Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman’s interview with the reporter Chris McGreal, who was the Johannesburg correspondent for The Guardian, revealed that Elon Musk’s family’s history is deeply intertwined with the political and economic structures that upheld apartheid, as well as with extremist ideologies that preceded it.
Musk was born in 1971 in Johannesburg, South Africa, during the height of apartheid, a system of institutionalized racial segregation and white supremacy.
Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, emigrated from Canada to South Africa in 1950, drawn to the newly established apartheid regime.
Before his move, Haldeman had been a prominent figure in Technocracy Incorporated, a social movement active in the United States and Canada in the 1930s that sought to replace democratic governments with rule by corporate technocrats.
Favoring technocracy as a system of government over representative democracy and concomitant partisan politics.
By the 1930s, the group had adopted fascist overtones, with members wearing gray uniforms modeled after Nazi paramilitary attire. When Canada entered World War II, Haldeman was arrested for possessing Nazi-sympathetic materials and remained under government surveillance as a suspected subversive.
After the war, Haldeman founded another political movement in Canada, this one promoting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic forgery.
Finding little support in postwar Canada, he relocated to South Africa, where the apartheid government’s racial policies aligned with his ideological leanings. He and his wife became vocal supporters of the regime.
Musk’s father, Errol Musk, amassed considerable wealth through investments in Zambian emerald mines, benefiting from the exploitative labor conditions prevalent in southern Africa’s mining industry.
The family lived a privileged, neocolonial lifestyle, with servants, multiple homes, and luxury assets like yachts and private jets.
The political environment of Musk’s upbringing was shaped by figures like John Vorster, South Africa’s prime minister from 1966 to 1978.
Vorster had been a member of the Ossewabrandwag, a pro-Nazi paramilitary group during World War II that sought to overthrow the South African government in support of Hitler.
Even after the war, Vorster openly compared the ideology of apartheid—”Christian nationalism”—to Nazism and fascism.
Musk’s close associate, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, also has roots in southern Africa’s white supremacist enclaves.
Thiel spent part of his childhood in Swakopmund, Namibia, then under South African control, where neo-Nazi sentiment remained openly expressed well into the 1980s. His father worked at a uranium mine that supplied material for South Africa’s nuclear weapons program, developed in collaboration with Israel.
Another key figure in Musk’s orbit, David Sacks, was born in Cape Town before moving to the U.S. as a child. Like Musk and Thiel, he has embraced libertarian and anti-government views that critics argue stem from a desire to distance themselves from the systemic advantages they inherited under apartheid.
The connections extend further. Roelof Botha, another member of the so-called “PayPal Mafia,” is the grandson of Pik Botha, the last foreign minister of apartheid South Africa, who spent years defending the regime internationally.
Musk left South Africa in 1988 at age 17, just before he would have been conscripted into the military, which was then engaged in suppressing Black resistance and fighting border wars against liberation movements. His departure coincided with the increasing ungovernability of apartheid South Africa, as mass protests and international sanctions weakened the regime.
Decades later, Musk’s political and business alliances reflect a continuity with this background. His recent embrace of far-right rhetoric, including gestures interpreted as Nazi salutes, has drawn scrutiny.
Trump’s decision to cut aid to South Africa and offer refugee status to white South Africans—framed as victims of “unjust racial discrimination”—has been championed by groups like AfriForum, which has long promoted a narrative of white persecution.
The historical threads connecting Musk’s upbringing to his present influence underscore how the legacy of apartheid continues to resonate, not just in South Africa, but in the global networks of power and ideology he now inhabits.