Will Bunch writes:

The images coming out of Belfast — the city in Northern Ireland made famous by decades of ethnic violence that came to be known simply as, “the Troubles” — were horrific enough. The sight of cars and homes ablaze and hordes of masked, young men roaming the city streets brought back painful memories for old-timers.

“I lost my teenage years to the Troubles,” a shell-shocked, 71-year-old, Paul Sharkey, told the New York Times, after watching a flaming van crash near his home on the outskirts of Belfast. “I thought moving out here I had got away from them — from the bombs and bullets, all the rest of it…“

Remarkably no one seems to have been killed in a couple of nights of riots that targeted Belfast’s Black and brown immigrant communities after a Sudanese migrant was charged with a stabbing — captured on video — that left a white man in a coma. But terror was felt across Northern Ireland’s largest city, as volunteers raced to rescue families from burning homes, immigrant addresses were posted online, and workers were afraid to go to work after a nurse was attacked.

And yet there was something about this anti-immigrant pogrom in Belfast that was just as appalling as the pictures of burning streets and fleeing children. Their biggest cheerleader was not some street thug in a balaclava but the richest person in the history of Planet Earth, urging the rioters on from some posh hideaway on the other side of the Atlantic.

Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!! https://t.co/73GDcLLFwv

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 9, 2026

Tuesday morning, as news of the stabbing attack spread across the United Kingdom, Elon Musk took to X — the influential social-media site that was called Twitter when he bought it in 2022 for $44 billion — to amplify a post by UK far-right extremist leader Tommy Robinson. It called for white people “to hit the streets” that night and protest what Robinson called “yet another invader attack on our people.”

“Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!” wrote the U.S.-based, South African-born electric-car-and-spacecraft mogul, just hours before the sadly familiar loudness of repeated explosions rocked Belfast.

Musk’s tweet was hardly a one-off. In a flurry of X posts attacking immigration, he told his 240 million followers that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer “hates white people” while sharing an image of the Black suspect which simply said that “millions must go.” When his diatribes started provoking a backlash, he wrote: “Murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town is what’s making people angry, not ‘social media’!”

The nonprofit tech watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Musk’s posts about Belfast and racial politics in the U.K. were viewed an astonishing 64 million times. The center noted that the amplified posts from Robinson — banned from the pre-Musk Twitter for hate speech, but restored in 2023 — drew responses calling for lynching and other forms of violence. Musk has also been using X to promote a fringe, far-right anti-immigrant party called Restore Britain, an off-shoot of the Nigel Farage-led Reform UK.

It’s kind of bizarre that this then-billionaire not-too-busy-to-hate found the time for this, in a week where he had one job: to make sure the long-awaited stock offering of one of his major business ventures, SpaceX, launched on Friday without blowing up like some of its rockets.

Unfortunately for the star-crossed Musk, investors’ shock and revulsion over the entrepreneur’s vile posts caused …

O.K., if you follow the news you know that the unfinished sentence above was a little bit of cynical misdirection. Wall Street, from the biggest investment banks to starstruck smalltime day traders could not wait to throw their cash at SpaceX and its founder. They acted as if Musk the anti-immigrant hatemonger and Musk the tech visionary were two different human beings, even as they also ignored the fantastical malarkey of SpaceX’s dream to build data centers in outer space.

By the end of a tumultuous week, the tulip-mania demand for SpaceX stock — with the market valuing the money-losing company at a gobsmacking $2.1 trillion — made the already world’s richest person wealthier in a way that defies comprehension. The man who wanted to burn everything down on Tuesday became the planet’s first trillionaire on Friday. [Continue reading…]