A Cabinet minister dodged questions over whether billionaire Elon Musk had been invited to London for the UK’s investment summit.
Science Secretary Peter Kyle declined six times to say if the Tesla and X (Twitter) owner had received an invite.
“Elon Musk has never come to these sort of (investment) events under any government,” he told BBC radio, while repeatedly dodging the question over whether he had been invited.
“We are out there inviting people to come to the summit who are already open to investing and have investment programmes that are underway.
“Elon Musk would have been very, very welcome if he had an open investment programme that we could have latched onto.”
He stressed that business chiefs representing £40 trillion worth of assets were in the capital for the event.
“We focused on those big global companies who already have announced global investment programmes,” added Mr Kyle.
“We want to make sure they come here not to one of our competitive countries.”
He stressed the Government’s “ambition” was clear with bosses from corporate giants with £5 trillion of assets from the US tech industry at the summit.
Highlighting the political and economic stability under the new Government to attract investors, he added: “We would love to engage with Elon Musk if he wants to open up an investment programme and there is global competition for it believe me we will be first in line and I will be first in line knocking at his door to try to get that investment here.”
Musk did play a key role last autumn at the UK Government’s AI safety summit held at Bletchley Park, once the top-secret home of the World War Two Codebreakers, north of London.
He even did a joint even with the then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
But Sir Keir Starmer’s Downing Street later slapped him down after he waded into the row over summer riots in Britain by posting on X that “civil war is inevitable”.
Responding to a post on the social media site, formerly Twitter, that blamed mass migration and open borders for the disorder in Britain, Musk wrote: “Civil war is inevitable.”
But No10 flatly rejected the intervention by the social media boss.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “There is no justification for comments like that.”
Sir Keir criticised social media companies for not doing more to stop their platforms being used by people to fuel the public disorder.
Musk also took a swipe at the PM, branding him “two-tier Kier” amid accusations, which were strongly refuted, that the police had taken a tougher stance against Far Right thugs involved in the public disorder than other demonstrators, including on pro-Gaza marches, who had broken the law.
Mr Kyle denied the billionaire had been snubbed from the investment summit after his remarks on the riots.
Asked whether the X owner’s absence from the event was because he had called the Prime Minister “two-tier Keir”, he told Sky News: “Absolutely not. Our Prime Minister puts the country first, party second.
“He has said numerous times, we want to make sure that people from around the world understand we are a Government that is open for business.”
