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News - 1 September 2025

Grok AI just turned against tax-dodging elites

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Willem Moore

@willem_moore


On Sunday 31 August, the Daily Mail published a front page criticising the tax affairs of deputy prime minister Angela Rayner. While we agree it’s fair game for honest journalists to question the government, we’re not so sure anyone who works for the Daily Mail could consider themselves an honest journalist. Once activist highlighted why that is with the help of Elon Musk’s AI tool Grok:

 

Elon Musk and people in glass houses

Harry Eccles is a clinical nurse who specialises in addiction; he’s also a trade unionist and a socialist. He uses his platform online to speak out about issues such as the creeping privatisation of the NHS:

Elon Musk’s X/Twitter operates an AI named Grok which will answer questions on demand. In response to Eccles’ question, the AI replied:

Grok responds: "The owner of the Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere, reportedly uses non-dom status and offshore trusts to legally minimize taxes, per sources like The Guardian and Tax Justice Network. Other views note such practices are legal. The headline criticizing Angela Rayner's use of a wealth protection firm could be seen as inconsistent by some, given these reports."

Eccles followed up on this:

AI is well known to get things wrong, so thankfully it highlighted some of the human sources to have reported on this topic. One outlet it drew attention to was Scotland’s the Ferret, which reported in 2025:

Nearly a third of Scotland’s most-read national newspapers are owned in a US tax haven – and that proportion may soon rise to half, The Ferret can reveal.

Speaking specifically on Rothermere, it reported:

Billionaire Lord Rothermere, another press baron, is a controller and executive director of the London-based Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT). It owns the Scottish Daily Mail, Scottish Mail on Sunday and the Scottish editions of the Metro and the i Paper, via its DMG Media subsidiary.

Rothermere owns DMGT via the Jersey-registered Rothermere Continuation Limited, a company controlled via a trust “held for the benefit of Viscount Rothermere and his immediate family”, according to DMGT’s latest accounts.

The article carried comments on what should be done to fix this issue, with the Public Interest News Foundation stating:

The media play a vital role in democracy, so it’s problematic when the owners of the media aren’t accountable to citizens and residents in the country where they operate.

Back to the original headline, the Independent has summarised the timeline of Rayner’s housing row. While we’re not going into further detail here, we have accused her of hypocrisy on other issues such as the two-child benefit limit. We’ve also reported on the issues caused by second homes in the UK.

Power

Involving Grok was a particularly relevant move on Eccles’ part, as the AI’s deadbeat dad Elon Musk is also accused of tax dodging. In an article titled “Elon Musk Leads America’s Top Tax-Dodging CEOs”, the New Republic wrote:

Which firms are the worst of the worst? You can probably guess the company that tops the list because it’s the one run by The New Republic’s 2023 Scoundrel of the Year. During the five years of the study, Tesla took home $4.4 billion in profits as CEO Elon Musk carted off $2.28 billion in stock options, which, since his 2018 payday, have ballooned to nearly $56 billion—a compensation plan so outlandish that the Delaware Court of Chancery canceled it. Tesla has, during that same period of time, paid an effective tax rate of zero percent through a combination of carrying forward losses from unprofitable years and good old-fashioned offshore tax dodging.

In coming years, Musk and Tesla might have particular relevance to the UK, as Tesla has applied to be a UK energy supplier. Canary writer Maryam Jameela covered the Tesla energy story on 27 August, writing:

Ofgem are still considering whether or not to grant Tesla the licence it’s requested, so as to effectively give Musk access to UK energy. However, more than 8000 people have written to them urging them to turn down the American company. If the licence is granted, Tesla could well be amongst the likes of British Gas and Octopus as early as 2026.

You might not be surprised by this, but many of the leading responses on X/Twitter come from people who are colloquially known as ‘Elon Musk dick riders’:

These people aren’t mentioning that Tesla sales tanked this year as a result of Musk’s disastrous stint in the US government. They’re also not mentioning the multiple lawsuits against Tesla as a result of alleged safety failures, with the company recently forced to pay out $243m as a result of a “2019 fatal crash of an Autopilot-equipped Model S”.

Do we really want this guy anywhere near our energy infrastructure?

Do we really want the money we spend on British energy sitting in some foreign tax haven?

Tools of attack

Here at the Canary, we’re no fans of AI tools like Grok, Elon Musk, nor of the damage they’re doing to society and the environment. In terms of using these people’s tools against them, though, this passage from Current Affairs’ Nathan Robinson is worth considering:

I have always been somewhat puzzled by a quotation popular among leftists. It originates with Audre Lorde, and goes like this:

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

The short, catchy version is just “the master’s tools will never demolish the master’s house.” And here’s why I puzzled over it: to me, the master’s tools seem like the ideal way to demolish his house. If the master has kerosene and a lighter in his shed, his house will not be long for this world. If he’s got a wrecking ball, well, there goes the house. Grab his hammer and you can bash holes in his house, grab his pliers and you can yank off any piece of his house. In fact, it’s hard to see any way in which the master’s tools are limited in their ability to dismantle his house. A tool is a tool. It’s neutral, in that its capabilities do not vary based on who happens to be holding it. If you want to kill the master, you’d best head for his toolshed.

While we’re not suggesting that Grok prompts will bring down the global oligarchy, we do agree that people should use every tool at their disposal to break this system to pieces. Increasing public awareness is key to that, and Harry Eccles clearly understands that.

Featured image via Gage Skidmore – Flickr (image cropped with Daily Mail logo super imposed over it)





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