How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa
Chris McGreal
Chris McGreal
THE GUARDIAN
Sun 26 January 2025
Sun 26 January 2025
A member of the South African AWB in 2010 and Elon Musk during a speech after Trump’s inauguration on 20 January 2025
.Photograph: AFP via Getty Images, Reuters
When Elon Musk’s arm shot out in a stiff arm salute at Donald Trump’s inaugural celebrations, startled viewers mostly drew the obvious comparison.
But in the fired-up debate about Musk’s intent that followed, as the world’s richest man insisted he wasn’t trying to be a Nazi, speculation inevitably focused on whether his roots in apartheid-era South Africa offered an insight.
In recent months Musk’s promotion of far-right conspiracy theories has grown, from a deepening hostility to democratic institutions to the recent endorsement of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). He has taken an unhealthy interest in genetics while backing claims of a looming “white genocide” in his South African homeland and endorsing posts promoting the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Increasingly, his language and tone have come to echo the old South Africa.
He is not alone. Musk is part of the “PayPal mafia” of libertarian billionaires with roots in South Africa under white rule now hugely influential in the US tech industry and politics.
They include Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated. Thiel, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021 biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as “economically sound”.
David Sacks, formerly PayPal’s chief operating officer and now a leading fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young. A fourth member of the mafia, Roelof Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha, and former PayPal CFO, has kept a lower political profile but remains close to Musk.
Related: ‘Reactionary nihilism’: how a rightwing movement strives to end US democracy
Among them, Musk stands out for his ownership of X, which is increasingly a platform for far-right views, and his proximity to Trump, who has nominated Musk to head a “department of government efficiency” to slash and burn its way through the federal bureaucracy.
Some draw a straight line between Musk’s formative years atop a complex system of racial hierarchy as a white male, in a country increasingly at war with itself as the South African government became ever more repressive as resistance to apartheid grew, and the man we see at Trump’s side today.
The week before the inauguration, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, described white South Africans as the “most racist people on earth”, questioned their involvement in US politics and said Musk was a malign influence who should go back to the country of his birth.
Others are sceptical that Musk’s increasingly extreme views can be tracked back to his upbringing in Pretoria. The acclaimed South African writer Jonny Steinberg recently called attempts to explain Musk through his childhood under apartheid “a bad idea” that resulted in “facile” conclusions.
But for those looking to join dots, there is fodder from Musk’s early life with a neo-Nazi grandfather who moved from Canada to South Africa because he liked the idea of apartheid through his high school education in a system infused with the ideology of white supremacy.
Musk’s formative years in the 1980s came amid a cauldron of rebellion in the Black townships which drew a state of emergency and a bloody crackdown by the state. Some whites fled the country. Others marched with the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement against any weakening of apartheid.
The South Africa into which Musk was born in 1971, and to which Thiel moved as a child from Germany, was led by a prime minister, John Vorster, who had been a general in a fascist militia three decades earlier that allied itself with Hitler.
The Ossewabrandwag (OB) was founded shortly before the second world war. It opposed South Africa entering the war as an ally of Britain and plotted with German military intelligence to assassinate the prime minster, Jan Smuts, as a prelude to an armed uprising in support of Hitler.
Vorster made no secret of his sympathy for Nazi, or National Socialist, ideology which he compared to the Afrikaner political philosophy of Christian nationalism.
“We stand for Christian nationalism which is an ally of National Socialism,” he said in 1942. “You can call this anti-democratic principle dictatorship if you wish. In Italy it is called ‘Fascism’, in Germany ‘German National Socialism’ and in South Africa ‘Christian nationalism’.”
Smuts’s government took a dim view of that and a few weeks later interned Vorster as a Nazi sympathiser.
Related: KKK distributes flyers in Kentucky telling immigrants to ‘leave now’
At the end of the war, the OB was absorbed into the National party, which then won the 1948 election, in which Black South Africans had no vote, on a commitment to impose apartheid. In 1961, Vorster joined the government as minister of justice and five years later became prime minister.
Nazism may have been defeated in Europe but Christian nationalism was alive and kicking in South Africa under Vorster, with its own brand of racial classification and stratification justified by the need to keep the “swart gevaar”, or black danger, at bay.
In schools, Christian nationalist education sought to forge a South African identity around a singular version of the country’s history. Musk and Thiel were taught that the Afrikaner, mostly the descendants of Dutch colonisers, was the real victim of South Africa’s strife whether at the hands of grasping British imperialists or treacherous Zulu chiefs.
The truth is we didn’t see Black people quite as equals. We didn’t think about it
Bea Roberts, who grew up in an apartheid-supporting family but came to oppose the system and later worked for the Institute for a Democratic South Africa, remembers a heavy emphasis on Afrikaners as victims pursuing apartheid in order to protect their culture and even their very existence.
“It was a strange mix of ‘we got fucked up by the British in the [second Boer] war, and our women and children died in thousands in the concentration camps’ so we are going to rebuild our nation and make sure that that we are invincible. And we’ll do that by extreme means,” she said.
Schooling, like much else, was segregated by race for most of the apartheid era and, on paper at least, white pupils across South Africa were subject to the same Christian nationalist education. But white society was itself divided and the historical narrative embraced in Afrikaans-speaking schools could often became the basis for an implicit rejection of apartheid philosophy in English-speaking ones.
Musk attended a Johannesburg high school and then the Pretoria boys high school, an institution whose other alumni include students who went on to become leading anti-apartheid activists such as Edwin Cameron, a South African supreme court justice after the collapse of white rule, and Peter Hain, who moved to Britain, where he became a leading campaigner against apartheid and then a Labour government minister.
Phillip Van Niekerk, former editor of the leading anti-apartheid Mail and Guardian newspaper in Johannesburg, had Afrikaner parents but attended an English-speaking school. He recalled that the official version of history did little to engender support for the apartheid system among a lot of English speakers even if they benefited from it and did little to challenge it.
“We hated the National party government. Even our teachers were kind of hostile. It was seen almost like an imposition. Yet you imbibe things through the culture. The truth is we didn’t see Black people quite as equals. We didn’t think about it,” he said.
Thiel got all that and more at schools in South Africa and its de facto colony, South West Africa, which became independent as Namibia in 1990.
South West Africa had been a German colony until the end of the first world war and Thiel lived for a time in the city of Swakopmund, where he attended a German-language school while his father worked at a nearby uranium mine.
At that time, Swakopmund was notorious for its continued glorification of Nazism, including celebrating Hitler’s birthday. In 1976, the New York Times reported that some people in the town continued to greet each other with “Heil Hitler” and to give the Nazi salute.
Van Niekerk visited Swakopmund during South African rule.
“I was there in the 1980s and you could walk into a curio shop and buy mugs with Nazi swastikas on them. If you’re German and you’re in Swakopmund in the 1970s, which is when Thiel was there, you’re part of that community,” he said.
Thiel, who moved to the US when he was 10, has described his schooling in Swakopmund as instilling a dislike of regimentation that steered him towards libertarianism.
Thiel’s father worked at a uranium mine in Rössing where, as in the gold and coalmines of the Reef around Johannesburg, Black laborers were paid just enough to survive, living conditions were dire and the work dangerous. White managers, on the other hand, lived a lifestyle of neo-colonial luxury with servants at the ready.
Musk’s father, Errol, was also in the mining business among other interests. He once boasted that his stake in Zambian emerald mines made him “so much money we couldn’t even close our safe”. Musk’s mother, Maye, has said the family owned two homes, a plane, a yacht and a handful of luxury cars.
Errol Musk has said that he opposed apartheid and joined the Progressive Federal party but then left because he didn’t like its demand for one person, one vote, and instead favored a more gradual reform with separate parliaments for different races. That was the liberal position inside the Musk family.
Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, moved from Canada to South Africa in 1950 because he liked the newly elected apartheid government.
In the 1930s, Haldeman was the Canadian leader of a fringe political movement originating in the US, Technocracy Incorporated, that advocated abolishing democracy in favor of government by elite technicians but which took on overtones of fascism with its uniforms and salutes.
The Canadian government banned Technocracy Incorporated during the second world war as a threat to the country’s security in part for its opposition to fighting Hitler. Haldeman was charged with publishing documents opposing the war and sent to prison for two months.
After the war, Haldeman led a separate political party that among other things promoted the antisemitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When that went nowhere, he moved to South Africa because he said he liked the core National party philosophy of Christian nationalism that Vorster likened to Nazism.
Errol Musk described Maye’s parents as so extreme he stopped visiting them.
We white South Africans, by the very nature of our privileges and our place in the racial hierarchy, grew up believing we were the master race
“They were very fanatical in favor of apartheid,” he told Podcast and Chill. “Her parents came to South Africa from Canada because they sympathised with the Afrikaner government. They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff.”
Haldeman was killed in a plane crash when Elon was three years old but the boy remained close to his grandmother and mother. He is estranged from his father, whom Maye has described as abusive of her and their children. Errol Musk once claimed to have shot and killed three people who broke into his house.
Musk has described his father as a “terrible human being”.
“Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done,” he told Rolling Stone without elaborating in 2017.
What is indisputable is that Musk and Thiel grew up amid incredible privilege where the racial hierarchy was clear. Those who claimed to reject apartheid sought to explain this privilege not as the result of systemic racial oppression but the natural order of things thanks to their own abilities. That in turn led some to regard all forms government as oppressive and true liberty as an individual battle for survival.
The biography of Thiel said he held a view common among apartheid’s supporters at the time that Black South Africans were better off than Africans in other parts of the continent even if they were systematically denied their rights. Thiel has denied ever having supported apartheid.
Van Niekerk said that opposition to apartheid did not necessarily mean rejection of white supremacy or privilege, a point made in a 1968 British television documentary the year before Thiel was born.
The commentary observed that the English-speaking mining barons and other industrialists in Johannesburg usually claimed to be “hostile to apartheid, call themselves liberal” but did little to oppose the system while profiting from it.
Helen Suzman, at the time a member of the South African parliament who was often a lone voice in opposition to apartheid, was critical of these powerful industrialists and businessmen, saying “people who do nothing are responsible”. She accused them of hiding behind apartheid to exploit Black workers.
“I see no reason why the industrialists should not improve the living conditions of their workers,” she said.
In the documentary, Stanley Cohen, the managing director of the OK Bazaars supermarket chain owned by his family, was asked why he only employed whites behind the counter and no South Africans of other races even though many of the customers were Black. Cohen acknowledged that it was not a legal requirement, but did it to indulge the racist prejudices of white customers.
“There is no reason why they [Black people] can’t work behind the counters. There’s no law against it. But there is this natural prejudice in this country which you can’t legislate for or against,” he said.
A decade later, power was shifting. The uprising that began in Soweto in 1976 had become a full-blown national crisis for the apartheid system by the 1980s. A low-level civil war was under way. In response, the state grew even more violent and repressive. White paranoia was fed by the creep of independent Black African states under Marxist-leaning governments ever closer to South Africa’s borders, with Angola and Mozambique in the 1970s followed by Zimbabwe in 1980.
Talk of white genocide emerged, a conspiracy theory that has taken on new life in recent times with the killings of white farmers in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Support surged for the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), or Afrikaner Resistance Movement, founded in the early 1970s to oppose any relaxation of apartheid.
The AWB, founded by Eugene Terre’Blanche, an imposing and flamboyant figure given to riding around on a horse from which he occasionally fell off, made no secret of its model with a badge strikingly similar to a swastika in design and colors. It’s supporters were also fond of the stiff-armed Hitler salute as they paraded on the streets of Pretoria. At its peak, the AWB appeared to have the support of more than 10% of white South Africans.
Roberts said life for privileged whites in particular was “definitely a bubble, and one filled with self-belief”. But she said that it became increasingly difficult to ignore reality.
“I think Musk in Pretoria in the 1980s must have had a sense of what Black people were experiencing and why they were angry. I grew up fairly conservative but I was able to change my views. I think you have to be fairly rigid in the 80s to still cling on to the belief that the apartheid system was fine and correct and in everybody’s best interest,” she said.
Musk left South Africa in 1988 in the midst of this ferment, two years before FW de Klerk carved out a path to freedom by releasing Nelson Mandela. Had he stayed, Musk faced being conscripted into the military for two years, an obligatory service for white men, that could well have meant fighting in the “border war” in Angola and Namibia or being sent to put down Black protests in the townships.
Instead, Musk took Canadian citizenship through his mother and moved to Ontario. Van Niekerk said that, whether he wants to admit it or not, Musk also took a part of South Africa with him.
“We all [white South Africans], by the very nature of our privileges and our place in the racial hierarchy, grew up believing we were the master race, even if we didn’t actively think about it,” he said.
Chris McGreal is the Guardian’s former Johannesburg correspondent
When Elon Musk’s arm shot out in a stiff arm salute at Donald Trump’s inaugural celebrations, startled viewers mostly drew the obvious comparison.
But in the fired-up debate about Musk’s intent that followed, as the world’s richest man insisted he wasn’t trying to be a Nazi, speculation inevitably focused on whether his roots in apartheid-era South Africa offered an insight.
In recent months Musk’s promotion of far-right conspiracy theories has grown, from a deepening hostility to democratic institutions to the recent endorsement of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). He has taken an unhealthy interest in genetics while backing claims of a looming “white genocide” in his South African homeland and endorsing posts promoting the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Increasingly, his language and tone have come to echo the old South Africa.
He is not alone. Musk is part of the “PayPal mafia” of libertarian billionaires with roots in South Africa under white rule now hugely influential in the US tech industry and politics.
They include Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated. Thiel, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021 biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as “economically sound”.
David Sacks, formerly PayPal’s chief operating officer and now a leading fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young. A fourth member of the mafia, Roelof Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha, and former PayPal CFO, has kept a lower political profile but remains close to Musk.
Related: ‘Reactionary nihilism’: how a rightwing movement strives to end US democracy
Among them, Musk stands out for his ownership of X, which is increasingly a platform for far-right views, and his proximity to Trump, who has nominated Musk to head a “department of government efficiency” to slash and burn its way through the federal bureaucracy.
Some draw a straight line between Musk’s formative years atop a complex system of racial hierarchy as a white male, in a country increasingly at war with itself as the South African government became ever more repressive as resistance to apartheid grew, and the man we see at Trump’s side today.
The week before the inauguration, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, described white South Africans as the “most racist people on earth”, questioned their involvement in US politics and said Musk was a malign influence who should go back to the country of his birth.
Others are sceptical that Musk’s increasingly extreme views can be tracked back to his upbringing in Pretoria. The acclaimed South African writer Jonny Steinberg recently called attempts to explain Musk through his childhood under apartheid “a bad idea” that resulted in “facile” conclusions.
But for those looking to join dots, there is fodder from Musk’s early life with a neo-Nazi grandfather who moved from Canada to South Africa because he liked the idea of apartheid through his high school education in a system infused with the ideology of white supremacy.
Musk’s formative years in the 1980s came amid a cauldron of rebellion in the Black townships which drew a state of emergency and a bloody crackdown by the state. Some whites fled the country. Others marched with the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement against any weakening of apartheid.
The South Africa into which Musk was born in 1971, and to which Thiel moved as a child from Germany, was led by a prime minister, John Vorster, who had been a general in a fascist militia three decades earlier that allied itself with Hitler.
The Ossewabrandwag (OB) was founded shortly before the second world war. It opposed South Africa entering the war as an ally of Britain and plotted with German military intelligence to assassinate the prime minster, Jan Smuts, as a prelude to an armed uprising in support of Hitler.
Vorster made no secret of his sympathy for Nazi, or National Socialist, ideology which he compared to the Afrikaner political philosophy of Christian nationalism.
“We stand for Christian nationalism which is an ally of National Socialism,” he said in 1942. “You can call this anti-democratic principle dictatorship if you wish. In Italy it is called ‘Fascism’, in Germany ‘German National Socialism’ and in South Africa ‘Christian nationalism’.”
Smuts’s government took a dim view of that and a few weeks later interned Vorster as a Nazi sympathiser.
Related: KKK distributes flyers in Kentucky telling immigrants to ‘leave now’
At the end of the war, the OB was absorbed into the National party, which then won the 1948 election, in which Black South Africans had no vote, on a commitment to impose apartheid. In 1961, Vorster joined the government as minister of justice and five years later became prime minister.
Nazism may have been defeated in Europe but Christian nationalism was alive and kicking in South Africa under Vorster, with its own brand of racial classification and stratification justified by the need to keep the “swart gevaar”, or black danger, at bay.
In schools, Christian nationalist education sought to forge a South African identity around a singular version of the country’s history. Musk and Thiel were taught that the Afrikaner, mostly the descendants of Dutch colonisers, was the real victim of South Africa’s strife whether at the hands of grasping British imperialists or treacherous Zulu chiefs.
The truth is we didn’t see Black people quite as equals. We didn’t think about it
Bea Roberts, who grew up in an apartheid-supporting family but came to oppose the system and later worked for the Institute for a Democratic South Africa, remembers a heavy emphasis on Afrikaners as victims pursuing apartheid in order to protect their culture and even their very existence.
“It was a strange mix of ‘we got fucked up by the British in the [second Boer] war, and our women and children died in thousands in the concentration camps’ so we are going to rebuild our nation and make sure that that we are invincible. And we’ll do that by extreme means,” she said.
Schooling, like much else, was segregated by race for most of the apartheid era and, on paper at least, white pupils across South Africa were subject to the same Christian nationalist education. But white society was itself divided and the historical narrative embraced in Afrikaans-speaking schools could often became the basis for an implicit rejection of apartheid philosophy in English-speaking ones.
Musk attended a Johannesburg high school and then the Pretoria boys high school, an institution whose other alumni include students who went on to become leading anti-apartheid activists such as Edwin Cameron, a South African supreme court justice after the collapse of white rule, and Peter Hain, who moved to Britain, where he became a leading campaigner against apartheid and then a Labour government minister.
Phillip Van Niekerk, former editor of the leading anti-apartheid Mail and Guardian newspaper in Johannesburg, had Afrikaner parents but attended an English-speaking school. He recalled that the official version of history did little to engender support for the apartheid system among a lot of English speakers even if they benefited from it and did little to challenge it.
“We hated the National party government. Even our teachers were kind of hostile. It was seen almost like an imposition. Yet you imbibe things through the culture. The truth is we didn’t see Black people quite as equals. We didn’t think about it,” he said.
Thiel got all that and more at schools in South Africa and its de facto colony, South West Africa, which became independent as Namibia in 1990.
South West Africa had been a German colony until the end of the first world war and Thiel lived for a time in the city of Swakopmund, where he attended a German-language school while his father worked at a nearby uranium mine.
At that time, Swakopmund was notorious for its continued glorification of Nazism, including celebrating Hitler’s birthday. In 1976, the New York Times reported that some people in the town continued to greet each other with “Heil Hitler” and to give the Nazi salute.
Van Niekerk visited Swakopmund during South African rule.
“I was there in the 1980s and you could walk into a curio shop and buy mugs with Nazi swastikas on them. If you’re German and you’re in Swakopmund in the 1970s, which is when Thiel was there, you’re part of that community,” he said.
Thiel, who moved to the US when he was 10, has described his schooling in Swakopmund as instilling a dislike of regimentation that steered him towards libertarianism.
Thiel’s father worked at a uranium mine in Rössing where, as in the gold and coalmines of the Reef around Johannesburg, Black laborers were paid just enough to survive, living conditions were dire and the work dangerous. White managers, on the other hand, lived a lifestyle of neo-colonial luxury with servants at the ready.
Musk’s father, Errol, was also in the mining business among other interests. He once boasted that his stake in Zambian emerald mines made him “so much money we couldn’t even close our safe”. Musk’s mother, Maye, has said the family owned two homes, a plane, a yacht and a handful of luxury cars.
Errol Musk has said that he opposed apartheid and joined the Progressive Federal party but then left because he didn’t like its demand for one person, one vote, and instead favored a more gradual reform with separate parliaments for different races. That was the liberal position inside the Musk family.
Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, moved from Canada to South Africa in 1950 because he liked the newly elected apartheid government.
In the 1930s, Haldeman was the Canadian leader of a fringe political movement originating in the US, Technocracy Incorporated, that advocated abolishing democracy in favor of government by elite technicians but which took on overtones of fascism with its uniforms and salutes.
The Canadian government banned Technocracy Incorporated during the second world war as a threat to the country’s security in part for its opposition to fighting Hitler. Haldeman was charged with publishing documents opposing the war and sent to prison for two months.
After the war, Haldeman led a separate political party that among other things promoted the antisemitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When that went nowhere, he moved to South Africa because he said he liked the core National party philosophy of Christian nationalism that Vorster likened to Nazism.
Errol Musk described Maye’s parents as so extreme he stopped visiting them.
We white South Africans, by the very nature of our privileges and our place in the racial hierarchy, grew up believing we were the master race
“They were very fanatical in favor of apartheid,” he told Podcast and Chill. “Her parents came to South Africa from Canada because they sympathised with the Afrikaner government. They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff.”
Haldeman was killed in a plane crash when Elon was three years old but the boy remained close to his grandmother and mother. He is estranged from his father, whom Maye has described as abusive of her and their children. Errol Musk once claimed to have shot and killed three people who broke into his house.
Musk has described his father as a “terrible human being”.
“Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done,” he told Rolling Stone without elaborating in 2017.
What is indisputable is that Musk and Thiel grew up amid incredible privilege where the racial hierarchy was clear. Those who claimed to reject apartheid sought to explain this privilege not as the result of systemic racial oppression but the natural order of things thanks to their own abilities. That in turn led some to regard all forms government as oppressive and true liberty as an individual battle for survival.
The biography of Thiel said he held a view common among apartheid’s supporters at the time that Black South Africans were better off than Africans in other parts of the continent even if they were systematically denied their rights. Thiel has denied ever having supported apartheid.
Van Niekerk said that opposition to apartheid did not necessarily mean rejection of white supremacy or privilege, a point made in a 1968 British television documentary the year before Thiel was born.
The commentary observed that the English-speaking mining barons and other industrialists in Johannesburg usually claimed to be “hostile to apartheid, call themselves liberal” but did little to oppose the system while profiting from it.
Helen Suzman, at the time a member of the South African parliament who was often a lone voice in opposition to apartheid, was critical of these powerful industrialists and businessmen, saying “people who do nothing are responsible”. She accused them of hiding behind apartheid to exploit Black workers.
“I see no reason why the industrialists should not improve the living conditions of their workers,” she said.
In the documentary, Stanley Cohen, the managing director of the OK Bazaars supermarket chain owned by his family, was asked why he only employed whites behind the counter and no South Africans of other races even though many of the customers were Black. Cohen acknowledged that it was not a legal requirement, but did it to indulge the racist prejudices of white customers.
“There is no reason why they [Black people] can’t work behind the counters. There’s no law against it. But there is this natural prejudice in this country which you can’t legislate for or against,” he said.
A decade later, power was shifting. The uprising that began in Soweto in 1976 had become a full-blown national crisis for the apartheid system by the 1980s. A low-level civil war was under way. In response, the state grew even more violent and repressive. White paranoia was fed by the creep of independent Black African states under Marxist-leaning governments ever closer to South Africa’s borders, with Angola and Mozambique in the 1970s followed by Zimbabwe in 1980.
Talk of white genocide emerged, a conspiracy theory that has taken on new life in recent times with the killings of white farmers in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Support surged for the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), or Afrikaner Resistance Movement, founded in the early 1970s to oppose any relaxation of apartheid.
The AWB, founded by Eugene Terre’Blanche, an imposing and flamboyant figure given to riding around on a horse from which he occasionally fell off, made no secret of its model with a badge strikingly similar to a swastika in design and colors. It’s supporters were also fond of the stiff-armed Hitler salute as they paraded on the streets of Pretoria. At its peak, the AWB appeared to have the support of more than 10% of white South Africans.
Roberts said life for privileged whites in particular was “definitely a bubble, and one filled with self-belief”. But she said that it became increasingly difficult to ignore reality.
“I think Musk in Pretoria in the 1980s must have had a sense of what Black people were experiencing and why they were angry. I grew up fairly conservative but I was able to change my views. I think you have to be fairly rigid in the 80s to still cling on to the belief that the apartheid system was fine and correct and in everybody’s best interest,” she said.
Musk left South Africa in 1988 in the midst of this ferment, two years before FW de Klerk carved out a path to freedom by releasing Nelson Mandela. Had he stayed, Musk faced being conscripted into the military for two years, an obligatory service for white men, that could well have meant fighting in the “border war” in Angola and Namibia or being sent to put down Black protests in the townships.
Instead, Musk took Canadian citizenship through his mother and moved to Ontario. Van Niekerk said that, whether he wants to admit it or not, Musk also took a part of South Africa with him.
“We all [white South Africans], by the very nature of our privileges and our place in the racial hierarchy, grew up believing we were the master race, even if we didn’t actively think about it,” he said.
Chris McGreal is the Guardian’s former Johannesburg correspondent
Sat, January 18, 2025
MASHABLE
Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos, the trifecta of tech titans — all now supporting Donald Trump.
The sight of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg sitting together at Donald Trump's inauguration — as they reportedly will do Monday — would be a shock for their 2016 selves.
Back then, these titans of the tech world were way to the left of Trump, whose political stances put him about as far to the right as Republicans get, then and now.
Musk, once a vocal Barack Obama supporter, voted for Trump's opponent Hillary Clinton in 2016. The Bezos of that year blasted candidate Trump for "eroding democracy." Zuckerberg didn't make an endorsement, but the issues he put his money behind at the time — social justice, inequality, easing the immigration process — put him squarely on the Democratic side of the political line.
The most vocal tech world supporter of Trump in 2016, Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, was seen as an outlier back then: Silicon Valley was solid blue. Now the outlier is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who hasn't donated to Trump's inauguration fund and won't be attending.
All the other big names in tech will be there: Apple's Tim Cook, Google's Sundar Pichai, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and TikTok's Shou Chew, have all donated $1 million or more, and all save Altman will be in attendance.
What happened? It wasn't just that these men were made so much richer by a stock market rally following Trump's election in November. A similar rally happened in November 2016 as well, and it didn't make tech CEOs any less reluctant at a Trump Tower meeting with the president-elect. That was the roundtable where Thiel's smile stood out in a sea of grimaces.
Back then, these titans of the tech world were way to the left of Trump, whose political stances put him about as far to the right as Republicans get, then and now.
Musk, once a vocal Barack Obama supporter, voted for Trump's opponent Hillary Clinton in 2016. The Bezos of that year blasted candidate Trump for "eroding democracy." Zuckerberg didn't make an endorsement, but the issues he put his money behind at the time — social justice, inequality, easing the immigration process — put him squarely on the Democratic side of the political line.
The most vocal tech world supporter of Trump in 2016, Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, was seen as an outlier back then: Silicon Valley was solid blue. Now the outlier is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who hasn't donated to Trump's inauguration fund and won't be attending.
All the other big names in tech will be there: Apple's Tim Cook, Google's Sundar Pichai, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and TikTok's Shou Chew, have all donated $1 million or more, and all save Altman will be in attendance.
What happened? It wasn't just that these men were made so much richer by a stock market rally following Trump's election in November. A similar rally happened in November 2016 as well, and it didn't make tech CEOs any less reluctant at a Trump Tower meeting with the president-elect. That was the roundtable where Thiel's smile stood out in a sea of grimaces.
Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, left, and Apple CEO Tim Cook display very different reactions to Donald Trump speaking after his 2016 election.
Credit: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
The process of tech leaders learning to love Trump may have begun piecemeal during his first administration. But it only really kicked into high gear over the course of 2024, with a speed and ferocity that has left many observers' heads spinning. No wonder President Biden, in his farewell address, warned of a tech-led "oligarchy" that may threaten democracy itself.
To understand what happened, let's take a look at the three richest tech bros, who also happen to be the three wealthiest men in the world, and the journey they took from opposing Trump in 2023 to sitting together at his inauguration in 2025.
Elon Musk
Nowadays, of course, Musk is so central in Trump's camp that he is sometimes described as the incoming "co-president." He donated $250 million, spoke at Trump rallies, called himself "Dark MAGA," and clearly put more than a thumb on the scale for Trump on Twitter/X throughout the fall of 2024.
Musk's America PAC seized the @America account from its original owner, and even now faces a fresh lawsuit from Pennsylvania's Attorney General over that PAC's dubious $1 million lottery for swing state voters.
But it's important to remember that Musk wasn't always this far right, and his turn towards Trump came fairly recently. Yes, he joined Trump's business council in 2017, but he also quit when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate accords. Back then, the Bay Area-based Burning Man attendee was still happy to support Pride month.
Musk drifted rightwards during the pandemic years, when he moved Tesla HQ to Texas and, according to reports, began feuding with his trans daughter. The drift seems to have accelerated when he bought Twitter in 2022, started tweeting about the "woke mind virus," and endorsed the GOP (unsuccessfully) in that year's midterm elections.
Even then, Musk was no Trump fan. In 2023 he helped launch Florida governor Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign in a disastrous Twitter Spaces. Musk's statement that Trump should "sail into the sunset" prompted a brief feud with the former president. "I could have said, "drop to your knees and beg," and he would have done it," Trump responded, recalling an Oval Office meeting in his first term.
Then came 2024, and three key events. First, DeSantis dropped out in January. Then on May 31, Donald Trump's conviction in a New York courtroom over hush money payments that possibly swung a close 2016 election his way. Musk fumed that the charges were "trivial" and politically motivated. By then, perhaps not coincidentally, Trump was already talking to Musk about a possible advisory role — and we were starting to learn just how many federal agencies were investigating Musk.
But the deal was sealed in July when Trump survived a shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk "fully endorsed" Trump on Twitter that day, then made his first appearance with Trump on his return to Butler in October.
By then, Trump had already promised Musk his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, the advisory group that Musk is set to lead along with fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy. The latest reports on DOGE say that Musk will have an office inside the White House itself.
Notably, Musk did not have to drop to his knees and beg for any of this. Which leads us to wonder: who is really on whose leash here?
The process of tech leaders learning to love Trump may have begun piecemeal during his first administration. But it only really kicked into high gear over the course of 2024, with a speed and ferocity that has left many observers' heads spinning. No wonder President Biden, in his farewell address, warned of a tech-led "oligarchy" that may threaten democracy itself.
To understand what happened, let's take a look at the three richest tech bros, who also happen to be the three wealthiest men in the world, and the journey they took from opposing Trump in 2023 to sitting together at his inauguration in 2025.
Elon Musk
Nowadays, of course, Musk is so central in Trump's camp that he is sometimes described as the incoming "co-president." He donated $250 million, spoke at Trump rallies, called himself "Dark MAGA," and clearly put more than a thumb on the scale for Trump on Twitter/X throughout the fall of 2024.
Musk's America PAC seized the @America account from its original owner, and even now faces a fresh lawsuit from Pennsylvania's Attorney General over that PAC's dubious $1 million lottery for swing state voters.
But it's important to remember that Musk wasn't always this far right, and his turn towards Trump came fairly recently. Yes, he joined Trump's business council in 2017, but he also quit when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate accords. Back then, the Bay Area-based Burning Man attendee was still happy to support Pride month.
Musk drifted rightwards during the pandemic years, when he moved Tesla HQ to Texas and, according to reports, began feuding with his trans daughter. The drift seems to have accelerated when he bought Twitter in 2022, started tweeting about the "woke mind virus," and endorsed the GOP (unsuccessfully) in that year's midterm elections.
Even then, Musk was no Trump fan. In 2023 he helped launch Florida governor Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign in a disastrous Twitter Spaces. Musk's statement that Trump should "sail into the sunset" prompted a brief feud with the former president. "I could have said, "drop to your knees and beg," and he would have done it," Trump responded, recalling an Oval Office meeting in his first term.
Then came 2024, and three key events. First, DeSantis dropped out in January. Then on May 31, Donald Trump's conviction in a New York courtroom over hush money payments that possibly swung a close 2016 election his way. Musk fumed that the charges were "trivial" and politically motivated. By then, perhaps not coincidentally, Trump was already talking to Musk about a possible advisory role — and we were starting to learn just how many federal agencies were investigating Musk.
But the deal was sealed in July when Trump survived a shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk "fully endorsed" Trump on Twitter that day, then made his first appearance with Trump on his return to Butler in October.
By then, Trump had already promised Musk his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, the advisory group that Musk is set to lead along with fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy. The latest reports on DOGE say that Musk will have an office inside the White House itself.
Notably, Musk did not have to drop to his knees and beg for any of this. Which leads us to wonder: who is really on whose leash here?
Jeff Bezos
In the 2016 election, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was one of Trump's most outspoken critics in the tech world. A month after Trump entered the White House, Bezos' Washington Post unveiled its pointed new slogan, echoing its owner's warnings: "Democracy dies in darkness." Bezos and the Post's coverage continued to earn Trump's ire.
Two years later, in an equally pithy Medium post, Bezos attacked Trump ally David Pecker, head of the company that owns the National Enquirer, for what Bezos said was blackmail over nude photos of the billionaire.
But a curious thing had started to happen by then. With his growing wealth, which spiked in the late 2010s, plus his new marriage and new yacht, Bezos started to develop a serious case of Rich Guy Brain. By 2022, his tone on social media had changed entirely, becoming much more Musk-like. No longer was Bezos skewering his Trumpian opponents for literally threatening to expose his ass; instead, he was discussing compliments on his ass.
Finally came the moment that Bezos' opposition broke. His top lieutenant at the Post told staffers there would be no presidential endorsement in 2024 — which, if democracy was still at risk, seemed a curious case of fence-sitting. (Indeed, the Post staff had prepared a Kamala Harris endorsement that was effectively spiked.)
More than 200,000 Post subscribers cancelled their subscription in disgust. Still, Bezos seemed unmoved. This time he penned a piece explaining that newspaper endorsements didn't matter. It was, he said, a complete coincidence that Trump was visiting his space company Blue Origin the same day.
After the election, Bezos continued his shift towards Trump. In a December interview he said the incoming president was "calmer" and had "grown a lot over the last eight years." Time will tell whether that's true, or whether Bezos has simply shifted to the side of Dark MAGA.
Mark Zuckerberg
Unlike Musk and Bezos, who moved Trumpwards all at once, the Facebook founder seems to have slalomed back and forth in his attempts to placate Republicans in Washington since Trump first took office.
Prior to Trump's first election, Zuckerberg was easily the most liberal of this Big Tech trio. As a New York Times investigation during election season noted, he helped found Fwd.us, an advocacy group dedicated to giving undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. The Zuckerberg-Chan initiative spent nearly half a trillion dollars on causes such as legalizing drugs, reducing the number of people in U.S. prisons, and promoting universal healthcare.
But then in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, Zuckerberg quickly tossed aside claims that unchecked fake news on Facebook had contributed to Trump's victory. He later regretted that stance, but not enough to avoid being dubbed Misinformer of the Year in 2017 by the watchdog group Media Matters for America.
Zuckerberg's response to Trump's first election was twofold: he minimized the presence of news posts in Facebook feeds, which unintentionally contributed to a widespread crash in readership for media entities. And he set up a fact-checking service, which often earned the ire of conservative groups. The fact-checking service was nuked in January 2025, pleasing the incoming Trump administration.
Often wanting to appear amenable to conservative concerns about the news feed and which stories get promoted, Zuckerberg made repeated changes to the algorithm that boosted pro-GOP voices. When internal data showed right-wing news sites like the Daily Caller were getting more interactions on Facebook than anyone else, Zuckerberg nixed the release of that data.
The more amenable he is, however, the more conservative voices (including Musk) complain — an old tactic called "playing the ref." Now Zuckerberg has morphed again, apologizing even for his donation to election integrity groups in 2020. Most recently, he told Joe Rogan that corporate America needs more "masculine energy."
What that means for the social media giant remains to be seen, but America is certainly about to get a lot more oligarch energy from Zuck and his fellow tech bros.
Experts sound the alarm over Meta's controversial decision about fact-checking on Facebook: '[The] effects have become more obvious and proven every day'
Alyssa Ochs
Sun, January 26, 2025
Tech giant Meta has eliminated fact-checking and made it possible for false climate information to spread online more rapidly.
Social media sites are now at a heightened risk of misleading the public and undermining scientific proof of our planet's rapidly changing climate.
What's happening?
As E&E News reported, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg will partner with President-elect Donald Trump to reduce censorship at the expense of accurate fact-checking. He stated his belief that fact-checking has gone too far and that fact-checkers have become politically biased.
Meta no longer partners with newsrooms, climate scientists, or other third-party moderators. Instead, its platforms will rely on their users to identify inaccuracies and fake news.
The company is also moving its domestic content moderation team from California to Texas to address Zuckerberg's concerns about bias and censorship.
Why is climate fact-checking important?
Climate scientists are concerned about Meta's abandonment of fact-checking because it could lead to misinformation that hinders global progress toward a cleaner, greener future.
Watch now: High-speed rail can cut an hour commute to 15 minutes — so why isn't it more prevalent?
Climate fact-checking helps dispel myths that lead to misunderstandings and inaction to improve public health and sustainability. It ensures access to accurate information and helps people make informed decisions about their daily behavior and community involvement.
Michael Khoo from Friends of the Earth said: "Disinformation's effects have become more obvious and proven every day. We're seeing it hamstring our ability to mitigate climate change with false attacks on wind power."
Andrew Dessler from Texas A&M University said: "The trend is towards living in a world where there basically are no facts. This is just sort of another step down the road."
Trump Staffers Expect More Ring-Kissing, Sucking Up From Mark Zuckerberg
William Vaillancourt
Fri, January 24, 2025
Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg may have donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, ended Facebook’s fact-checking program, and shelved Meta’s DEI initiatives, but those close to Trump say that should be just the start of the tech billionaire’s attempts to ingratiate himself with the president.
“There is a lot more ass-kissing that needs to be done,” a senior Trump administration official told Rolling Stone on Friday. “He just needs to prove himself. It’s a good start, but he can’t just snap his fingers and make the past not happen.”
Zuckerberg, who traveled to Mar-a-Lago in December, has since been publicly critical of both the Biden administration, and more generally about how society is being “emasculated.”
Those comments came on Joe Rogan’s podcast a few weeks ago, around the time that Zuckerberg added Trump pal Dana White to the board of Meta—another move seen as part of Zuckerberg’s plan to align his social media platform with Trump’s vision.
Another White House official told Rolling Stone that they will be “keeping an eye on how (Zuckerberg) follows through” on those plans.
Zuckerberg’s eyes, meanwhile, have been elsewhere.
Zuckerberg promised Trump crony Stephen Miller he would not ‘obstruct’ president-elect’s agenda
Ariana Baio
INDEPENDENT UK
January 17, 2025·
Less than two months before Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta would be axing its diversity, equity and inclusion program, he assured Trump adviser Stephen Miller that he would not get in the way of the president-elect’s agenda.
The meeting between Zuckerberg, the billionaire co-founder of Facebook and CEO of Meta, and Miller, a powerful figure within Donald Trump’s inner circle and the architect of his hard-line immigration policies, happened shortly after the president-elect won the election.
Miller told Zuckerberg he had a chance to help change the United States – on Trump’s terms, sources familiar with the conversation told the New York Times.
Those terms include ditching DEI policies that corporate America, such as Meta, had openly embraced roughly four years ago during the Black Lives Matter movement.
January 17, 2025·
Less than two months before Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta would be axing its diversity, equity and inclusion program, he assured Trump adviser Stephen Miller that he would not get in the way of the president-elect’s agenda.
The meeting between Zuckerberg, the billionaire co-founder of Facebook and CEO of Meta, and Miller, a powerful figure within Donald Trump’s inner circle and the architect of his hard-line immigration policies, happened shortly after the president-elect won the election.
Miller told Zuckerberg he had a chance to help change the United States – on Trump’s terms, sources familiar with the conversation told the New York Times.
Those terms include ditching DEI policies that corporate America, such as Meta, had openly embraced roughly four years ago during the Black Lives Matter movement.
Stephen Miller, an influential Trump adviser, is held largely responsible for creating Trump’s hard-line immigration policies. He reportedly met with Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg shortly after the election (AP)
Zuckerberg reportedly agreed and signaled that changes were coming to the company to oversees Facebook and Instagram. Sources familiar with the conversation said Zuckeblamed Meta’s former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for pushing inclusivity policies at the company.
In early January, those close to Zuckerberg reportedly shared the potential changes with Miller. Days later, the changes to Meta’s diversity program were made public.
The tech giant said as a result of the Supreme Court declaring some diversity programs unconstitutional it plans to end its DEI programs across training, hiring and choosing suppliers, according to an internal memo seen by Axios.
Facebook also announced it would cease its fact-checking program and instead rely on community notes – a similar function implemented on X, the platform owned by Trump’s close friend Elon Musk.
Fact-checkers, who pushed back on Trump’s false claims of mass election fraud after the 2020 election, were another ire of the president-elect.
Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has recently become friendly with Trump. He reportedly talked DEI programs with Miller at a recent meeting (AP)
The Trump-inspired changes to the tech giant’s extraordinarily influential platform are happening as the United States prepares for a second, but far more calculated, Trump presidency.
Zuckerberg and other tech giants such as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and TikTok CEO Shou Chew have immediately flocked to the president ahead of inauguration, hoping to make nice with him before he implements sweeping changes across the country.
With four years of presidential experience, and another four years of building grudges, Trump is coming into the White House fully prepared to upend the policies he dislikes. He’s relying on influential people such as Miller to help him deliver on those.
The Independent asked the Trump–Vance transition team and Meta for comment.
No comments:
Post a Comment