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 his 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 never returned, but South Africa clearly stayed with him. Take his recent intervention into the debate over the country’s land reform as an example. In response to a bill passed in January that allows in specific circumstances the expropriation of land without compensation, Mr. Musk used his platform to suggest that white South Africans are uniquely persecuted. Never mind that land restitution is a broadly accepted norm in post-colonial societies or that eminent domain or compulsory purchase laws do something similar in the United States and elsewhere. The Trump administration — amplifying fringe voices, promoting distorted narratives of racial victimhood and using Mr. Musk’s claim as a symbolic cudgel — was only too happy to play along.
Mr. Musk’s role in the controversy suggests he has not so much moved beyond the logic of apartheid as absorbed it. His ideological commitments — deregulated markets, hostility to labor organizing and Trumpist nationalism — bear its trace. In effect, his politics reprise apartheid’s economic principles on a global scale: maintaining zones of privilege under the guise of “free enterprise” while resisting any moves toward redistribution as threats. You can hear it in his exhortations for others to work harder and his pleas for him and his businesses to receive special treatment.
Mr. Musk is one of a number of reactionary figures with roots in Southern Africa who found an unlikely home in Silicon Valley and now wield disproportionate influence in shaping American and global right-wing politics. These men, such as Peter Thiel and David Sacks, emerged from a historical tradition that revered hierarchy and sought to sustain racial and economic dominance, only to find themselves in a world where that order was unraveling. Their politics reflect an instinct to preserve elite rule, cloaked in the language of meritocracy and market freedom, while channeling resentment toward new power structures they view as threats to their position.
For them, Southern Africa is never very far away. They are part of a global right that has long been fascinated with Rhodesia and its successor, Zimbabwe. For them, the loss of white-minority rule in Zimbabwe represents the model of civilizational decay — a formerly “successful” colonial state plunged into chaos through decolonization. The specter of “Zimbabwefication” is wielded as a warning against any redistribution of power. Now South Africa — “openly pushing for genocide of white people,” according to Mr. Musk — is being made to take on the mantle of scare story. The implicit argument is that settler power, once displaced, leads only to ruin.
It doesn’t help that South Africa has stood against Israel’s genocidal aggression in Gaza, leading the charge in attempts to hold it to account under international law. This outspoken opposition has further alienated the country from the Western powers that support Israel, reinforcing the perception of South Africa as a rogue state in the eyes of the global right. One of the front-runners to be Mr. Trump’s pick for ambassador to the country, the South-African born Breitbart commentator Joel Pollak, certainly believes it is. For figures like Mr. Musk, South Africa’s stance against Israel no doubt confirms their view of the country as a lost cause — a once “civilized” outpost of white rule now succumbing to the chaos of majority rule and decolonization.
This reaction is both ideological and deeply personal. For all his vehement opposition to “woke” identity politics, Mr. Musk is actually an ardent identitarian. He has boosted claims from far-right South African groups that the government is “race mad,” with 142 “race laws” on its books. But their method for defining a “race law” is laughably broad: Any law that makes race legally relevant supposedly qualifies. By this metric, even laws that prohibit arbitrary racial discrimination or repeal apartheid-era discrimination would count. Given Mr. Musk’s aggressive dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, this obsession with one identity group is more than a little ironic.
It’s dangerous, too. The fixation has led to Mr. Trump ending, by executive order, America’s financial assistance to South Africa, with potentially devastating effect on treatment for H.I.V. and AIDS. South Africa is now anathema: Secretary of State Marco Rubio is refusing to travel there for the Group of 20 summit later in the year, saying that it is a hotbed of “anti-Americanism” that is “doing very bad things.” Given the administration’s fascination with old-style colonialism — epitomized most starkly by its putative plan to resettle Gaza with “the world’s people,” along with the desire to buy Greenland and annex the Panama Canal — it’s no surprise that it sees South Africa as a dystopian prophecy to be resisted.
Mr. Musk, ever the entrepreneur, is happy to supply the propaganda. But South Africa’s history tells a different story — one where white dominance was not inevitable, where settler rule did not last and where a different future, however uncertain, remains possible. From his exalted position of power, Mr. Musk may do all he can to reverse or subvert this story. But he won’t be able to. History, unlike Mars, is not his to colonize.
