European leaders expressed growing frustration with tech billionaire Elon Musk on Monday, as a major row escalated between members of Britain\u2019s government and US president-elect Donald Trump\u2019s key ally. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer slammed those \u201cspreading lies and misinformation\u201d following days of incendiary posts by Musk on his X platform over historical sex offences against children in northern England. Musk, who is set for a role in Trump\u2019s administration, then accused the centre-left Labour leader of being \u201cdeeply complicit in the mass rapes\u201d and \u201cutterly despicable\u201d. European leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron have also weighed in against Musk. The French leader said the SpaceX boss was \u201cdirectly intervening in elections\u201d, including in Germany where Chancellor Olaf Scholz has condemned the Tesla boss for backing an extreme-right party. Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said he found it \u201cworrying\u201d that someone with so much wealth and influence was getting involved in the politics of European countries. Much of Musk\u2019s focus in recent days has been on Britain and historical scandals involving grooming gangs that first emerged during Starmer\u2019s 2008-2013 tenure as chief state prosecutor for England and Wales. The comments pose a major challenge for Starmer\u2019s government, as it tries to fend off growing support for the far-right while also seeking to maintain good relations with Trump\u2019s incoming administration. Musk\u2019s tirade, which included demands for a new public inquiry into the scandal, has prompted some UK opposition politicians to join in the criticism and call for a fresh national probe. \u2018Lies\u2019 The issue has long been seized upon by far-right figures, including Tommy Robinson, one of Britain\u2019s best known far-right agitators, whom Musk has praised and said should be released from jail. Responding to media questions on the topic, Starmer insisted he was \u201cnot going to individualise this to Elon Musk\u201d but said \u201ca line has been crossed\u201d with some of the online criticism. \u201cThose that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible, they\u2019re not interested in victims, they\u2019re interested in themselves,\u201d Starmer told reporters, without naming Musk. \u201cI\u2019m prepared to call out this for what it is. We\u2019ve seen this playbook many times: the whipping up of intimidation and threats of violence, hoping that the media will amplify it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
European leaders expressed growing frustration with tech billionaire Elon Musk on Monday, as a major row escalated between members of Britain\u2019s government and US president-elect…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22149,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}