In a barrage of posts rife with misinformation, he revived questions about a child sex abuse scandal, vilified the prime minister and defended a jailed far-right agitator.
He demanded the release of a convicted criminal and far-right agitator. He falsely accused the prime minister, Keir Starmer, of failing to go after child rapists when he was head of public prosecutions. He endorsed a post calling on King Charles III to dissolve Parliament and call elections to remove Britain’s seven-month-old Labour government, a constitutional impossibility.
Elon Musk has once again set his sights on Britain, putting the country in the bull’s-eye in the capricious world of his online obsessions. In a fusillade of posts that began before the new year, Mr. Musk moved on from his enthusiastic boosting of a far-right party in Germany to targeting Britain on multiple politically sensitive fronts.
After mostly ignoring Mr. Musk’s trolling, which has been going on for months, the British government on Friday snapped back, though in characteristically polite fashion.
“Elon Musk is an American citizen and perhaps ought to focus on issues on the other side of the Atlantic,” the government’s health minister, Andrew Gwynne, said in an interview with LBC radio. Mr. Gwynne’s boss, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, told reporters, “Some of the criticisms Elon Musk has made, I think, are misjudged and certainly misinformed.”
Britain is one of several European countries where Mr. Musk is trying to replicate the influence he wielded on behalf of President-elect Donald J. Trump in the American election last fall. In addition to Germany, where his advocacy of a far-right party with neo-Nazi ties, Alternative for Germany, has roiled that country’s politics before elections next month, Mr. Musk has nurtured close ties to Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.
In Britain, Mr. Musk’s antagonism toward the Labour government is rooted in part in its aggressive response to hate speech online. Officials said false and inflammatory posts helped incite anti-immigrant riots that followed the killing of three girls in a mass stabbing in the town of Southport last July. They arrested more than 30 people, which prompted Mr. Musk to condemn the government for what he called an attack on the free speech that he extols on his platform, X.