At the height of a series of riots that took place across British towns and cities earlier this summer, the owner of the X-rated social media platform formerly known as Twitter sought to embolden the rioters by declaring that the United Kingdom was in a state of civil war.

He and his increasingly virulent platform have managed to do a great deal to promote and apparently legitimize the views of far-right extremists, criminals whose only concerns are their hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities and their fondness for looting, vandalism, and mob violence.

One UK government minister described Elon Musk's comments as "pretty deplorable". She added that "for someone who has a big platform, a large following, to be exercising that power in such an irresponsible way, is actually pretty unconscionable."

Mr. Musk then went on to attempt directly to goad the British Prime Minister on his own increasingly antisocial media platform, before sharing the entirely fake news that Keir Starmer's administration was "considering building 'emergency detainment camps' on the Falkland Islands" to house arrested rioters.

He has branded the British premier "two tier Keir" in an attempt to bolster the absurd myth that the UK police take action against white people but let people of color get off scot-free – rather than that (as is the case) these officers of the law tend to do their best to uphold that law and preserve the peace by arresting violent rioters and allowing peaceful protesters to get on with their business of protesting peacefully.

Musk has also tried to smear Mr. Starmer's plans to prosecute (or at one point, supposedly to ‘execute’) those people who attempted to set fire to hotels housing refugees and to attack Muslims and mosques, and has generally done his best to continue to propagate the violent disorder into which Britain briefly sank.

Indeed, one of Twitter's former vice presidents has gone so far as to suggest to The Guardian newspaper that the X boss should face arrest warrants for his ostensible attempts to incite criminal violence – supposing that "Musk might force his angry tweets to the top of your timeline, but the will of a democratically elected government should mean more than the fury of a tech oligarch."

Meanwhile, Mr. Musk has reignited a dispute with Scotland's former first minister Humza Yousaf, whom he has described as a "super, super racist… scumbag" who "loathes" white people – and who has, in turn, called Musk a "dangerous race baiter" and "one of the most dangerous men on the planet”. Mr. Yousaf's successor, Scottish first minister John Swinney, has even had to intervene, denouncing Musk's remarks as "baseless" and "reprehensible".

Evil Elon has often been caricatured as a real-life billionaire Bond villain in the style of Elliot Carver, Max Zorin, or Hugo Drax – a media mogul, a tech tycoon, and a space pioneer – a madman fixated upon his diabolical plots to take over the world. Sadly, Musk has increasingly come to resemble those very same caricatures, a grinning prattling anarchist, a stirrer of chaos extraordinaire.

Yet, his ambitions for world domination are of course also matched by his growing desperation, as his ex-Twitter platform continues to shed value from the 44 billion dollars that he paid for it before managing to lose its name, its brand, its goodwill, and a lot of its revenues. 

It has been reported this summer that he has initiated legal action against multinational corporations that have decided to withdraw advertising from the doom-stricken platform and that adverts promoting legitimate enterprises have been appearing alongside posts from far-right figures. 

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Indeed, the iNews outlet reported in August that promotional materials for the Telegraph newspaper were being published under tweets from "one of Britain's most notorious Fascists" – a man "who has been jailed for a series of hate crimes against Muslims" – and who, though banned from Twitter in 2017, was reinstated by Musk last year.

Musk's desperation might also be witnessed in his recent efforts to buddy up with Donald Trump – with whom last month he shared a vacuous and mutually sycophantic conversation, hosted on X, apparently in a bid to lure the orange monster back from his own Truth Social (a realm of inevitably antisocial untruths). It was a dialogue beset by embarrassing technical problems which the tech magnate blamed on a cyber-attack, although at the time the rest of his platform appeared unaffected by this purported act of sabotage. 

This strange engagement was rambling and unfocused, and it has been reported that Republican strategists have since told Mr. Trump that it could only possibly have appealed to supporters who'd already committed themselves, their families, their neighbors, their pets, and their collections of assault rifles to voting for him.

There have been calls from some commentators that the British government should consider banning Musk's X altogether, but that would both be impractical and raise massive questions about the rights to freedom of expression exercised by the many hundreds of thousands of legitimate users of the platform. 

Others within the UK – certainly many within the more progressive social media bubbles – are talking of closing their accounts, or have already done so.

But perhaps the most powerful restraining influence on Elon Musk will be his fellow shareholders in the American automobile manufacturer Tesla, a company of whose shares Musk himself owns approximately 13%. 

As the head and face of Tesla, Musk's various eccentric antics have tended to rebound unfortunately upon the value of the corporation. But his latest behavior far overshadows his drug-induced weirdness on a popular podcast that sent share prices tumbling in 2018 and cast doubt upon his fitness to run a space exploration business reliant on federal patronage.

His recent conduct on X has damaged his reputation as a businessperson, a visionary genius, and a human being capable of any greater empathy than a sociopathic narcissist. 

Once that reputational damage starts to hit sales of his cars, it seems somewhat unlikely that his position – or at least his contemptuous behavior – will prove sustainable.

It also seems probable that further private, public, and third-sector organizations will abandon their use of (and advertising in) the former Twitter platform – at the same time as celebrities, politicians, and ordinary people have been leaving it in droves.

This isn’t the end for Elon Musk. But it may, for future historians, come to look like a turning point in his fortunes, which may now be inexorably tied to those of his similarly eccentric and extremist ally Donald Trump.

This might be the point at which the grand futures of these two lords of misrule – and their opportunistic attempts at self-serving acts of gratuitous disruption – start to fall apart.