‘It’s time Elon Musk stopped utilizing our outrage as a cash-machine’
Precious pictures of Henry Nowak are being used to whip up hatred, spread lies and cause division, writes Ros Wynne-Jones. It’s time to fight back against the grifters hoping to whip up another summer of discontent
Henry Nowak, 18, was stabbed to death by Vickrum Digwa in December last year(Image: Hampshire Police/PA Wire)
His smiling photographs – at a family wedding, with 18th birthday balloons in the background – should have just been for his parents’ mantelpiece. But Henry Nowak’s family photographs are known to all of us now.
Following his horrific murder and the catastrophic failure of our police to protect him, these family pictures have become as familiar as the sickening bodycam footage showing Henry being handcuffed as he lay dying. Elon Musk has long been posting and reposting those photographs to his 240 million followers – often multiple times a day – not in memoriam, but in a cynical attempt to whip up hatred, and spread lies about who we are as a country.
These posts didn’t just start after the trial, but during it, knowing that the mainstream media was prevented by reporting restrictions that accompany any trial from giving the real story. Whether it’s appearing on screen at the first Tommy Robinson demo, or vocally supporting the Far Right Restore party online, Musk is not ashamed to use anything to fuel the kind of division his algorithms rely on for revenue.
The gaslighter-in-chief uses and foments our outrage as a cash machine. And today, the Prime Minister finally called him out. “Musk,” he said, “again, has been interfering in our politics in the last few days, trying to whip up division – that is not who we are in Britain.”
The world’s richest man has been posting about Henry since May 20, egged on by the Far Right community on his own platform. On May 20, he quote-tweeted @libsoftiktok’s post – ‘Reuters stories on Henry Nowak: 0; Reuters stories on George Floyd: 1,087. Do you see what’s happening?’
“Something is deeply wrong,” Musk wrote. On the same day, he wrote: “This poor boy was running away from someone who stabbed him & stole his phone, but the police in the UK attacked him instead of his murderer!” And later: “The only conclusion that can be drawn is that the legacy mainstream media is incredibly, hatefully racist against Whites.”
Henry’s killer Vickrum Digwa was arrested and charged five days after his murder on December 3 – making proceedings active from December 8. So at the time of Musk’s post, the UK media was unable to write about the Henry’s murder because of reporting restrictions that automatically apply to every jury trial in our country, to protect a defendant’s right to a fair hearing.
The trial did not conclude until last week on May 28, when Digwa was found guilty of murder. On June 1, he was jailed for life with a minimum of 21 years. This was a vacuum into which the Far Right and its most powerful champion gleefully leapt, cynically crafting its own narrative. And after Musk, jumped Nigel Farage – currently facing a beauty contest against his sworn rival Restore’s Rupert Lowe – desperate for the rich donor’s money and attention.
Farage called for “pure, cold rage”. An interesting contrast with his post on the death of Sarah Everard in March 2021 when the same politician posted: “we must not allow the tragic murder of a young woman to turn into attacks on men and attacks on the police.”
So, despite Henry’s father Mark’s dignified statement that he did not want Henry’s death “to be used to create further division, hatred or tension”, by the time the trial concluded on Monday, violence was a foregone conclusion. Eleven officers and a police dog were injured during disorder by those claiming to protest over Henry’s murder, as wheelie bins, bricks and beer cans were hurled and defiant Nazi salutes flung.
HOPE not Hate reported that during the protest, part of the crowd broke out into a chant of “white man, fight back”, as they pelted police. As Tommy Robinson – real name Stephen Yaxley Lennon – Britain First’s Paul Golding, former actor Lawrence Fox, and UKIP leader Nick Tencioni rushed to be seen at the barricades, Musk was still adding flames to the fire.
“Legacy mainstream media, same ones who wrote about George Floyd millions of times, are dead silent about Nowak,” he posted on Tuesday. He used X to offer to fund a private prosecution of the officers involved.
Even more chillingly, his showcase AI tool, Grok, wrongfully identified a former policewoman, spreading the false claim that she was one of the officers who arrested Nowak as he lay dying. A male officer also had to move out of his home after being misidentified on Grok and other social media.
The policewoman wrote: “It is alarming to see how quickly a piece of outdated media can be weaponised by algorithms and accepted as fact by AI platforms, despite being factually impossible.”
Keir Starmer is right to call Musk out personally for fanning the flames of division. Meanwhile, Labour MP Jess Asato has announced she is taking legal action against his xAI company after, she says, Grok helped a user produce fake sexualised pictures of her, part of a wave of images that flooded X earlier this year.
Elon Musk bought what was then called Twitter in 2022. In November 2023, the site reinstated the account of Tommy Robinson. In 2024, claims that the Southport killer had arrived by small boat spread across X like wildfire. Last summer on 29 August 2025, during the height of the summer’s anti-migrant protests, Musk reposted a clip of activists raising flags in Wales with the caption: “People of the great nations of Britain and Ireland, rally NOW to save your beautiful countries! It’s now or never. Fight, fight, fight! Soon it will be too late.”
Seven months ago he posted: “Civil war in Britain is inevitable. Just a question of when”. At the Unite the Kingdom rally last September, he warned the crowd: “… whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back, or you die.”
Those who gain from riots are always the same. Glazers. Insurance companies. And the people who own social media networks that light up with hatred spilled like blood all over their platforms. Yesterday, the Prime Minister – on behalf of all of us – began to fight back against the grifters hoping for another summer of discontent.
