Nick Pickles profile: the Yorkshireman who has become one of Elon Musk’s right-hand men at X

The richest man in the world’s foray into British politics saw him being accused of stirring up the violence with comments described as “unjustifiable” by Labour frontbenchers.

All the while Mr Musk had a Yorkshireman at his side, 40-year-old Nick Pickles who was recently promoted to vice president of global affairs at the social media platform according to his LinkedIn.

Mr Pickles, a regular Yorkshire Post columnist a decade ago, is charged with fighting Mr Musk’s growing number of political battles across the globe and stopping increasing regulation.

The Financial Times has said this makes him one of Musk’s most “influential lieutenants”, in a fairly meteoric rise up the company.

In 2007, one year after Twitter was launched by Jack Dorsey, Stuart Bruce interviewed Mr Pickles for a role at his PR company.

Mr Bruce, based in Leeds, had previously been director of communications for Alan Johnson’s campaign to become Labour’s deputy leader, and his firm focused on digital and social media.

He told the Yorkshire Post that Mr Pickles was “quite impressive” and even back then was interested in social media as “a platform for people to share views”.

“It was all very new, and I think that’s what he was interested in,” Mr Bruce said.

“He was doing interesting things with it and experimenting.

“We thought there was potential with social media and he definitely did, which was why he was interested in working with us.”

Mr Bruce didn’t offer Mr Pickles a job, as there wasn’t a specific role that fitted him, but he remembers the senior X executive as “sharp and insightful”.

He added: “His politics are very Musk-like and I suspect that’s the explanation for his pretty fast rise at Twitter.”

In 2010, Mr Pickles stood for the Conservative Party against the now Home Secretary Yvette Cooper in Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford.

He gained a 12.5 per cent swing in the year David Cameron became Prime Minister, but still finished second in what has been a pretty safe Labour seat.

Shortly afterwards he became a director at Big Brother Watch, the civil liberties group founded by former TaxPayers’ Alliance and Vote Leave chief executive Matthew Elliott.

Around this time, Mr Pickles became a regular contributor to the Yorkshire Post, writing in 2012 about how the “Conservatives need to speak for working-class values”.

He revealed that some people in the music industry, where he had worked as a photographer, and friends he had grown up with in West Yorkshire stopped speaking to him after he stood for the Conservatives in 2010.

In 2014, he joined Twitter as a senior public policy manager in the UK, and started dealing with the government and the Prime Minister’s office.

A former Twitter staffer told the Yorkshire Post: “I don’t think any of that kind of stuff phased him. He just was very confident and sure of his abilities, and probably rightly so.

“Whatever he did, it was done to a really high level.”

The employee said Mr Pickles was “sharp”, adding: “I always enjoyed talking to Nick, he was always very smart so good to chat to.

“It was always interesting to have a chat with him even though our politics were different.”

In 2018, Mr Pickles moved to Twitter’s main office in San Francisco, and continued his rapid rise even after Mr Musk’s controversial take over two years ago.

Since then, a swathe of controversial previously banned accounts have been readmitted to the platform, such as Tommy Robinson and Donald Trump, with studies finding there has been an increase in hate speech and misinformation.

Does Mr Pickles have a problem with his boss’s inflammatory comments about the riots? The ex-Twitter employee said: “Clearly he’s not got an issue with it.”