The British Public Dislikes Elon Musk. He Can Still Sway Politics.

His influence is partly the result of a very online political establishment, and partly thanks to a right-leaning media that is hostile to Keir Starmer’s Labour government.

He is a deeply unpopular figure in Britain, according to opinion polls, and his social media channel has lost users in the country since he took it over in October 2022. Yet when Elon Musk put Britain in his cross hairs on X in recent weeks, pounding the political establishment over a decade-old child sex abuse scandal, he instantly catapulted the issue to the top of the news agenda.

Mr. Musk’s success is rooted in two obvious factors: his mammoth fortune and his alliance with the incoming president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. But it also reflects a British political and media establishment that is divided and deeply in flux, all of which has made Britain easy pickings for an outside influencer with vast resources and a single-minded mission to disrupt.

Britain’s right-leaning newspapers have picked up and amplified Mr. Musk’s call for a new national investigation of young girls who were sexually exploited in several towns in the 2000s, including in Rotherham, where an estimated 1,400 girls were exploited by “grooming gangs” composed largely of British Pakistani men.

The leader of the opposition Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, threw her support behind a new national investigation as well, even though the previous Conservative government did not pursue one. A former Tory leader, Boris Johnson, once belittled those inquiries, saying, an “awful lot of money and an awful lot of police time now goes into these historic offenses and all this malarkey.”

The Labour government, which was vaulted into power with a landslide majority in July, has so far rejected Tory calls for another investigation, saying its priority is to implement the recommendations from a previous seven-year-long national investigation, including tightening requirements to report child abuse and collect better data on cases.

The government’s minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, Jess Phillips, had earlier pushed back privately on calls for a fresh national inquiry, arguing that a local inquiry would be more effective, for which she was labeled a “rape genocide apologist” in a post by Mr. Musk.

But even as Prime Minister Keir Starmer defended Ms. Phillips, the drumbeat of angry Musk posts forced him to retreat from his claim that Ms. Badenoch and others were calling for an investigation simply “because they want to jump on a bandwagon of the far right.” Now, he says, he has an open mind about it.

The crimes committed against young girls in these cases were so appalling that the resurfacing of them, even years later, would have drawn a strong public reaction, regardless of how they came to light.

But as Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a research organization in London, said, “Elon Musk’s political posting has been enormously influential in driving both the political and media conversation in the U.K.”

Based strictly on the numbers, Mr. Katwala said, that makes little sense: Mr. Musk is viewed favorably by only 20 percent of people in Britain, according to the market research firm YouGov, while 71 percent view him unfavorably. The reach of X fell by eight percent from May 2023 to May 2024, according to an annual report on online usage by Ofcom, which regulates communications in Britain.

“There has been a recent tradition of lecturing the liberal left to remember that Twitter is not Britain,” Mr. Katwala said. “But the right-wing ecosystem seems inclined to forget that X is not Britain either.”

Still, he said, X has managed to hang on to its followers among the politicians and journalists who work in Westminster and who set the political news agenda. They have proven a rapt audience for Mr. Musk’s increasingly strident, often erroneous, posts about Britain and his false claims about Mr. Starmer’s supposed complicity in a scheme to cover up child sex abuse, dating back to his days as Britain’s director of prosecutions. In fact Mr. Starmer’s office brought the first case against a grooming gang and drafted new guidelines for the mandatory reporting of child sex offenses.

While many of Mr. Musk’s posts, particularly those on grooming gangs, originated in the ecosystem of far-right bloggers and activists, they are also tempting to mainstream politicians in search of a cudgel to use against their opponents. And they appeal to editors and broadcasters looking for a good story.

“The British press and the broadcasters, to a degree, fell all over themselves to give Elon Musk publicity,” said David Yelland, a former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid, The Sun. “In the print press, they did it because they are extremely hostile to Keir Starmer. This is plain old Fleet Street bias.”

Claire Enders, a London-based media researcher and founder of Enders Analysis, likened Mr. Musk to Mr. Murdoch, the insurgent media baron from Australia who upended the London newspaper industry in the 1970s. “We just have a new Murdoch,” she said. “He’s American, he’s a multibillionaire, and he’s close to Trump.”

Mr. Musk, however, is not interested in taking over the British press so much as discrediting it. He claims the news media was complicit in a coverup of abuses against young girls. The truth is, British newspapers across the political spectrum did cover these crimes, if not immediately, then energetically, as the scale of the abuses became apparent in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The Times of London published a major investigation of the scandal, and the slow response to it by the police, in 2011.

“It’s been on the front page of every paper and led the 6 o’clock news for years,” said Raheem Kassam, who covered the scandal as editor of the British outpost of the right-wing news outlet, Breitbart News. “The idea that there is a media blackout on this, and we needed Elon Musk to uncover it, is nonsense.”

And yet even The Times of London, which is also owned by Mr. Murdoch, published its own demand for a new inquiry on its front page on Jan. 6. It pointed to the hundreds of articles it had published on the scandal but added that a newspaper “can only go so far.”

No British media outlet has revived the grooming scandal with the zeal of GB News, a hard-right cable news channel that went on the air in 2021, a decade after The Times’s investigation into grooming gangs. Charlie Peters, an investigative reporter, broke the story that Ms. Phillips had rejected a request for a national inquiry into child sexual abuse in Oldham, a town near Manchester.

Since then, GB News has interviewed relatives of the victims of abuse across Britain. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform U.K., an anti-immigrant party, has praised Mr. Peters, saying he had “really reignited this story” and demonstrated that “these barbarities have taken place in at least 50 towns.” Mr. Farage has vowed that Reform will carry out its own investigation if the government does not.

But Mr. Farage is also trying to extricate himself from his own spat with Mr. Musk — this one over Mr. Farage’s refusal to echo Mr. Musk’s demand that Tommy Robinson, a far-right agitator with multiple criminal convictions, be released from prison. Mr. Musk posted that Reform needed to find a new leader because Mr. Farage “doesn’t have what it takes.”

The cumulative effect of Mr. Musk’s inflammatory posts has been to energize Britain’s populist right. Even Mr. Farage’s rift with Mr. Musk may ultimately play to his benefit, giving him credibility with those who revile Mr. Robinson. The Labour government, meanwhile, is struggling to regain control over its agenda, while critics say the Conservatives embraced Mr. Musk largely to stay relevant.

“He brings the two tactical nuclear weapons of modern politics: unlimited cash and a social media platform,” said Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump who has clashed with Mr. Musk on visas for skilled workers in the United States. “There’s not a government in Europe that can withstand this guy’s onslaught.”

Mr. Kassam, a former chief of staff to Mr. Farage who now works with Mr. Bannon in the United States, said he expected Mr. Farage and Mr. Musk to mend fences soon. Aside from their differences over Mr. Robinson, he said, their political philosophies were probably closer than those of Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump.

“Elon tries to break things and see where they fall,” Mr. Kassam said. “He’s treating the United Kingdom like one of his companies.”

The World of Elon Musk

The billionaire’s portfolio includes the world’s most valuable automaker, an innovative rocket company and plenty of drama.

• Relationship With the Far Right: As Elon Musk embraces more extreme parties and figures globally, he has fallen out with prominent right-wing Americans who say they are worried that their agenda may be sidelined in favor of his own.
• Federal Reviews: Federal agencies have opened at least three reviews into whether Musk and SpaceX complied with disclosure protocols intended to protect state secrets, people with knowledge of the matter said.
• Tesla: Sales at Musk’s electric-car company fell slightly in 2024, the first annual decline in its history, as rivals in China, Europe and the United States introduced dozens of competing electric models.
• Musk’s Backers: Here’s a look at the people who influence the world’s richest man, and those who stand to gain from their association with him.
• Starbase, Texas: Over the past few years, Musk has expanded his footprint in Texas. Now, he is trying to create a company town where SpaceX is based.