Elon Musk was warned against seeking to be a “political puppet master” trying to choose Republican candidates to be US president.
The Tesla boss was already playing an “outsized role in both the election and now the formation of the new US administration,” said former Deputy Prime Minister Sir Nick Clegg.
Musk donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars for Trump’s campaign for a White House comeback and his second term as president is due to start in January.
Sir Nick, who quit British politics after the Liberal Democrats were trounced in the 2015 general election and losing his seat in 2017, now works as president for global affairs at Meta in California.
He argued that Musk, head of X, also known as Twitter, and who has been appointed by Trump to co-lead his new Department of Government Efficiency now faced a choice.
“He can be either an avid and well-heeled supporter which is what he seems at least as far as I can make to be,” Sir Nick told Nick Robinson’s BBC political podcast.
“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.”
The ex-Lib Dem leader stressed that being a wealthy donor was understood by voters because “people with means” often get involved in politics, but seeking to be a “political puppet master” would be “quite different to the general tradition of American democracy”.
Sir Nick, who was MP for Sheffield Hallam before losing the seat in 2017 in a shock general election result, also stood by remarks he made branding Meta’s social media rival, X, a “one-man, hyper-partisan, ideological hobbyhorse”.
Musk has also repeatedly waded into British politics.
He took a swipe at Sir Keir Starmer, claiming there was “two tier” policing in the UK, branding the Prime Minister “two-tier Keir”, both claims which were strongly denied by the Government and the Met Police.
He recently denied he was planning to donate £80 million to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK as he backed it to win the next general election, overtaking the Tories as the party on the Right.
After moving to America, former MP Sir Nick was promoted to a senior role by Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, covering policy as well as communications and a reported bonus of £10m on top of his £2.7m annual salary.
Pressed on whether Meta was doing enough to prevent harmful content on its platforms, he said: “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.”
He also hailed the benefits of generative artificial intelligence, but rejected the idea that the revolutionary technology would “turn us all into paperclips by next Tuesday” or that it was “going to destroy democracy” with a proliferation of deep fakes.
