Kemi Badenoch says she’s ‘huge fan’ of Elon Musk, as other Tory leadership candidates decline to praise him

Elon Musk has not been invited to an international investment summit organised by the government next month, the BBC is reporting. No one will be surprised. Despite being the richest person in the world, and a guest of honour at Rishi Sunak’s AI summit last year, the far-right billionaire spent much of the summer attacking Keir Starmer on X, his social media platform, over the government’s handling of the riots and posting or reposting comments about the situtation in the UK which were inflammatory, conspiracy theorist or just wholly false.

But one person may be disappointed. In an interview with the Spectator, Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leadership candidate most popular with party members according to most surveys, has said she is a “huge fan” of his.

The magazine asked all four candidates if they thought Musk had been good for freedom of speech, and Badenoch, the former business secretary, replied:

I think Elon Musk has been a fantastic thing for freedom of speech. I will hold my hand up and say, I’m a huge fan of Elon Musk.

I look at Twitter before he took over and after: there is a lot more free speech. Yes, there are many, many more things that I see on X, as he calls it, that I don’t like.

But I also know that views are not suppressed the way that they were, that there was a cultural establishment – that was very left – that controlled quite a lot of discourse on that platform.

All the other candidates were far more circumspect in how they replied to this question.

Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister and current favourite in the contest, said that he did not have a strong opinion about the X owner, but that he was “not going to be booking a tête-à-tête with Elon Musk any time soon”.

James Cleverly, the former home secretary, said that when Musk took control of X, he tried to counter the perception that right-of-centre voices were being silenced on it. But Cleverly said you should be “very, very careful about curtailing voices that you disagree with”.

And Tom Tugendhat, the former security minister, said he was worried about malign states exploiting the internet for propaganda purposes. (There are claims this is happening much more on X since Musk took over, but Tugendhat directly make that connection.)