Elon Musk shunned as not invited to top UK summit

BBC

The world's richest person, Elon Musk, has not been invited to the UK government's International Investment Summit in response to his social media posts during last month’s riots, the BBC understands.

Violence spread across the UK after a stabbing attack in Southport, in which three children attending a dance class were killed. The tech entrepreneur posted on X, formerly Twitter, predicting civil war in the UK and repeatedly attacking the prime minister.

The summit in October is the key moment that PM Keir Starmer hopes to attract tens of billions in inward funding for business from the world’s biggest investors.

Mr Musk went to last year's event and took a starring role in November's AI Summit, including a fireside chat with then PM Rishi Sunak. The government and Mr Musk have been approached for comment.

During the August riots, Mr Musk shared, and later deleted, a conspiracy theory about the UK building “detainment camps” on the Falkland Islands for rioters, on X - the social media platform he owns.

At the time ministers said his comments were “totally unjustifiable" and "pretty deplorable".

The BBC understands this is why he has not been invited to join hundreds of the world’s biggest investors at the event on 14 October.

Coming two weeks head of the Budget, the government is billing it as a huge opportunity to attract foreign investment to grow the UK economy. The Labour Party committed before the general election to hold this event within its first 100 days in office.

Under the Conservatives, Mr Musk, who owns or runs X, Tesla and SpaceX, was quietly shown around various UK sites with potential for a gigafactory for cars and batteries.

He has previously told journalists he opened a site in Germany and not the UK partly because of Brexit.

He is a regular at the equivalent French summit. In July, he attended a three-hour lunch with top executives with President Emmanuel Macron ahead of the Olympics earlier this summer.

Under his ownership of the site formerly known as Twitter, Mr Musk lifted the ban on far-right figures, including on the Britain First group.

The UK is considering a tougher Online Safety Act, after the role of misinformation in the widespread racist disorder in August.

He is the world's richest person and has used his platform to make his views known on a vast array of topics.

Bloomberg estimates his net worth to be around $228bn.

That's based largely on the value of his shares in Tesla, of which he owns more than 13%. The company's stock soared in value - some say unreasonably - in 2020 as the firm's output increased and it started to deliver regular profits.

Since bursting on to the Silicon Valley scene more than two decades ago, the 53-year-old serial entrepreneur has kept the public captivated with his business antics.

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Mr Musk showed his talents for entrepreneurship early, going door to door with his brother selling homemade chocolate Easter eggs and developing his first computer game at the age of 12.

For a long time Mr Musk, who became a US citizen in 2002, resisted efforts to label his politics - calling himself "half-Democrat, half-Republican", "politically moderate" and "independent".

He says he voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and - reluctantly - Joe Biden, all of them Democrats.

But in recent years he's swung behind Donald Trump, who is a Republican. Mr Musk officially endorsed the former president for a second term in 2024 after his attempted assassination.