Sir Jim Ratcliffe is bored. That’s the only logical explanation for why a man with a £30 billion empire and a crumbling football club to fix is currently cosplaying as a late-night talk radio crank. The INEOS founder and Manchester United co-owner has decided to stop talking about "marginal gains" for a moment to inform us that the UK has been "colonised by immigrants."

It’s a bold choice of words. Especially coming from a man who famously moved his tax residency to Monaco to keep his billions away from the British Treasury.

Ratcliffe’s latest outburst isn’t just a slip of the tongue; it’s a symptom of the billionaire’s disease. You see it with Musk on X. You see it with the venture capital crowd in San Francisco. Once you’ve won the game of capitalism, the world starts to look like a series of engineering problems that only you, with your superior brain and massive bank account, can solve. But when the problems are human—messy, historical, and deeply complex—the "engineering" solutions start to sound a lot like old-fashioned prejudice.

Let’s look at the friction here. Sir Jim wants something. He wants a "Wembley of the North." He’s been lobbying the government to help foot the bill for a brand-new, £2 billion stadium to replace the leaky, mouse-infested Old Trafford. He wants the state—the very same state he avoids paying into by living in a Mediterranean tax haven—to subsidize his private asset. That’s the trade-off he’s pitching: give me public money for my luxury stadium, and in return, I’ll tell you who to blame for your problems.

It’s a classic bait-and-switch.

The irony is thick enough to clog a chemical refinery. Manchester United is a global brand. It was built on the backs of international stars and is currently kept afloat by a worldwide fan base that doesn’t give a damn about Ratcliffe’s views on borders. The club’s "theatre of dreams" is filled with people from every corner of the planet. But Sir Jim seems to think his customers and his citizens are two different species. Or perhaps he just thinks the rules of globalism only apply to the flow of money, not the flow of people.

Ratcliffe’s rhetoric feels like a throwback to a grittier, nastier era of British politics. It’s the kind of talk that usually stays confined to the dark corners of the internet or the bottom of a fifth pint in a dying pub. Hearing it from a Knight of the Realm is jarring. It’s a total teardown of the "sensible businessman" persona he’s tried to cultivate since buying his 27.7% stake in the club.

The data doesn’t support his "colonisation" fantasy, of course. But billionaires don’t need data when they have "vibes." They have private jets and walled estates. They don’t experience the world the rest of us live in. They see the UK from 30,000 feet, and from that height, everything looks like a line on a spreadsheet that needs to be erased.

There’s a specific kind of arrogance in claiming a country is being "colonised" while you’re actively trying to extract billions in public subsidies for a private sports project. It’s the ultimate "marginal gain": keep the profits, socialize the costs, and distract the public with a bit of xenophobia.

The tech world loves to talk about "disruption." Ratcliffe isn’t disrupting anything here. He’s just repeating a script that’s been running for decades. It’s the same script used by every mogul who realizes that fixing a football team is actually quite hard, but complaining about "outsiders" is remarkably easy.

Meanwhile, Old Trafford still leaks. The squad still looks like a collection of expensive strangers. The "Wembley of the North" remains a fever dream of public-private partnership that would make even the most cynical Treasury official blush. But Sir Jim has found his new mission. He’s not just a chemical engineer or a sports mogul anymore. He’s a demagogue with a Knighthood and a French zip code.

One has to wonder how this plays in the dressing room. Or in the boardrooms of the global sponsors who pay hundreds of millions to have their logos plastered across a stadium Ratcliffe thinks is under siege. It’s a hell of a way to run a business.

Does Sir Jim actually believe the UK is a colony, or is he just annoyed that the government hasn’t written him a check for his stadium yet?