Opinion | Elon Musk Is South African. It Explains a Lot.
Elon Musk is everywhere.He is firing federal employees, gaining access to important government data, popping into the Oval Office, appearing on Fox News alongside President Trump and even attending a White House cabinet meeting.For some, his rampage through the institutions of the American state augurs a replacement by private interests; for others, it amounts to a Big Tech takeover.
For many looking on, it’s above all a baffling bromance at the heart of power.However one understands Mr.
Musk’s role in the Trump administration, it has cemented his reputation as one of the most powerful people on the planet.But discussion of Mr.Musk, especially in the United States, often misses something: He is a white South African, part of a demographic that for centuries sat atop a racial hierarchy maintained by violent colonial rule.
That history matters.For all the attempts to describe Mr.
Musk as a self-made genius or a dispassionate technocrat, he is in fact a distinctly ideological figure, one whose worldview is inseparable from rearing in apartheid South Africa.More than just an eccentric billionaire, Mr.
Musk represents an unresolved question: What happens when settler rule fails but settlers remain? That’s what is playing out in America today.Born in Pretoria in 1971, Mr.Musk had an upbringing typical of the white South African elite.
The family was wealthy, despite his parents divorcing when he was young, its economic standing shaped by a system designed to assist whites.Mr.
Musk doesn’t appear to have enjoyed his private education — there are stories of bullying and loneliness — but he still benefited from the advantages it conferred.Though his father, an engineer, was for a time a member of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party, there is little evidence Mr.
Musk inherited his political convictions.Like many white South Africans, Mr.
Musk left the country before the collapse of racial rule, settling in Canada, where his mother was born, in 1989.He ne...