Rishi Sunak’s love-in with Elon Musk might be the most embarrassing political event I’ve ever witnessed. It’s hard to watch in its entirety. The mind reels backwards in astonishment and horror. Something deep down in your guts demands that you stop the video. And yet you have to carry on, appalled and fascinated all at once.
How has it come to this? How did it ever get this bad? Who is advising the Prime Minister? Could no one stop him? And why in the name of God is he babbling about how to turn off a Terminator?
But underneath all that there is a truly despairing political lesson. Sunak did not just supplicate himself by treating Musk like a rock star. He supplicated Britain. He humiliated his office and the nation at the same time. It made Tony Blair’s relationship with George Bush look like a model of equal status.
Even the build-up to the event was cringeworthy. Downing Street released a video of the front door of No 10 with the numerals morphing into an X – the new name for Twitter. For months now, this has been the butt of countless jokes, a totem for the way in which the billionaire bought a successful social media company and drove it into the ground. Monthly users are down 15 per cent. Ad revenue is down 54 per cent. It’s worth half the price he paid for it. And yet Sunak decided he wanted to associate himself as closely as possible with this symbol of failure.
Why? Because Musk’s appearance at his much-vaunted artificial intelligence (AI) summit would hand it legitimacy. Most world leaders did not bother to attend. The closest he got to political starpower was US Vice President Kamala Harris and even she managed to upstage him by announcing a US AI institute just before Sunak unveiled his own effort.
When the two men finally sat down, the power dynamic was immediately obvious. Sunak was leaning forwards, eager, seemingly actually quite grateful, an enthusiastic smile plastered over his face.
And then they started talking, and it all became even stranger. This wasn’t a conversation between two figures. It was an interview. It was far crazier than we could have ever thought possible. The Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was the one interviewing the billionaire. The power dynamic wasn’t even superficially equal. He was there to learn from the tech bro.
For a while now tech entrepreneurs have liked to portray themselves as the saviours of mankind, as a better way of fixing social problems than boring old mainstream electoral politics. But we have never seen it made this symbolically obvious. In an exchange between Silicon Valley and political leader, it is the political leader who asks the questions.
This might have been halfway tolerable if the questioning was at least robust. After all, Musk is controlling technology with a key role in national security but without any of the democratic scrutiny or the intellectual competency to do so. On Twitter, he has repeatedly engaged with conspiracy-theory ultra-conservative alt-right accounts.
And yet the first words out of Sunak’s mouth were: “Bill Gates said there is no one in our time who has done more to push the bounds of science and innovation than you.” This set the tone for what was to come. Softball question after softball question, more akin to an in-house corporate presentation at one of Musk’s companies than an exchange with a leader of a leading democracy.
One question began: “Given that you are known for being such a brilliant innovator and technologist…” Another saw him explicitly ask Musk what his own policy should be. “What do we need to do to make sure we are doing it quick enough?”
For his part, Musk rattled off a series of childlike sci-fi daydreams. This is the reality of the man. When you dig past his genuine accomplishments at Tesla and Space X, his other projects are embarrassing and unscientific.
His August 2020 presentation for his company Neuralink, for instance, saw him claim that conditions like depression, anxiety and addiction could be solved with “an implantable device” in the human brain. This is so far from our understanding of these conditions or our knowledge of the limitation of grafted technology as to be laughable.
There was a lot of that last night. Musk entered into fantasies about Terminator AI robots that “can basically chase you everywhere”. He then concluded that it will be a “great friend, so long as that friend can stay your friend and not get turned off or something”. And throughout all this mumbo-jumbo nonsense, the Prime Minister sat and smiled and nodded his head.
If it was possible to reduce Sunak as a political figure then last night’s event would have accomplished it. But it did not stop there. He also reduced us as a country. He put us in the subservient position to a man who replies to alt-right anonymous accounts on Twitter.
This is not how it is overseas. The US government is taking a tough inquisitive approach to Musk’s behaviour. The EU is issuing warnings to Musk to comply with its laws on disinformation. “There are obligations under the hard law,” European commissioner Věra Jourová said recently. “So my message for Twitter/X is you have to comply. We will be watching what you do.” It’s all a million miles from Sunak’s desperate rictus grin and his softball school-prize questioning.
We were promised after Brexit that Britain would stride tall and strong on the world stage. Last night we got a striking representation of the reality. A British Prime Minister, desperate for a tech bro to attend his summit, visibly unable to control his relief that he had done so, and rewarding him with an act of self-debasement.
It was a spectacle of embarrassment and humiliation. The sooner we can wipe it from our collective memories the better.
