South Africa

How South African men are changing the course of American democracy

20 Nov 2024

What do figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Joel Pollak and Patrick Soon-Shiong have in common? They are public figures of considerable power and influence in the US – who all spent some part of their formative years in apartheid South Africa.

‘With no whites here, the blacks will go back to the trees.”

That was one of the lines in an email South African Errol Musk sent his son Elon, the world’s richest man, in 2022.

It is a detail included in Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography of Musk and by no means the only racist statement Isaacson quotes from Musk senior.

“The blacks would take everything from you,” Errol Musk told Isaacson in an interview for the book.

“I don’t have anything against the blacks, but they are just different from what I am.”

Elon Musk’s tormented relationship with his father is one of the running themes of Isaacson’s book, and it is made clear that Elon, in the main, deeply disapproves of his father’s views and behaviour.

Among the most grotesque aspects of Errol Musk’s history, as is now widely known, is that he has fathered two children with his own stepdaughter.

Last week, Errol Musk appeared on one of South Africa’s top podcasts, Podcast and Chill with MacG, in what was hailed as a coup for podcaster Macgyver Mukhwevho. There, Errol was permitted to deliver a highly sanitised account of this history, including claiming that he had no contact with his stepdaughter until she was 29 years old.

In Isaacson’s biography, a very different version is given: one in which Elon Musk invited his father and his family to stay with him in the US in 2002, but rapidly became concerned – because Errol, “who was then 56, was becoming uncomfortably attentive to one of his stepdaughters, Jana, who was then 15”.

Errol would get Jana pregnant at 30, describing it to Isaacson as “God’s plan or nature’s plan”.

Elon Musk went to live with his father at the age of 10, and although relations between the two are highly acrimonious, even Isaacson’s pretty hagiographic biography suggests the two share certain similarities. Among them, suggests Isaacson, is a conspiratorial mindset: a tendency “to read wacky fake-news sites purveying conspiracy theories”.

Something Isaacson does not explore: whether growing up under the thumb of an unabashedly racist father in apartheid South Africa would shape Elon Musk’s future politics.

But the question is surely worth asking – not just of Musk, but of a remarkable number of other figures currently playing outsized roles in US politics.

Elon Musk’s politics-free childhood

The upbringing of Elon Musk, as per Isaacson’s biography, is one that takes place in a political vacuum. The word “apartheid” features so little in the book that it does not even warrant an entry in the index – despite Musk living in South Africa from his birth in 1971 until 1988, a stretch of time which saw some of the greatest tumult of the apartheid regime.

Musk’s maternal grandfather was a Canadian man who specifically moved to apartheid South Africa in 1950 because he believed Canada had “gone soft”.

Musk was clearly raised in an aggressive, macho environment; he attended veldskool, notorious for its violence, and was seemingly relentlessly bullied at school in Pretoria.

But the account Musk gives of his childhood and adolescence to Isaacson is quite astonishing for the invisibility of apartheid and his own apparent failure to develop any kind of resulting social consciousness or sense of racial injustice.

Indeed, he seems to have emerged from it with a very deep sense of his own victimhood – despite being a member of a class of people, in white South Africans, who were at various points of the twentieth century quite literally the most privileged people on earth.

“When things were most dire, he got energised. It was the siege mentality from his South African childhood,” writes Isaacson at one stage.

On a rare trip back to South Africa in 2001, Musk contracted malaria and almost died.

Years later, he told Isaacson: “Vacations will kill you. Also, South Africa. That place is still trying to destroy me.”

Read more: Triumphant Donald Trump praises ‘super guy, super genius’ Elon Musk, with Tesla shares soaring

Peter Thiel’s apartheid adventure

In his life in the US, Musk would go on to meet and work with another man who had spent part of his childhood in sub-Saharan Africa: another present-day billionaire, investor Peter Thiel.

Thiel was born to German parents in Frankfurt in the 1960s, a place which at the time was “full of pious white Christians”, according to Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin.

In The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (2021), Chafkin recounts how Thiel’s father Klaus, a mining project manager, chose to work on the construction of a uranium mine near Swakopmund – part of a clandestine project on the part of the apartheid government to create a nuclear weapons programme.

Thiel spent two years at the German School in Swakopmund, preceded by a stretch at the then whites-only Pridwin school in Johannesburg. (As recently as 2020, a Pridwin mother would write in Daily Maverick that she was “taken aback at the institutional and systematised, very subtle and highly sophisticated racism” of the school.)

Thiel’s parents moved to the US thereafter, and Thiel went on to attend Stanford – at the time roiled by protests by student associations to encourage divestment from apartheid South Africa. Those protests, wrote Chafkin, felt “at least a little bit personal to Thiel, who often spoke fondly of his childhood in South Africa”.

At Stanford, writes Chafkin, “on at least two occasions, he told peers that he thought their concerns about apartheid were overblown”.

Chafkin interviewed two black female peers of Thiel’s who decades later both vividly remembered their encounters with him on this score.

Thiel allegedly told one: “It [apartheid] works”.

He allegedly told another that “South Africa’s systematic denial of civil rights to black people was economically sound”. (Thiel’s spokesperson denied all these encounters.)

At Stanford, Thiel founded a publication called the Stanford Review in 1987, acting as editor-in-chief himself. One of the publication’s first crusades was in opposition to a plan from the university to add black writers to the student literature syllabus.

“Western culture in the balance”, was the headline for the Review’s cover story on the topic. This trope – of “Western culture” being under threat – remains a talking point for Musk et al to this day.

The Review would go on to publish writing by another undergraduate friend of Thiel’s, including an “impassioned defence”, according to Chafkin, of a Stanford senior who had pled no contest to the rape of a 17-year-old. The author argued that the rapist was deserving of sympathy in part because the victim had not resisted.

The author in question? One David Sacks.

David Sacks’ campaign against multiculturalism

David Sacks was born in Cape Town in 1972, and moved to Tennessee with his family when he was five.

In July 2024, addressing the Republican National Convention, Sacks played on his immigrant identity.

“I’m David Sacks, a legal immigrant who worked hard to achieve the American dream. Now I’m concerned those same opportunities won’t be there for future generations,” Sacks said.

“We need order in our cities, order at our border, and order restored to a world on fire. My friends, we need President Donald J Trump back in the White House.”

Read more: What Trump’s victory means for you, the world and SA — seven takes from Daily Maverick writers

Back in the early 90s at Stanford, Sacks and Thiel were hitting it off like a house on fire. In 1995, they would publish a book together called The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus.

Described by The New Republic as “angry, trollish, homophobic, fixated on identity and campus politics”, the book made it clear that the two men considered themselves oppressed – as white conservative men.

Sacks and Thiel would go on to work with Musk on internet payment platform Paypal – the staff profile of which, writes Chafkin, initially reflected Sacks and Thiel’s aversion to multiculturalism.

“In its earliest days, PayPal employed no women, and there were no black employees,” Chafkin writes.

Also brought on to PayPal in its early days: a mid-20s finance whiz called Roelof Botha, a University of Cape Town graduate who was the grandson of Pik Botha.

Today Roelof Botha is a managing partner in a venture capital firm of almost legendary status, Sequoia, but uniquely for the men profiled here has maintained a resolutely apolitical stance. Indeed, in July 2024 Botha explicitly ruled out endorsing any candidate to support ahead of the November US elections, saying: “As Sequoia as a partnership, we don’t take a political point of view”.

For his former Paypal peers Musk, Thiel and Sacks, the opposite is true.

When tech billionaires fight culture wars

“The political views of tech entrepreneurs are not normally discussed or debated,” Newsweek noted earlier this year.

It is no exaggeration to say that Musk, Thiel and Sacks have changed all that.

Sacks is described as “quietly becoming the leading practitioner of a new right-wing sensibility that has emerged in the political realignments provoked by Trumpism and the pandemic”, in a 2022 New Republic profile which begins: “Like his pals Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, Sacks is using his wealth and online clout to unite conservatives and former leftists in a reactionary movement against liberalism”.

Sacks and Musk are former Democrats who have drifted right on a current of perceived victimhood, opposition to the “woke mind virus” and concerns about the future of Western (read: white) civilisation.

Thiel was always conservative and has spun further rightward. All three moguls have at various points arrived at Donald Trump as their preferred presidential candidate – and gone to enormous lengths to back him.

When buying Twitter in 2022, Isaacson writes, Musk joked to his kids: “How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?”

Future social scientists will have to determine exactly what impact Musk’s purchase of Twitter had on the 2024 election results, but it seems certain to have had some. Among the tweaks Musk has made to the algorithm, the Washington Post recently reported, is one which seems to amplify the accounts of Republican legislators and suppress those of Democrats.

Thiel, meanwhile, is described by his biographer as wanting “more than sway in Silicon Valley – he wanted real power, political power”.

It was Thiel who helped persuade Facebook’s top brass, ahead of the 2016 elections, to allow Trump supporters on Facebook to “say more or less whatever they wanted on its platform”.

As a result, writes Chafkin: the most popular election story on Facebook during the run-up to those elections was “Pope Francis shocks the world, endorses Donald Trump for President” (totally false); another held that Hillary Clinton had sold weapons to Islamic State terrorists (totally false).

And that’s not all, folks…

The three Musketeers above are not the only men with South African ties disrupting US politics, though they may be the best known.

Just a few weeks before the US elections this year, there was an uproar when the influential LA Times broke with the tradition of decades and announced it would not endorse a presidential candidate – despite the editorial board having decided to endorse Kamala Harris.

The man blocking the endorsement was the owner of the LA Times: Gqeberha-born, Wits-educated medical billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong.

Soon-Shiong previously told the National Museum of American History: “Growing up in apartheid South Africa, we were always the underdogs. My black friends were always the underdogs. It gave me insight into the dignity and strength of the underdog. So part of what [wife] Michele and I do, consciously or unconsciously, is always fight for the underdogs in this country and for ourselves.”

Amid outrage about the threat to media freedom posed by a newspaper baron overruling his own editors’ political choices, Soon-Shiong’s daughter Nika took to social media to claim that the reason the family would not endorse Harris was because of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza – something her father denied was true.

Although Soon-Shiong himself claimed he blocked the Harris endorsement because he wanted “fair and balanced” journalism, the concern was that the real reason was a fear that Trump would take revenge on hostile media outlets if he won the election.

But a media outlet with no fear of Trump’s vengeance was the right-wing Breitbart News, which has served as a reliable mouthpiece for Trumpian talking points for the last decade.

Its “senior editor at large” is Cape Town boy Joel Pollak, formerly Tony Leon’s speechwriter, who at one stage was being considered by the first Trump administration for ambassador to South Africa.

Pollak has been busy. In July 2024, in what was interpreted by some as a fairly transparent attempt to win a spot in the second Trump administration, Pollak launched a book – published by the notorious Steve Bannon – titled The Agenda: What Trump Should Do In his First 100 Days.

Pollak’s book recommends stopping even legal immigration to the US until the immigration system is reformed; proposes that the White House hold daily Bible study events; wants a task force set up to “promote childbearing”; and suggests that the decision on whether IVF is legally permissible in the US should be outsourced to a Trump-established ethics panel. DM

Categories:

South Africa

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...