Elon Musk says his English ‘nana’ might need been a grooming gang sufferer in current day after rising up ‘very poor’ with ‘nobody to guard her’

Elon Musk has claimed that his ‘very poor’ working class grandmother from Liverpool could have been a rape gang victim today.

The Tesla billionaire said that his ‘Nana’ had ‘no one to protect her’ and could have fallen into the clutches of abusers had she been growing up in 2025. 

Cora Amelia Robinson, mother of Elon’s father Errol, emigrated to South Africa but retained such a love for the country of her birth that she would always stand when the late Queen Elizabeth II was on TV. 

‘My Nana was one of the poor working-class girls with no one to protect her who might have been abducted in present day Britain’, her grandson tweeted today. 

Mr Musk is in the middle of a war of words with Sir Keir Starmer, who he says should be jailed for failing to tackle the issue during his five years as Director of Public Prosecutions.

He has been accused of trying to interfere in and influence British politics and policy from the US.

But today he suggested that the memory of his grandmother, who was born in 1923 and died in 2011 aged 87, was driving him on having been ‘an important part of my childhood’, which included time spent on Merseyside as a young child on holiday.

‘She was very strict, but also kind and I could always count on her. She grew up very poor in England during the Great Depression only to be bombed in WW2‘, he said.

‘To earn money for food, she cleaned houses, leaving me with a lasting respect for those who do so’.

It came amid reports via his father Errol that Mr Musk would love to buy Liverpool football club, given his family connection to the city. 

His supporters have pointed out the parallels to Donald Trump, whose mother is Scottish. The President elect has a deep affection for the UK and the Royal Family.

Musk – who is said to be worth more than £380 billion – has become one of Britain’s fiercest critics since Sir Keir Starmer‘s election win, warning the country has become ‘a tyrannical police state’.

But the South African-born Tesla tycoon once proudly declared he was ‘from a British/English not an Afrilkaner background’.

When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, the entrepreneur paid tribute on Twitter – which he now owns and has rebranded as X – saying the late Prime Minister was ‘tough but sensible and fair like my English Nana’.

Cora Amelia Robinson, one of five siblings, was born in the family’s modest terraced house in Mossley Hill, Liverpool in August 1923.

She grew up in pre-war poverty as part of a ‘proud, hard-working family’ before leaving the UK to settle in South Africa where she married Walter Musk in 1944.

The couple went on to have a son Errol who had three children of his own – Elon, brother Kimbal and sister Tosca.

As well as the north west, Musk also has relatives in Gloucestershire. 

The Prime Minister yesterday accused Elon Musk of ‘spreading lies and misinformation’ about the handling of the grooming gangs scandal.

The Prime Minister’s war of words with the world’s richest man intensified as he hit back at days of criticism.

It culminated yesterday with Mr Musk saying the PM should be jailed for failing to tackle the issue during his five years as Director of Public Prosecutions.

Downing Street had been wary of antagonising the tech billionaire, who has emerged as Donald Trump’s right-hand man in recent months.

But Sir Keir said a ‘line had been crossed’ when Mr Musk described safeguarding minister Jess Phillips as a ‘rape genocide apologist’ for refusing demands for a fresh inquiry into the sexual abuse of young girls by gangs of men of predominantly Pakistani origin.

Mr Musk has also claimed that the Government is resisting a fresh inquiry because Sir Keir is ‘complicit’ in the failure by authorities to tackle the issue earlier.

At a press conference in Epsom, Surrey, the PM read out a lengthy statement defending his record as head of the Crown Prosecution Service and condemning the frenzy of criticism on Mr Musk’s social media site X. He said he had tackled the grooming gang scandal ‘head on’ during his time as DPP between 2008 and 2013.

‘I could see what was happening, and that’s why I reopened cases that have been closed and supposedly finished. I brought the first major prosecution of an Asian grooming gang,’ he said. ‘We changed, or I changed, the whole prosecution approach, because I wanted to challenge, and did challenge the myths and stereotypes that were stopping those victims being heard.’

The PM did not mention a 2009 decision by the CPS to drop a major grooming gang case in Rochdale, despite the existence of DNA evidence.

But he took credit for the decision four years later to bring the first case of its kind in the town four years later. He added: ‘When I left office, we had the highest number of child sexual abuse cases being prosecuted on record.’

Sir Keir did not mention Mr Musk by name, but asked about the treatment of Ms Phillips he took a thinly veiled swipe at the multi-billionaire who has also called for the jailed far-Right activist Tommy Robinson to be freed.

‘Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible, they’re not interested in victims. They’re interested in themselves,’ he said.

‘Those who are cheerleading Tommy Robinson are not interested in justice. They’re supporting a man who went to prison for nearly collapsing a grooming case, a gang grooming case.’

He said Ms Phillips had ‘done 1,000 times more than they’ve even dreamt about when it comes to protecting victims of sexual abuse throughout her entire career’.

He added: ‘When the poison of the far-Right leads to serious threats to Jess Phillips and others, that in my book means a line has been crossed.’

Mr Musk responded with a string of further attacks on the PM on X, describing him as ‘utterly despicable’ and ‘insane’. He accused the PM of refusing demands for a national inquiry because it would show he was ‘deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes’.

Yesterday morning, he posted a poll on his X account asking whether America should ‘liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government’.

Senior government figures are nervous about the row with Mr Musk because of his close relationship with Mr Trump, who will return to the White House later this month. He has been involved in picking senior members of the President-elect’s administration.

Mr Musk has been engaged in a feud with Sir Keir since last summer when Downing Street criticised him for posting that ‘civil war is inevitable’ in the UK during the riots that followed the fatal stabbing of three girls in Southport.

The Tesla owner has publicly backed Reform and was reported to be considering an £80million donation to Nigel Farage’s party.

But, in a shock move at the weekend, he called for Mr Farage to be removed as Reform leader after he rejected pressure to join forces with Robinson.