Rupert Lowe is earning hundreds of pounds an hour from X by spreading anti-migrant propaganda, showing how billionaire-owned social media turns reactionary politics into a profitable business.
The Restore Britain leader has earned an average of £932 an hour for his posts since the beginning of 2026, according to his declarations in the register of MPs’ financial interests. That’s more than twice the £377 an hour he averaged last year.
Since June, Lowe’s reported hourly earnings have risen further to £1,476.
His total income from X since the 2024 general election has now passed £105,000, with more than half of it earned during the first eight months of this year. If his average earnings continue, he’ll receive just over £93,000 from the platform in 2026—almost as much as his £98,599 salary as an MP. If the higher rate recorded since June continues, his X income could easily exceed his parliamentary salary.
Lowe’s growing income is inseparable from the increasingly vicious anti-migrant content on which he has built his political career. He describes his greatest achievement since founding Restore Britain after leaving Nigel Farage’s Reform UK as “dragging mass deportations [of migrants] into mainstream politics”.
X’s revenue-sharing scheme pays premium subscribers according to the performance of their posts. The more attention Lowe’s propaganda receives, the more money the platform pays him. Elon Musk, X’s billionaire owner, has repeatedly amplified Lowe’s posts, expanding both their political reach and their earning potential.
“We tend to treat a politician’s online reach and their income as two separate stories, but for Rupert Lowe they’re part of the same mechanism,” said researcher Ambrose Pym. “The more his content is seen, the more X pays him for it.”
This is private ownership of the means of communication in its modern form. Musk doesn’t merely own a website on which political discussion happens. He owns the machinery that decides what millions of people see, which voices are amplified and who gets paid. The platform’s workings turn reactionary agitation into a commodity: hatred attracts attention, attention produces engagement, and engagement becomes income.
Lowe’s recent output shows how the system rewards him. One post declared:
“An illegal migrant could read ten thousand Home Office pamphlets in some woeful attempt to ‘integrate’, I’d still want him deported.
“They broke into our country – they are not welcome here, and they all need to be removed. This is not complicated.”
It received 1.3 million views, 25,000 likes and 3,000 reposts. Another post supporting Portugal’s restrictions on wearing the burqa in public spaces received almost a million views. Lowe has previously described diversity policies as a “wicked, malicious, viperous cancer” and presented migrants as “unvetted foreign males” loitering “where your daughter walks home”.
Lowe’s politics divides the working class along national and religious lines. Migrants are cast as intruders to be expelled, while Muslims are singled out for restrictions on their dress. Phrases such as “unvetted foreign males” loitering “where your daughter walks home” turn migrant men into a threat to British women. This chauvinism encourages British workers to identify with the state and ruling class against other workers marked as foreign. The people who own Britain disappear from the picture. Landlords, employers, property developers and private monopolies are replaced by a fantasy in which society’s central conflict is between native and migrant workers.
This is why Lowe’s claim that migrants “broke into our country” is politically useful to the ruling class. It encourages British workers to imagine that they share ownership of the country with its billionaires, while the land, workplaces, media and political institutions remain firmly in capitalist hands. National belonging is offered as a substitute for material power.
Pym noted that a US billionaire is simultaneously paying and promoting an ideologically aligned British politician through his own platform, with little scrutiny. But the central issue isn’t simply that Musk is foreign. Britain’s own capitalist press has spent decades producing the same anti-migrant politics. What X adds is a direct and highly visible payment system through which a billionaire’s privately owned political infrastructure financially rewards those who spread it most successfully.
Lowe dismissed questions about his earnings, telling the Guardian: “If I wanted to make money, I would not be in politics. I donate my entire net MP salary to local charities in my constituency – being a politician is the most expensive job I’ve ever had.”
Whether Lowe donates his parliamentary salary doesn’t alter the arrangement. His political notoriety has already brought him more than £105,000 from X, and demands for mass deportations are helping to sustain the attention from which that income is drawn. Anti-migrant politics isn’t only serving the capitalist class by dividing workers. For one of its loudest parliamentary advocates, it has become extremely lucrative personal content.
