Last Monday, a white Northern Irishman named Stephen Oglivie was critically stabbed in Belfast by a 30-year-old Sudanese immigrant, who was arrested and charged with attempted murder. Oglivie was hospitalized with serious injuries, having lost his left eye in the attack, but a local politician told the BBC that his condition is “ improving .” Mobs of angry Britons—already incensed by video footage of a white Southampton student, Henry Nowak, who’d been stabbed to death by a Sikh in December—mobilized in response, torching cars and buildings across North Belfast and targeting local immigrant populations . The violence in Northern Ireland has since quelled, but copycat anti-immigrant riots have spread across the United Kingdom. Britain has seen plenty of anti-immigrant furor over the past few years, but rarely had any of those gatherings reached such a devastating scale. Researchers with the Center for Countering Digital Hate pinpointed one particularly influential figurehead of this disorder: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who spent the week on X explicitly boosting more than 100 vile reactions and calls to violence from extremist Brits. His inflammatory posts came amid his rockets-and-A.I. company’s debut on the stock markets Friday as the largest initial public offering in history, which made him, at least on paper, the world’s first trillionaire. As his wealth reached unprecedented heights, so did the reach and danger of the rhetoric he chose to amplify. At this point, one may reasonably wonder whether there is anything that can hold Musk to account, after all these years of elite impunity, when politicians and investors have consistently let Musk off the hook for everything from endorsing antisemetic slogans and gestures to building a chatbot that spews white supremacist rhetoric and deepfake porn . Yet even as Musk amasses the world’s largest fortune on paper, bolstered by myriad institutions that shrug off his vile actions, there is still one group determined to hold his feet to the fire: everyday people on the streets of the U.S. and the U.K. Across the pond, the people most affected by the unrest, and its instigating events, are not having any of it. The families of Stephen Oglivie and Henry Nowak have been resolute in demanding that these horrific attacks not be leveraged for inciting disorder—or for terrorizing the U.K.’s many immigrants. (A man who interfered in the attack on Oglivie and helped save his life likewise echoed that sentiment .) In Belfast itself, local communities have gathered en masse to support their immigrant neighbors , whether by hiding them from roving mobs or raising money to repair their homes and businesses. Many others are putting their money back into their homes and communities, or taking to the streets to organize anti-racist counterprotests, rallying thousands of Belfast residents with them . (The anti-Musk solidarity has even reached other parts of Europe: In Geneva, tens of thousands of Swiss residents came together to protest the ongoing G7 conference, and set a parked Tesla on fire .) Stateside, the anti-Musk protests have been much more symbolic, but no less pointed. On Thursday, a 40-foot-tall inflatable balloon shaped like a shirtless Musk appeared outside the Nasdaq headquarters, surrounded by banners reading “Grok Makes AI Porn” and “#StopSpaceXChildNudes,” in an allusion to the nonconsensual sexual deepfakes that have been (and are still being ) produced en masse by X’s chatbot. The organizers, who wore black T-shirts saying “STOP SPACEX’S AI PORN,” have not revealed anything about themselves, but they certainly got to Musk: Imagery of the balloon went viral across X, and Musk whined that the protest slogans were “ totally false .” That’s, apparently, what it takes to distract the SpaceX CEO from his racist online crusades. On Friday, as SpaceX went live on the charts and JPMorgan Chase planned a luxurious celebration for Musk, the activist group Stop Funding Billionaires rallied a few dozen protesters in front of the big bank’s headquarters, agitating against one particular aspect of the mega-IPO: the fact that many Americans’ retirement accounts are now being forced into investing with SpaceX, thanks to special accommodations that Wall Street traders have made for Musk. The values of major pension and 401(k) payouts are often tethered to index funds that track major indices, and the sheer size of SpaceX’s market debut means that the welfare of many public employees’ futures is now bound up in a Muskian meme stock. “Retirements are long-term investments for people over decades. But the markets are investing this money in the companies that may not even be profitable over the next couple of years,” Jonathan Westin, a campaigner for Stop Funding Billionaires, told me. He likewise pointed out that the most-hyped A.I. firms (SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic) lose way more cash than they make, putting soon-to-be retirees at further financial risk: “It seems completely unjust that workers are going to be left holding the bag.” Mike Madowitz, principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute, made a similar claim in an emailed statement. “The SpaceX IPO effectively forces its way into the index funds that other companies must earn their way onto, and drives 401(k) holders to buy insiders’ shares whether retirement savers like it or not,” he wrote. “It’s certainly preferable to give all Americans the choice to invest in fast-growing tech companies, but choice is the operative word.” Indeed, the matter of choice lies at the heart of so much anti-Musk feeling over the past few years. No Americans voted for him to ravage the federal government, and no Britishers elected Musk as political leader. And yet, because so few people in power seem willing to confront Musk in a substantive way, the everyday people have been doing their best to hit his bottom line. The “Tesla Takedown” protests of 2025 contributed to a deep slump in the company’s once flourishing car sales and overall revenue that’s persisted into this year . Similar momentum has been coming for SpaceX for a while now. Last year, anonymous Texas vandals also defaced a mural and a statue of Elon Musk situated near the Starbase facility where SpaceX is headquartered; locals again rallied near the premises in April to object to the firm’s IPO. And a few nonprofits also called attention to Grok’s child sexual abuse material issue at Apple’s most recent developer conference , prevailing upon the Big Tech giant to ban X and Grok from the App Store. It is far too soon to say whether any of this can reasonably hit the bottom line of a hypercapitalized megacorporation that’s trading off institutional capture and meme-stock vibes to scale to heights yet unreached by any other public company. One thing is for sure, however: Musk is still paying attention to all the negative reactions , too. And that alone is bound to affect the way he does business: When Tesla’s stock suffered slightly thanks to the backlash to his government sabotage, he almost broke down crying in a Fox Business interview and pivoted the company to lofty promises of robot armies instead of sticking with its original, once successful business model (i.e., selling affordable electric cars to coastal libs worried about climate change). The past week demonstrated the extent of Musk’s bigotry and his impulsiveness; even when on track to become a trillionaire, he can’t help but post racist attacks and respond to stunts like the Nasdaq balloon effigy. People with money and power may not be ready to confront Elon Musk, but everyday people on the ground know they can get Musk’s attention and hit him both financially and emotionally, thus affecting his decisionmaking. It will take a lot for anyone here or abroad to undercut a multitrillion-dollar empire like SpaceX. But the efforts are starting now, and they’re already getting to him. If a year of protests could halt Tesla’s momentum, there’s no reason SpaceX’s surge can’t also be derailed.

Source: Slate Magazine

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