Elon Musk’s Family History in South Africa Reveals Ties to Apartheid & Neo-Nazi Movements

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show with Part 2 of my recent interview with the reporter Chris McGreal, who was the Johannesburg correspondent for The Guardian during the last years of apartheid through 2002. He’s been closely following the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, who was born in 1971 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and raised under the country’s racist apartheid laws. Some of McGreal’s pieces include “What does Elon Musk believe?” and “How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa.” I began by asking Chris McGreal to discuss Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman.

CHRIS McGREAL: We see Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman. He immigrates to South Africa in 1950. And that’s really when apartheid has just started to kick in. The 1950s are when the most — the first laws — South Africa had had discriminatory laws before, but you see the specific apartheid laws, which are much more aggressive, and in many ways reminiscent of the Nazi Nuremberg laws against Jews in the 1930s. They have very similar echoes in stripping Black people from the right to work in certain places, their movements, controlling them, confining them to areas. You already had a situation which has now, you know, come to the fore because of recent events with Trump, but —

AMY GOODMAN: You mean with Elon Musk giving the Nazi salute?

CHRIS McGREAL: Yes, but also with the sanctions over land, is that the 1913 Land Act had already deprived most Black people of land in South Africa anyway. At that point, the 7%, or 10%, as it was, of the population that was white owned more than 85% of the land under the Land Act of 1913. So, the apartheid laws kick in in the 1950s.

Musk was born — Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Johannesburg, and at that point the prime minister was a guy called John Vorster. And John Vorster’s background is very telling, really, because Vorster, in the 1930s, had been a member of a neo-Nazi militia called the OB, which was openly sympathetic and linked to the Nazis in Germany. It was responsible for all kinds of attacks, but including burning Jews out of their businesses in Johannesburg.

AMY GOODMAN: And we’re talking about what years?

CHRIS McGREAL: In the 1930s, so the late 1930s. And then South Africa goes to war as an ally of Britain against Hitler. The OB and the groups that support them, like Vorster, people like Vorster, they actively oppose that. They actually are in touch with — OB is in touch with German military intelligence, and they plan to assassinate the prime minister of South Africa, Jan Smuts, and overthrow the government and have it support Hitler. That plan fails, because the Germans are unable to provide the necessary weapons and back out.

But in 1942, John Vorster, later prime minister, stands up and gives a speech, and he talks about the system that they — their kind of ideological belief system, which was Christian nationalism. And he says Christian nationalism in South Africa is the same as Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy. It’s all anti-democratic. It’s all the same thing. By 1971, when Elon Musk is born, that man is the prime minister of South Africa. And Christian nationalism is the basis of not only the political philosophy, but the entire education system that Elon Musk is brought up into.

AMY GOODMAN: So, take us from Elon Musk’s grandfather moving to South Africa in the ’50s to his father, how they gained their wealth.

CHRIS McGREAL: So, Musk — Elon Musk’s grandfather moves there in 1950s. He’s not particularly prosperous. He arrives without a lot of money. But it’s Elon Musk’s father, Errol, who makes the real money, principally through investments in emerald mines in Zambia. And, you know, mining conditions in southern Africa in that period were really pretty dire in the 1960s and ’70s, very high death rate, very poor conditions. But the owners got very rich.

And Musk lived what can only be described as a neocolonial life. If you were a white South African in that period and you had any money at all, you lived with servants at your beck and call. You lived in sprawling housing. And what you see with Errol Musk is that when we get a glimpse into just how much money he had, when he and Elon’s mother get divorced, she says at the time that, well, he owns a yacht, he owns a jet, he owns several houses. So there was considerable wealth there.

AMY GOODMAN: Was the grandfather of Elon Musk on the record in his support for Vorster?

CHRIS McGREAL: Well, he was certainly on the record in his support for apartheid, very vividly so, yes. And he said that that’s why he had moved to South Africa from Canada in 1940, was in support of it. Now, the grandfather himself is killed a few years later in a plane crash, but it’s not known what Elon Musk’s grandmother’s personal views of Vorster particularly were, but they were both avid supporters of the apartheid system, and the grandmother lived for a number of years afterwards.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you’ve been talking about Elon Musk’s maternal grandparents and how they moved to South Africa, but talk about their roots in Canada.

CHRIS McGREAL: Originally, the grandparents have no connection to South Africa. They’re born and grew up in Canada. And in the 1930s, the grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, he’s head of the Canadian branch of a U.S. movement called Technocracy Incorporated. And Technocracy Incorporated is essentially a movement to overthrow democratic governments in the United States and have technocrats, but big businessmen, in many ways, come in and run the country. That’s partly a reaction to FDR’s election and New Deal and massive reforms that he’s introduced in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: So, from Canada, they would help to launch a coup against FDR?

CHRIS McGREAL: No. Canada had its own branch of this movement to overthrow the government in Canada. He, Haldeman, heads that branch. And through the 1930s, it takes on increasingly fascist overtones. They start wearing gray uniforms modeled on the Nazi brown and black shirts. And so, when Canada declares war on Germany in 1939 alongside Britain, the movement is banned, because it’s clearly sympathetic to Hitler. Then Haldeman is arrested.

AMY GOODMAN: Elon Musk’s grandfather.

CHRIS McGREAL: Elon Musk’s grandfather is arrested. They find documents sympathetic to the Nazis and other subversive documents inside his house. And he is sent to prison for a few months, then remains on essentially a subversion watch list for the rest of the war here. So, he’s basically regarded as a Nazi sympathizer, a fellow traveler.

AMY GOODMAN: And about a decade later, he moves to South Africa. Why?

CHRIS McGREAL: So, after the war, he founds another political movement, which has deep antisemitic roots and actually promotes the forgery, The Protocols of the —

AMY GOODMAN: Elders of Zion?

CHRIS McGREAL: Elders of Zion, that’s it. But, obviously, after the war and the Holocaust, there’s no real appetite for that in Canada. It’s a failing political movement. And so, his eye casts down to South Africa. By 1950, the apartheid government has been in power for two years. And Haldeman looks at it and thinks, “That’s just my kind of place,” which clearly that was what he would want to create in Canada and had been trying to create in the 1930s. And so, that’s the point at which he and his wife Maye, they move to South Africa and become very fervent supporters of apartheid.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to blend in some breaking news, in addition to cutting off all aid to South Africa, news of the region. And that is, Sam Nujoma, the freedom fighter turned president, who led Namibia to independence from apartheid South Africa in 1990, has died at the age of 95, often referred to as Namibia’s founding father, known for his motto, “A united people, striving to achieve a common good for all members of the society, will always emerge victorious.” What used to be called South West Africa became the independent Namibia. Talk about Sam Nujoma and how that fits into this picture of South Africa through apartheid.

CHRIS McGREAL: So, Sam Nujoma was the head of the South West Africa People’s Organization, which was the liberation movement of Namibia.

AMY GOODMAN: SWAPO.

CHRIS McGREAL: SWAPO, indeed. Really, SWAPO takes off and has — is able to have effect after Angola becomes independent with the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship. The Portuguese colonizers leave Angola, and Angola provides a base then for SWAPO to really fight to liberate South West Africa. That becomes known as the Border War, euphemistically. The South Africans call it the Border War. They actually invade Angola in an attempt to overthrow the Marxist-leaning government of Angola, but also to keep SWAPO at bay. But the war goes on, and eventually South Africa loses that war.

At that period, though, one of the things you see is that Peter Thiel, another member of the “PayPal mafia,” very close friend of Musk, he had been at school in Johannesburg, but his father gets a job on a uranium mine near Swakopmund in what is then South West Africa. And so, Peter Thiel moves there as a child and goes to school there.

And the thing to know about South West Africa, the reason it was separate from South Africa is that it had been a German colony until the end of the First World War. Then it becomes — falls under South Africa’s mandate, partly because at that point South Africa was a British colony. When South Africa becomes a republic in the ’60s, it hangs onto South West Africa, and it becomes a South African colony. But the population, big part of the population was of German ancestry. And you could — I remember going to Windhoek in the early ’90s, and the main thoroughfare through Windhoek was called Hermann Goering Strasse, named not after the Luftwaffe chief, but after his father, who had been a governor of German South West Africa. In Swakopmund, it was even more extreme. It was notorious for many, many years, really into the ’80s and ’90s, as a hotbed of open support, continued support for the Nazis and for Hitler. The New York Times has a story from the mid-’70s of a reporter pulling up at a gas station to get his car filled with gas, and the attendant openly giving a Nazi salute and saying “Heil Hitler” to him. You could go to curio shops in Swakopmund, and they would sell Nazi-themed mugs and flags and things, and they openly celebrated Hitler’s birthday every May. Thiel went to a German school there. So, that’s the atmosphere he grows up in.

His father is an official on a uranium mine there. And the interesting thing about the uranium mine, amongst many other things, is that it supplied part of the uranium to develop the South African atomic bombs in the 1970s, which were developed in league with Israel. Now, part of the deal with Israel was that — is that South Africa would deliver yellow cake uranium to Israel. We don’t know where the yellow cake came from. It may have come from that Swakopmund-area mine, or it may have come from somewhere else in South Africa. But South Africa was shipping yellow cake to Israel at the same time, because it, too, was developing nuclear weapons.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what Peter Thiel has said about all this — you know, I remember, as we cover conventions for decades now, Peter Thiel standing up at the first Republican convention that nominated President Trump and supporting him — and who he is.

CHRIS McGREAL: So, Peter Thiel has said of his time in Swakopmund, and particularly the school, which he describes as particularly a brutal education, that it turned him against government and into a libertarian. And I think that’s an interesting element in all of this, is that one of the things that isn’t necessarily appreciated outside of South Africa is that there’s two kinds of whites there. There’s the Afrikaners, who we’ve been talking about, but there’s a big English-speaking white population. And one of the aspects of the English-speaking population was they, on paper, said they opposed apartheid, but they gained all of its benefits. And most of them, certainly not all — there were some really heroic individuals — but most of them did very little to actually end apartheid.

But one of the products of that is you have people like Musk and Thiel, who have done very well and whose parents did very well out of the apartheid system, who deny responsibility for it. They blame it on the Afrikaners. They blame it on a government, extreme government, extreme right-wing government. But then they have to explain how it is that their own parents were so able to do so well out of apartheid, and then they put that down to individual talent, that they’re naturally gifted, and that leads them down this whole libertarian path, anti-government path, because, essentially, they have to explain how they, too, were benefits of apartheid, without taking responsibility.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about their relationship, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

CHRIS McGREAL: Well, they’re co-founders of PayPal together. They both, essentially, share the same kind of worldview, from what I can make out. They’re, you know, libertarians. They’re very opposed to any kind of DEI. You’ve seen a deep, deep hostility to DEI. I think Thiel buys into the same message about anti-white, the war on white people in South Africa, that South African white groups like AfriForum have been pushing in the United States. So I think, you know, philosophically, they’re very similar, and obviously they have a very close relationship.

AMY GOODMAN: And then talk about David Sacks, and talk more specifically about what you’re referring to as the “PayPal mafia.” I don’t think most people in this country understand all of these connections and this unusual situation where these, what, some of the wealthiest men in the world work together, founded PayPal and now surround the president of the United States.

CHRIS McGREAL: Yes. So, David Sacks was born in Cape Town in the ’70s. And he moves — his parents take him to Tennessee when he’s 5 years old. So he didn’t grow up in the same milieu as Musk and Thiel, but he did grow up in the white South African diaspora, for sure. He clearly shares the same views. You know, as you say, they’re part of the PayPal mafia. They all get rich from the creation of this company. They’re all at the top running it. And now Sacks has emerged as Trump’s AI and crypto czar, again, part of the same project. So, you can see this —

AMY GOODMAN: And he was a chief fundraiser for President Trump — 

CHRIS McGREAL: A big one.

AMY GOODMAN: — as you said, born in Cape Town.

CHRIS McGREAL: Yes, a big. So, they’ve all emerged with, essentially, from what I can make out, the same philosophy. And, of course, that’s only been reinforced by their success. They’re convinced, obviously, of their own genius and worth, and that government, whether it’s South African government or, in this case, it seems to be, the U.S. government, is an obstacle to success.

AMY GOODMAN: And though we talked about it in Part 1, finally, Roelof Botha, making this little quartet, white men of a certain age together, and his history, also a part of the PayPal mafia?

CHRIS McGREAL: Yes, he’s part of it, and he’s been — he has not emerged as an open supporter of Trump. I’m not entirely sure what his personal views are on this. But he does have a very interesting background.

His grandfather was Pik Botha, who was the last foreign minister of apartheid South Africa. And Pik Botha’s job, essentially, was to go around the world, particularly the West, and assure them that apartheid was being amended, was being dismantled, when in fact it was in many ways — although what was known as petty apartheid, which was the routine discriminations, the segregation, was being dismantled, in fact, the political system was actually only reinforcing it, solidifying it. The government of the time cooked up a system of three parliaments that would represent different parts of the population, but — and give people who weren’t — some people who weren’t white a vote, but none of those people were Black. There was no Black parliament, partly because they were being pushed into the independent homelands. The idea was that they were no longer South African anyway.

So, Pik Botha went around trying to apologize and excuse for this system. And he was successful with, you know, conservatives. He saw a lot of Reagan and people. They loved him here, and the same with Thatcher in Britain. They saw them as the acceptable face of apartheid. And he was so deluded by the end. He was convinced. I remember meeting him during the era of the transition to democracy from apartheid. He was so convinced that he was indispensable to the system that Mandela would have to appoint him foreign minister, which he duly did not.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you say the background of all these men’s families was fleeing Mandela’s South Africa?

CHRIS McGREAL: Well, they didn’t — some of them left before. I mean, it’s worth noting that Elon Musk left in 1988 at the age of 18, just as he would have become eligible to be drafted into the South African army, as all white males were at that point, which might have led him to fight the Border War that I was talking about in Angola against SWAPO, or it might have led him into the townships, which at that point were in complete ferment. And, you know, you had a huge amount of civil unrest in South Africa at that point. The country had largely become ungovernable. It was under a state of emergency, and the white troops were trying to keep some form of order in the Black townships, like Soweto. He left before he had to do any of that.

AMY GOODMAN: So, very interestingly, for people who aren’t aware, Elon Musk had a company called X.com. It was an online bank. It merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. The merged company was renamed PayPal in 2001. And you have all of these guys who you’ve just laid out — well, I think Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital — but now key players. And that brings us to Trump’s order on Friday to cut off all aid to South Africa and offer refugee status in the United States to the white South Africans who are, quote, “victims of unjust racial discrimination.” But, interestingly, many in the right-wing white lobby say they want to stay and focus on ending Black majority rule. This is Flip Buys, the chairperson of what’s called the Solidarity union.

FLIP BUYS: We might disagree with the ANC, but we love the country. As in any community, there are individuals who wish to immigrate, but the repatriation of Afrikaners as refugees is not a solution for us. We want to build a future in South Africa.

AMY GOODMAN: So, he is speaking in front of a sign that says “AfriForum.” Put this in context. And what about Afrikaners saying, “No, this is our land. We don’t want to come to the United States”?

CHRIS McGREAL: Well, AfriForum is backpedaling furiously now, because there’s been a huge backlash in South Africa from people who blame it for this situation. In fact, some people have accused it of treason. But if you look at what AfriForum was saying just a decade ago, and certainly in 2018, when people like Kallie Kriel, who was head of the AfriForum, and others were coming to the United States, they were claiming there was a white genocide. They were claiming there was a war on white people in South Africa. And they were essentially trying to characterize the post-apartheid era of one of oppression of Afrikaners, that they were the true victims of it.

And this is — they’re not alone in this. There had been a phenomenon, ever since the end of apartheid, of Afrikaners painting themselves as victim. There was a song emerged in the 1990s called “De la Rey,” and it’s very popular with Afrikaners. It’s sung in bars and rugby matches. And de la Rey was a famous general who fought to the bitter end against the British in the Boer War, the Second Boer War in the early 20th century, which the Afrikaners then lost. And this song essentially is an attempt to take Afrikaners back to a time when they were the victims, when it was their women and children dying in the British concentration camp, when they were the people who were oppressed. And it conjures up this Boer general, who — he may be losing the war, but he’s going to fight to the last, a bitter ender.

And this is how they’ve been characterizing themselves, some of them. And AfriForum is part of that kind of attempt to rewrite history and make out that they’re this minority that has long been persecuted, not just by the post-apartheid era, but by the British, and they have a long history, and apartheid was just a means of survival — all they were trying to do was to keep themselves and their culture alive.

It has had one other effect, which they hadn’t expected and has alarmed them, is that in all the orders that have been given out canceling aid and agreements, one of them affects agricultural products being imported to the United States, which have generally been duty-free as a means of helping Africa. One result is that their own products are no longer being imported duty-free into the United States. So, these white South African farmers, who have been complaining of oppression, will now actually be being hit with tariffs or regular duties, and so it’s going to cost them financially, which is one of the reasons they’re so upset by it and pretending that it was nothing to do with them.

AMY GOODMAN: Guardian reporter Chris McGreal. He was the Johannesburg correspondent for The Guardian during the last years of apartheid through 2002.

We did this interview in early February. Over the past two months, Trump has suspended aid to South Africa, expelled the South African ambassador and offered refugee status to white South Africans, claiming South Africa’s discriminating against the white minority. Trump has also just nominated Leo Brent Bozell to be U.S. ambassador in South Africa. Bozell’s son was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for his role in the January 6th insurrection, before he was pardoned by President Trump. One note on Elon Musk’s family: Maye Musk is Elon’s mother, not his grandmother.

To see Part 1 of our interview with Chris McGreal, you can go to democracynow.org. We’ll also link to his pieces, “What does Elon Musk believe?” and “How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa.”

That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.