Nick Clegg suggests Elon Musk could become a “political puppet master”

Former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has stated that billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, could potentially evolve into a “political puppet master” within the United States. Mr. Clegg, currently serving as Mark Zuckerberg’s second-in-command at Meta in his capacity as president for global affairs, shared these observations during an appearance on Nick Robinson’s Political Thinking podcast. Addressing a question regarding whether Mr. Musk posed a threat to democracy, Mr. Clegg responded that the entrepreneur had been “playing an outsized role” in both the US election and the establishment of the new Trump administration. He additionally reiterated his previous description of X, Meta’s social media competitor, as a “one-man, hyper-partisan, ideological hobbyhorse”. The former leader of the Liberal Democrats, who held the position of deputy prime minister alongside David Cameron in the 2010 coalition government, transitioned from Westminster to Silicon Valley following his defeat in the Sheffield Hallam constituency to Labour during the 2017 general election. In 2022, Mr. Zuckerberg elevated him to a senior position, entrusting him with responsibilities for both policy and communication, along with a reported bonus of £10m in addition to his £2.7m annual salary. Since that time, he has represented Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, on numerous highly contentious subjects. During his discussion with Nick Robinson, he elaborated on how his responsibilities involve making decisions to reconcile freedom of expression with the imperative to safeguard Meta’s users from detrimental material. Conversely, Mr. Musk has articulated his objective to “remove all the censorship” from X, a stance that prompted Mr. Clegg to remark, “you can’t move [on X]… for want of tripping over stuff from the person who now privately owns it”. When questioned about whether Mr. Musk constituted “a threat to democracy,” Mr. Clegg responded: “I think Elon Musk is obviously now playing an outsized role in both the election and now the formation of the new US administration. “And I think it will see he has a choice – he can be either an avid and well-heeled supporter… Or he can try and become a sort of political…puppet master, going well beyond Trump, deciding who the next Republican candidate should be and the one after that, and so on, so forth.” He further elaborated that the former scenario is recognizable as “people with means” frequently engage in political affairs, but the latter “is is quite different to the general tradition of American democracy”. The former Liberal Democrat leader additionally emphasized the advantages of generative AI, dismissing the notion that the technology would “turn us all into paperclips by next Tuesday”. He asserted that apprehensions about “AI was going to destroy democracy” were exaggerated, especially concerns that democracy would be “up-ended by AI deep fakes” in 2024, a year marked by the highest number of elections globally in history. While acknowledging that this does not preclude the existence of deep fakes or efforts to employ AI for misinformation dissemination this year, he remarked that “the dog that, broadly, has not barked is AI” and that industry safeguards indicate it was not “the end of the world”. He further stated that “it has a paralysing effect when we talk about almost fictional fears” and advocated for a renewed concentration on addressing “real” problems such as child sex abuse, deep fakes, and disinformation. In response to critiques from activists and governmental bodies alleging that Meta is insufficient in combating harmful content across its platforms, Mr. Clegg commented: “I don’t think anyone’s ever doing enough. “And I think this issue of how kids interact with the online world, how much they use smartphones, how they use social media apps is something that you should never, ever think that the job is done.”