The incendiary views from across the Pond have sparked fierce debate, but Sir Keir Starmer may rue the day he took the bait from Elon Musk.

The world’s richest individual craves controversy and is never too busy with his sprawling technology empire that he can’t find time for a good scrap on social media. Even he admits it’s a compulsion that has done him no favours.

The pugnacious billionaire entrepreneur has crossed swords with everyone from a British expat cave diver in Thailand (whom he labelled ‘pedo guy’ for daring to criticise Musk’s half-baked idea of using his submarine to free schoolboys trapped in a cave), to Facebook founder and old rival Mark Zuckerberg, whom he challenged to a cage fight.

It is likely that Musk would have got a good pounding from the younger, fitter and martial arts-trained Zuckerberg had they actually fought, but it remains to be seen who will come out on top of his new bout with the UK Government.

At the weekend, Musk incensed British political leaders after he responded to shocking footage of the violent rioting in the UK – specifically of people shooting fireworks at police – by saying that ‘civil war is inevitable’.

He made that provocative observation, of course, on X (formerly Twitter) the social media platform he owns and has shaped in his image, and on which he has a jaw-dropping 193 million followers.

The Prime Minister’s spokesman said there was ‘no justification’ for Musk’s comment and, making clear that it was particularly ripe coming from the boss of X, added that social media companies ‘can and should’ be doing more to counter ‘misleading and inflammatory material hosted on their platforms’.

As far as 53-year-old Musk, a self-described ‘free speech absolutist’ and relentless tweeter was concerned, the gauntlet had been thrown down and he picked it up with glee.

Yesterday he posted and re-posted a string of videos, photos and memes suggesting that the UK is ­arresting and even imprisoning people for making offensive remarks on social media and that British police have been treating Asian criminals and troublemakers with kid gloves.

One of the images showed the main character from the animated comedy series Family Guy strapped to the ­ electric chair. He captioned it: ‘In 2030 for making a Facebook ­comment that the UK government didn’t like.’

He also shared footage apparently showing police arresting an unseen man for his social media activities – although it was unclear if it was Jordan Parlour, the first man in the UK to be charged with trying to stir up racial hatred on Facebook during the riots.

Many people might share Musk’s contempt for officers devoting resources to combating offensive online comment – or even agree with claims that ethnic minority troublemakers have been treated more leniently by British police.

But, as ever, the man who has compared his unremitting Twitter output to Niagara Falls, has overdone it. 

Making a mockery of X’s capabilities – under his ownership – to weed out misinformation, he asked his platform’s watchdog (called Community Notes) to check out the authenticity of some factually dubious content even as he was spreading it. 

Some will question whether tech barons can afford to keep behaving in such a cavalier fashion when governments are finally starting to clamp down on their under-policed industry. A US federal court has just delivered a landmark ruling declaring online search giant Google to be a monopoly – a decision that might lead to it being broken up.

Meanwhile, UK media regulator Ofcom has issued a statement reminding X and other social media ­companies of their new responsibilities under the Online Safety Act to take down illegal content and apply their terms of service, which often ban hate speech and disinformation.

Labour MPs Chi Onwurah and Dawn Butler, both candidates to chair the Commons’ science, innovation and technology committee, told the Politico website that, if chosen, they’d pressure Musk and other tech bosses to answer questions about the role of social media platforms in stirring up unrest in the UK.

Even someone as famously cocky as Musk must appreciate that this is not the perfect time to be goading ­Downing Street, or any Western government for that matter.

Yet those who have spent any time with Elon Musk say he ­cannot help himself when it comes to stirring the pot. ‘He’s addicted to drama, he’s addicted to risk and whenever things seem to be going smoothly he almost has a compulsion to stir things up,’ said his biographer Walter Isaacson, who spent months shadowing the ­mercurial genius.

Actress Amber Heard, a former girlfriend of Musk, put it more succinctly, telling Isaacson: ‘Elon loves fire and sometimes it burns him.’ His brother, Kimbal, says he is a ‘drama magnet… that’s his compulsion, the theme of his life’.Isaacson observes that Musk has ‘multiple personalities’.

One is the brilliant engineer and far-sighted businessman currently estimated to be worth £175billion. Another, however, is what Isaacson called Musk’s ‘demon mode’ where ‘he turns really dark’.

A personality, he adds, that has proved particularly problematic in his acquiring of Twitter which requires ‘more emotional intelligence’ than his other businesses such as electric car maker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX.

Musk, who over the years has displayed a jaw-dropping weakness for childish spats even with complete strangers on social media, freely admits that he is chronically impulsive.

He posted 19,000 tweets over a decade, many of them antagonistic. ‘My tweets are like Niagara Falls sometimes and they come too fast,’ he confided to Isaacson.

Musk is certainly a complicated ­personality. Aside from a toxic childhood, he has revealed he has Asperger’s syndrome and that, like many at the top of Silicon Valley, is notoriously bad at empathising with other people.

But of course he isn’t just ­wading in to battle against the Starmer government because, scarred by those years of remorseless school and paternal bullying (which his father Errol has denied), he likes to throw his weight around now he’s the Big-I-Am. Politically, Musk – a former Democrat – has veered ever more to the Right and he recently endorsed Donald Trump for President.

He made clear that he wanted to use Twitter as a culture wars weapon against Silicon Valley wokery long before he paid  $44billion (£35bn) for it in 2022.

It’s surely no coincidence he’s attacking the state of the UK now a Labour government is in power.

This is hardly the first time a ­foreign plutocrat – Musk has South African, Canadian and US citizenship – has indelicately ­chosen to weigh in on a domestic crisis, but at least this one appears to have no particular animus towards Britain.

It might be quite the opposite. Musk has attributed his success in part to British books he devoured as a child, namely The Lord Of The Rings and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

In fact, in January, he dispelled a common assumption that he is of Afrikaner heritage, comparing himself to his literary hero JRR Tolkien in a social media post in which he wrote: ‘Small ­correction: I am from a British/English background, not an Afrikaner background (similar to JRR ­Tolkien, who was also born in South Africa).’

Isaacson devoted much of his biography of the man to Musk’s troubled childhood in South Africa and tortured relationship with his father.

Small, nerdy and socially awkward, Musk was beaten up at school and at wilderness survival camps he described as ‘a paramilitary Lord Of The Flies’ to the point he was once hospitalised.

His ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ father, he claims, astonishingly took the ­bullies’ side and berated his son.

‘Adversity shaped me. My pain threshold became very high,’ says Musk. Or did it make him thirst for revenge?

Isaacson argued that Musk wanted to buy Twitter because, having suffered appallingly at school, he wanted control of the ‘world’s ultimate playground’.

In the US, politicians have expressed mounting concern over just how powerful Musk is becoming, especially since he owns a ­satellite network – Starlink – that provides internet coverage to Ukraine and is crucial to its war effort. (At one point, he reportedly considered pulling the ­ service from Ukraine as he feared it was singling him out for ­Moscow’s disfavour.)

At the same time, he is a great believer in the controversial Silicon Valley mantra that business success comes from ‘disruption’, from shaking up the status quo.

He’s certainly trying to do that now in Britain, just as the edges of our social fabric begin to fray.