hateful conduct” policies.
Musk reinstated his account in November 2023. “I am grateful to @elonmusk for giving me my voice back at such an important time,” Robinson said in response.
Around the same time Robinson was allowed back on X, the EU was beginning to exert pressure on Musk for allegedly failing to meet the requirements of the DSA. The EU then issued a letter warning Musk about levels of disinformation on X related to the Hamas attack on Israel. Musk responded on X by asking Breton to “list the violations you allude to on X, so that that the public can see them.”
The breakdown in Musk’s relationship with the EU preceded increased efforts to promote and boost far-right accounts, including Robinson’s.
At the time of his ban in 2018, Robinson had around 413,000 followers on Twitter, but today his account has 1.7 million followers. Much of that growth appears to be due to X’s algorithm boosting his posts; he has also enjoyed amplification from Musk himself, who shared Robinson’s posts during the racist riots that broke out in the UK during the summer of 2024—which marked Musk’s first notable foray into UK politics.
After the UK riots, Musk became increasingly focused on the UK: He spent the following months posting critically about UK prime minister Keir Starmer and boosted multiple extreme and fringe figures in the UK’s far-right community. In one instance in August 2024, Musk reposted a message defending the actions of Sam Melia, a member of Patriotic Alternative, one of the UK’s largest white supremacist groups. “The way that Twitter now operates, the toxicity of that platform is a godsend to people like Tommy Robinson, because Musk has turned Twitter into a weird conglomeration between a bespoke, far-right platform with some of the impacts and reach continuing of a mainstream platform,” says Joe Mulhall, director of research at Hope Not Hate, a British anti-racism and anti-fascism group.
Robinson was sentenced to 18 months in jail in October 2024 for contempt of court after he continued to post misinformation about a Syrian refugee that led to death threats against the refugee’s family. Musk continued to post about the UK. In the first week of January 2025, Musk posted almost 200 times about the UK “grooming gangs.” He suggested that government officials be jailed. He also reposted an account that claimed Musk had asked King Charles to dissolve Parliament and install a new government (something British monarchs cannot do), with Musk saying in his post that he “earnestly hopes” this matter is considered. Musk also ran a poll asking his followers if the US should “liberate” the UK from “their tyrannical government.”
In recent years and months, Musk has interacted with right-wing leaders from all over the continent, meeting with Hungary’s far-right leader Viktor Orban in Mar-a-Lago, seeming to flirt with Italian right-wing prime minister Giorgia Meloni, and hosting a livestream with Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) on X.
“Musk’s political interferences in Europe, whether that’s supporting the AfD in Germany or associating with various forms of far-right populist politics in the EU, should be seen as an attempt to change the balance of power within Europe,” says Damian Tambini, a policy fellow at the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. “[Musk is trying] to undo some of the regulation, which is going to have a pretty fundamental impact on his platforms, and particularly the ability for him to use them as propaganda platforms.”
In September, Musk appeared virtually at a rally in central London organized by Robinson, who was released from jail in May.
Musk again called for a “dissolution of parliament” and a “change of government,” before telling those watching that “whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die, you either fight back or you die, and that’s the truth.” The British home secretary Shabana Mahmood called the language used by Elon Musk in his speech “abhorrent.”
