What should be done about the world’s richest man, and all that he represents? Here in South Africa, it is tempting to contrast Elon Musk to our other most famous recent personality, Nelson Mandela, a symbol of freedom, justice and political equality for all.
Mandela led one of the last century’s greatest human achievements – ending Apartheid, a crime against humanity – by invoking the decency of people across the world, in unity with the oppressed in Black South African society. The result in 1994 was achievement of democracy based on his liberation movement’s demand, ‘one person, one vote, in a unitary state.’
Musk, in contrast, symbolises a no-holds-barred, crisis-prone, ultra-exploitative racial capitalism whose ideology fuses corporate-dominated economic libertarianism with a surveillance-centric militarised state and a personal drift to the ultra-right. Musk is advancing what former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis terms ‘techno-feudalism,’ which is now generating a series of social, political, economic and ecological disasters.
Currently, the most ferocious South African battleground is Musk’s attack on affirmative action; specifically, so-called ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ policies that compel him to find an indigenous co-investor for the Starlink satellite network to be licensed here. (Such arrangements are typically achieved through loans.) Musk refuses to do so because “Starlink is a global system, and we must retain sole ownership of all our subsidiaries for operational purpose” – an unconvincing excuse similar to any other time a corporation will evoke ‘operational’ reasons for anything they don’t want to explain.
The real reason for Musk’s opposition to black empowerment appears to be ideological, for he claims, “South Africa now has more anti-White laws than there were anti-Black laws under Apartheid” – a feeble argument that implicitly denies the way white South Africans committed what the United Nations termed a ‘crime against humanity.’ There is no ‘anti-White’ law on the books restricting voting, residence or other aspects of formal segregation, or even reversing the outright, widespread thefts of land and property committed during colonialism and Apartheid to Black people in the land of their birth.
Hence Musk’s local allies are seeking a non-partnering alternative for him to empower people considered the victims of settler colonialism from 1652-1994, e.g. the $30 million worth of free internet services Starlink has offered to rural schools. But this process has coincided with Musk both buying X.com (Twitter) and making absurd claims (to 240 million followers) about alleged dangers to the country’s white citizens, especially the nonsensical ‘Afrikaner farmer genocide’ trope. That, in turn, informed Donald Trump’s maniacal opposition to anything South African (aside from his friendship with white golfers).
While we do not see Mandela as the all-conquering hero beyond criticism, he is a figure who inspires a sense of pride for South Africans. Musk reminds of our need to apologise to the world on behalf of a society that from 1971-89 raised such an individual – and it also reminds of the same solution that Mandela promoted to end Apartheid: boycott the oppressor’s operations as much as possible, so as to shift power relations and delegitimise his hate speech.
Applied to Musk, that spirit could result in regulation or even nationalization of Big Data firms – especially given AI’s existential threats, as he himself identified back in 2014 – and will depend upon contexts, but the urgent necessity of weakening ‘Muskism’ cannot be denied.
A violent childhood in South Africa
Although at the time of writing, Forbes estimates Musk is worth $709 billion, he did reach $1.45 trillion in June, just after his SpaceX was offered to New York Stock Exchange investors – in part because of tricks that will compel many ordinary investors to buy his shares in the weeks ahead. Losing such a vast share of wealth on the speculative New York stock market reminds of his early-2025 net worth shrinkage – but then, it was a consumer boycott against his Tesla cars and X.com social media that wiped out a quarter of his wealth, as recalled below.
Such erratic personal wealth reflects Musk’s chaotic way of relating to the world around him. The roots of his ideology run deep into white South Africa’s own psychoses. Elon captured the soul of his father Errol – who was enriched during the mid-1980s as a merchant of emeralds illegally extracted from Zambia – in a 2017 Rolling Stone interview: “He’s a terrible human being… Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.”
Musk was born in the capital, Pretoria, and partly raised in Johannesburg – the world’s most unequal city – and Durban, but the most important moment in his South African years was when in 1984, as he put it in a CBS 60 Minutes interview, “I was almost beaten to death” during a high school bullying incident that left him hospitalized for a week. Describing his 1970s-80s life growing up under Apartheid, he continued, “It was very violent. It was not a happy childhood.”
His younger brother Kimbal was an eyewitness when a group of boys pounded Musk: “When they got finished, I couldn’t even recognise his face. It was such a swollen ball of flesh that you could barely see his eyes.” Nearly three decades later, the incident required corrective surgery, as he tweeted in 2013: “Was beat up pretty badly as a kid & left me w jagged septum. Harder to breathe as I got older, so time to fix.”
Errol told Elon’s biographer that the bullying attack occurred in retribution, because his son teased someone who “had just lost his father to suicide and Elon had called him stupid. Elon had a tendency to call people stupid. How could I possibly blame that child?”
The Johannesburg school at which this happened, Bryanston High, was a well-located all-white public school in 1984, training the country’s racist elites to run a society that required extreme brutality by the mid-1980s. Nearby was Sandton, a commercial area that, within a decade (as wealthy whites fled the center of town), would become Johannesburg’s central business district, the so-called ‘richest square mile in Africa.’ This space has consistently been cited by PwC consultancy as the world’s worst site for ‘economic crime and fraud.’
By 1989 at age 17 (prior to compulsory military service for Apartheid), Musk had fled to Canada, his mother’s home country, where his grandfather was supportive of Nazi Germany before moving to a welcoming Apartheid-era South Africa. In 1992, Musk enrolled at the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia, from where Donald Trump had himself graduated in 1968. Musk’s 1997 undergraduate degree there combined economics and physics, at a time financial training was increasingly mathematical, promoting market-speculation modelling.
Muskism’s deadly days at the wood chipper
Musk appears to have amplified the values of white South Africa and Wharton, leaving behind whatever he had briefly experienced in social-democratic Canada. Musk is a man who was built up during Apartheid and later in the U.S. through massive infusions of public money, yet presents himself as a rational critic of waste, fraud, abuse and privilege.
The ideology of ‘Muskism‘ – as dissected by Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian – is one way to capture Musk’s ‘techno-king’ role. As New York Times book reviewer Jennifer Szalai put it, “Muskism – with its uncanny mix of ruthless state power and juvenile memes – is already bigger than its namesake.”
Worse, behind Trump’s project lies not just the immediate neo-fascist ideology – whether the paleoconservative ‘non-interventionist’, isolationist 2024 election rhetoric or the revived neoconservative militaristic reality – but the danger of a longer-lasting Muskism as what political economists term a ‘regime of accumulation’: to replace what in South Africa we know of both so-called ‘Fordism’ – which Antonio Gramsci coined to capture mass production plus mass consumption – and late-20th century ‘Post-Fordism’.
In early 2025, prior to a temporary but hyperbolic falling out with Trump over the U.S. state deficit, Musk established a ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) reporting directly to the President and Cabinet, at the same time his companies continue to harvest vast federal subsidies. Even as DOGE gutted major parts of the U.S. state, SpaceX was awarded major new defence contracts.
Within days of joining the Trump White House, while apparently addicted to ketamine, Musk demolished the U.S. Agency for International Development, typing on his X.com platform: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
The result was not only devastation to life-saving programmes, but the re-empowerment of the U.S. State Department (which took over distribution of residual USAID funds) led by neoconservative Marco Rubio. For example, a new ‘America First Global Health Strategy’, according to University of Michigan economist Howard Stein, “offered health assistance in exchange for access to health data. These agreements threaten each country’s digital sovereignty and patient privacy, while opening economies to U.S. health-related goods and services. In the case of Zambia, negotiations have been held up due to US insistence that the Memorandum of Understanding be tied to the signing of a critical mineral accord… and continues a long tradition of using the continent’s population for potentially unethical experimentation.”
Ten thousand USAID jobs were quickly cut by DOGE, leaving just 300 employees. To be sure, some staff were employed to promote a neoliberal economic-policy ideology (e.g. through consultancies prolific in transitional South Africa). Washington’s National Endowment for Democracy operated under the pretence that a society committed to free politics would need “free markets and business organizations” and a “neoliberal, pro-corporate ideology,” as leading leftwing activists Ronnie Kasrils and Zwelinzima Vavi charged in 2024.
Yet because U.S. and allied activists had lobbied hard for more overseas aid – and Mandela had in 1998 complained that USAID only gave ‘peanuts’ even though U.S. corporations profited so much from Apartheid – there were finally programmes established at USAID crucial for saving lives. These Musk took aim at, especially against South Africans, and especially Black adolescent girls and women.
One peer-reviewed study – published in Britain’s Lancet journal in mid-2025 – analysed Musk’s potential damage: 14 million anticipated early deaths by 2030 (assuming there was no alternative funding), due to interrupted supplies of medicines, food, emergency assistance, energy and climate financing for adaptation and mitigation (especially to South Africa for a Just Energy Transition loan worth more than $1 billion).
The actual rate of death attributable to Musk’s cuts appears, for Year 1, about a quarter of the Lancet projections, at 700,000, according to former USAID official Atul Gawande. But that will rise, also within the U.S., as another 11 million lost medical insurance in early 2026 thanks to Musk’s DOGE. Women’s reproductive rights were another target of Musk (who has 14 children) thanks to Trump’s evangelical Christian base. The International Planned Parenthood Federation reported that nearly 14,000 family planning clinics closed as a result, accompanied by massive hits to U.S. reproductive healthcare.
In a recent article, “Blame Elon Musk and Donald Trump for the Out-of-Control Ebola Crisis,” the public health specialist who led USAID’s response to the 2014 outbreak, Jeremy Konyndyk, contended that the disease rapidly spread in Central Africa since May 2026 because, “USAID partners had been defunded. The USAID health office that managed relationships with Congolese health officials has been closed, along with the entire USAID presence and workforce in the country. Humanitarian relief and health programs that USAID oversaw in eastern Congo were suspended, disrupted, or fully ended. And the USAID personnel who managed global outbreak surveillance back in Washington were likewise purged.”
Musk was also responsible for the 2024-to-2025 shrinkage ($2.1 billion) in the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) medicines support, including a 51% cut in prevention funding. This resulted in closure of 1,714 service delivery sites in 46 countries (mostly in Africa). An AIDS vaccine developed in South Africa thanks to $45 million in USAID funding was also derailed.
Children were especially reliant upon PEPFAR’s treatment support, according to the International AIDS Society in a recent report: “South Africa recorded the largest absolute decline, with 30,880 fewer children receiving treatment support from PEPFAR – a 45% drop” – while internationally, 77,163 children suffered treatment cuts. South African healthworkers lost even more jobs, including more than 15,000 funded by PEPFAR.
Former USAID employee Nicholas Enrich’s Into the Wood Chipper recounted further healthcare crises in Musk’s homeland: “Within days, the health team at USAID in South Africa alerted the tuberculosis (TB) division in Washington that several clinical trials had been interrupted, preventing hundreds of TB patients who had recently been enrolled on novel treatment regimens from accessing their drugs. Without the medicine provided by USAID through the trials, there were no alternative options for the enrollees to receive treatment for the life-threatening infectious disease. The stop-work orders were in direct conflict with the ethical standards of an ongoing clinical trial, jeopardizing the reputations of renowned research institutions, not to mention the lives of the enrolled individuals, many of whom were children.”
In a July 2026 interview, Economist magazine editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes confronted Musk about “huge numbers of things shut down in Africa.” He angrily replied, “There were claims of this. These claims are false! They’re nonsense! And, and absolute nonsense! But, but obviously just for, when funding is stopped for fraudulent organizations or for something, do you think they’re going to say, do you think they’re going to say, ‘Well, we please keep funding the fraud’? Or do you think they’re going to come up with a sad story that sounds sympathetic in order to get the funding restored? Obviously, it will be the latter. And that’s exactly what they did.”
Musk was asked by Beddoes about fatalities and claimed, “Zero people died because of DOGE… Zero point zero… How many NGOs are there that could that could that could step in… the Gates Foundation has $50 billion. What’s what, what about them? What about any one of a number of organizations? What about um, the, uh um, what Mackenzie whatever her last name is, used to be Bezos, uh, gave $50 billion. What about that?”
In reality, only 2% of respondents in one survey of 166 former USAID recipients had found alternate (full-replacement) sources of programme financing a year later. In short, Musk embarked upon an extraordinary attack upon millions of people living with HIV who had been assisted by PEPFAR over the prior two decades, according to a recent UNAIDS report, as well as countless others defunded by DOGE, and he remained in a surreal state of denial about his deadly impact.
(As for Beddoes, she’s a ‘traitor to the West’, Musk soon tweeted, for asking tough questions.)
Muskism’s degenerate subsidization+exploitation
This is not hypocrisy in any ordinary sense. It is budget-cutting the parts of government that protect society and environment while keeping and expanding the parts that benefit capital. Strip away the biography of the genius-founder, the rockets, the trolling, and what remains of Musk? Not a ‘disruptor’ of ossified systems, but a clear example of how ultra-speculative capital now operates: dependent on the state it claims to despise, extremely hostile to the labor it needs in order to function, and financially and politically committed to movements that strengthen its power around the world.
In 2025, the Washington Post found that Musk and his businesses had received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits before Trump returned to power, including $6.3 billion in 2024 alone. These infusions arrived, repeatedly, at critical moments, helping seed the growth that made him the world’s richest person.
Tesla is the only major American automaker whose workforce is not represented by a union; despite allegations of high injury rates, long hours, and below-industry pay, every union drive across Musk’s facilities has failed. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) protecting workers found Tesla repeatedly violated labor law through coercively interrogating activists engaged in organizing, and using gag orders to silence or fire them.
Musk’s DOGE moved against the NLRB itself, as part of a broader effort to dismantle the legal architecture of collective bargaining, a system erected since 1935 to help stave off the causes and harms of the Great Depression. DOGE therefore implemented austerity but not just in the classical sense. It also promoted a deliberate shift of power from workers to employers, using the apparatus of the state to hollow out the very agencies meant to reasonably constrain capital given knowledge of prior crises.
Musk’s genius mythology — innovator of internet payment systems, electric vehicles and space exploration — is itself ideological in the classical sense. It flips the real relationship between capital and labor, rendering invisible the tens of thousands of workers whose surplus value underwrites every satellite launch and every fevered tweet. Musk did not build the future. He extracted it. When capital this nakedly seizes control of the state, the regulatory apparatus, the infrastructure of public discourse, and the international political field, small reforms stop being enough and may no longer be possible.
As historian Efthimios Karayiannides observed in 2024 in the Africaisacountry ezine, critics complain of the “surprisingly high number of white South Africans among dot-com moguls turned conservative crusaders against liberalism. Four of the founders of PayPal – the ‘company that made the modern internet’ – have some connection to Southern Africa… Musk’s ambitions to colonize Mars have been likened to the Great Trek, the northward migration of Dutch-speaking settlers aimed at escaping the Cape’s British colonial administration, not least its prohibition of slavery. Parallels have been drawn between Musk’s and fellow PayPal mafioso Peter Thiel’s authoritarian approaches to corporate governance and the Apartheid regime’s white supremacist baaskap (‘bossism’) ideology.”
Still, warns Karayiannides, “these are decidedly flimsy bases upon which to draw a connection between these latter-day robber barons and their erstwhile homeland. They rely upon either analogy or psychoanalytic speculation – the notion that some unspecified formative experience of white supremacy has deeply and irrevocably shaped their worldviews.”
The power of Muskism is even more dangerous than simply updating his childhood Apartheid economic privilege: it amplifies broader shifts within capitalism towards AI-induced mass unemployment, ubiquitous surveillance (especially thanks to Palentir, run by Thiel, who also attended school in Johannesburg not far from Bryanstonr), increasingly hierarchical social control, and an even worse tendency than now exists towards ‘financial fabulism.’
SpaceX as signifier of bubbling
The financial engineering Musk learned at Wharton continues to be pernicious, as Horace Campbell has recently shown in leading African ezine Pambazuka. Not only is the broader financialization process to blame, but controversy arose with SpaceX’s Initial Public Offering – before its share valuation collapse in July – because of the apparent willingness of investment index providers to relax, abbreviate or reinterpret their requirements in order to accommodate a company whose scale makes exclusion increasingly difficult.
Under such conditions, prices become influenced not only by assessments of expected risk and return but also by mechanical demand arising from stock-market index construction. Price support, liquidity, and legitimacy accrue immediately to existing shareholders, while much of the attendant risk is absorbed by pension funds and retirement accounts.
The benefits to Musk are correspondingly clear. First, index inclusion can support a higher valuation over a longer term, if the whole market does not melt down. If tens of billions of dollars in compulsory index-fund buying are directed toward a relatively small public float, demand may exceed supply and push prices upward.
Second, it can provide immediate liquidity. A conventional sale of shares requires issuers to persuade investors that the shares are worth buying; index inclusion creates a guaranteed buyer base, reducing uncertainty and allowing existing shareholders to convert paper wealth into realized wealth more readily.
Third, inclusion in the major indices signals that SpaceX belongs among the core firms of the American economy, even if it has not satisfied the older criteria that other established firms were required to meet.
Fourth, it shifts part of the downside risk onto passive investors. If the valuation later proves excessive, pension funds and ETF holders bear part of the cost because they were structurally required to buy.
What is at stake is whether the institutions that govern capital allocation constrain on economic power, or become increasingly responsive to it. The political-economic structure this reveals is not competitive capitalism in any classical sense. Passive investors, pension beneficiaries, and retirement savers become compelled buyers, absorbing downside risk, while insiders convert paper wealth into liquid wealth on preferential terms.
Musk deserves an active, widespread boycott
Most importantly, what Musk’s career illuminates is that American capitalist class power is now based not only on financialized bluffing. It is no longer pretending to be liberal, meritocratic, diverse, and inclusive. Musk’s impact on society has included repeated and increasingly vociferous attacks on people of colour, the trans-community and others outside the white heterosexual mainstream.
By mid-2025, as Musk ordered his X.com to turn off filters prohibiting hate speech, his Grok chatbox SpaceXAI service began to describe itself as a ‘mecha-Hitler’, posting pro-Nazi propaganda in response to questions. And thanks to Musk’s fascist-style straight-arm at a Make America Great Again rally on the day Trump took power in 2025, former Johannesburg Business Day editor (and now centrist Member of Parliament) Songezo Zibi – a former admirer – U-turned and opposed Starlink’s presence in the country.
Wrote Zibi: “Musk has actively promoted white supremacist ideas, including giving the Nazi salute. Call me naïve and idealistic but I still think character matters, but apparently to some people it really doesn’t. He has also spread racist lies about black and brown immigrants in the US and elsewhere… Musk is a proven purveyor of dangerous misinformation and disinformation. He uses his X platform for this purpose and has taken active measures to ensure that the fact-checking capacity the platform use to have has been taken away.”
Zibi’s hostility was in part the result of Musk’s disregard for women, evident in early-2026 postings of non-consensual sexualized images of women and children. Authorities in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines briefly suspended access to Grok, with other European countries investigating Musk’s creation of sexualized deepfake images. Musk initially denied there were “naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero.” (The chatbox itself, however, apologized.)
More recently, in mid-June during an episode of extreme Afrophobic xenophobia among rightwing Protestants in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Musk egged on the racists to keep demonstrating in his X.com posts seen 65 million times. He was especially supportive of Tommy Robinson, Britain’s leading rightwing Islamophobe.
In his home country, Musk has also claimed that affirmative action legislation attempting to build a capitalist class in the wake of Apartheid discrimination is racist, tweeting in April 2026, “South Africa won’t allow Starlink to be licensed, even though I was BORN THERE, simply because I am not Black! We were offered many times the opportunity to bribe our way to a license by pretending that a Black guy runs Starlink SA, but I have refused to do so on principle.”
Starlink even hired the former Democratic Alliance opposition-party leader Tony Leon’s consulting firm to make the case against affirmative action, setting off a major controversy that has split the leaders of the country’s second-largest (and white-dominated) political party.
Already in 2023, Musk had begun claiming that South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was allowing widespread attacks on Afrikaner (white minority) farmers, tweeting that another opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (enjoying just 8% support) was “openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa,” on grounds of leader Julius Malema’s singing of a nostalgia-inducing struggle-era song, ‘Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer.’ It is a chant generally considered by the country’s elites to be so harmless (or alternatively so useful for blowing off steam) that South Africa’s top court in March 2025 rejected a white Afrikaner lobby group’s case that it represented ‘hate speech.’
Musk’s bizarre genocide claim continued into 2026 – with Grok playing a major transmission role – along with other paranoid tweets consistent with international white supremacist talking points.
In reality, commercial farmer wealth has risen dramatically since democracy coincided with neoliberal economic policies in 1994, due largely to the end of sanctions and the lack of state redistribution of farmland that had been stolen by whites from black people within living memory. Yet thanks to Musk’s misinformation, Trump also gave more than 6000 Afrikaners special refugee status in the U.S. (while rejecting all other applications) with potentially 10,000 more to be welcomed in 2026-27. But 2.7 million remain in South Africa.
How to counter Musk’s power
South Africa is one site to identify a counter-politics to Muskism. In a time of what Washington-based political economist James Mittelman terms Runaway Capitalism, the new features of algorithmic, cognitive and philanthropic capital accumulation and social engineering are generating opposition. The new terrains of surplus extraction, super-exploitation, ecocide and political control fuse with core features of both industrial and financial capital, but resistance is rising.
Against the core super-exploitative features of South Africa’s 21st century ‘4th Industrial Revolution’ (a term that the World Economic Forum taught this country so as to frame new technologies), a 4th Industrial Counter-Revolution (4ICR) can be sighted, encompassing both class struggle and social-movement critique.
Activist battles have been successfully waged here since the early 2000s, against expensive, restrictive Intellectual Property on AIDS medicines, with the Treatment Action Campaign’s victory and hence state supply of free generics saving millions of lives (although not for Covid-19 vaccines, because of Berlin’s opposition); against Bill Gates’ ‘philanthro-capitalist’ penetration into low-income areas of South Africa; against the exclusionary and neo-colonial nature of tertiary education (led by the ‘#FeesMustFall’ student movement); against highway e-tolling surveillance whose costs were disproportionately born by workers; against predatory fintech in the form of a World Bank microfinance subsidiary; and – although not yet victorious, against and worker super-exploitation in the gig economy.
In these fights, 4ICR activists seek to apply brakes to runaway capitalism, but not as opponents of technology – instead using ideas that expand the ‘commons’, thereby seed-bedding an eco-socialist politics that is unwilling to sacrifice life-saving, productivity-enhancing techological progress on the alter of profits. This is vital here, in the world’s most unequal and often unsettled society. And especially when Musk controls the Starlink satellites and has the ability to turn internet access on or off at his whim, it is vital to question his agenda. And if his tools cannot be nationalized, they should be repelled, for the sake of societal and ecological safety.
One obvious place to observe Musk’s atmospheric irresponsibility, is in Starlink’s prolific ‘space debris’: SpaceX will leave thousands of large objects floating even when, as on August 5, a rocket drifted off course and crashed into the moon (at 8700kph). Raised as a young white lad in South Africa, Musk was never taught to contemplate whether the ‘polluter pays’ (as most national environmental management laws insist), because it was always a black domestic worker who picked up his rubbish.
In light of Musk’s enormous damage, a ‘Stop Starlink’ campaign in South Africa has begun mobilizing on the following demands of the state, starting with a ban on the use of Grok AI by government, universities and schools, and any public institutions, and remove all state institutions from the X.com platform. In the process, government should request non-profit agencies – especially those involved in education and the well-being of children – to seek alternative platforms with safeguards against online sexual abuse, and thus raise the issue of online sexual violence as a national dialogue, especially AI-generated non-consensual use of images.
As for Starlink, state regulators should halt any decision on Musk’s licence until national and international investigations into whether Musk is a ‘fit and proper’ person (a concept applicable in the professions of finance and law, obviously overdue for Big Tech).
These are ambitious demands to make of a government that is prone to folding to U.S. pressure, whether from Washington or Musk’s base in Texas, or even at the November 2025 G20 summit hosted in Johannesburg, which Trump sabotaged (according to a leading official), when Pretoria ‘collapsed’ its global governance agenda, in trying to appease the U.S..
Yet resistance is possible: already starting in 2022 when Musk bought X.com, people of conscience have been quitting the platform, as it took on more of Musk’s personal biases. A related technological front is growing citizen opposition to data centers that consume electricity and water in massive quantities, contributing to the climate crisis where fossil fuels are used. The charge of ‘environmental racism’ is levelled against Musk’s largest data center, located in Memphis in the U.S. South, due to vast methane gas turbines that generate local pollution now sickening nearby African-American residents.
In June, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People President Derrick Johnson threatened Musk with a lawsuit: “We cannot afford to normalize this kind of environmental injustice – where billion-dollar companies set up polluting operations in Black neighborhoods without any permits and think they’ll get away with it because the people don’t have the power to fight back. We will not allow xAI to get away with this.”
And surprisingly, even some African governments have occasionally stood up to Musk, as Karayiannides remarks: “a few declared Starlink a threat to their digital sovereignty: Namibia, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Cameroon, and South Africa have all either issued formal bans or demanded regularization. Having honed his skills in bitter battles with traditional banks, credit card companies, and government regulators in the 2000s, Musk is a master of regulatory arbitrage. He will no doubt leverage Starlink’s ability to cross borders via satellite and function before formal agreements are reached to muscle his way into recalcitrant markets.”
Cameroon is illustrative because according to Georges Macaire Eyenga from the University of Dschang, Starlink’s “business strategies privatize access and make it unaffordable for a large portion of the global population,” so “while Starlink claims to promote digital inclusion, its market-driven logic deepens existing inequalities – amplifying what has long been a major challenge of internet access and rendering it even more visible and politically salient.”
If Starlink does win South African regulatory permission, the main corporate losers will be cellphone companies – two of which (MTN and Vodacom) are facing resistance in the rest of Africa due to South African xenophobia – and a few other internet service providers. A new entrant in 2027, Amazon Leo, is just getting its satellite service up and running internationally, and appears to have quickly found a South African holding company for its local investment. But Amazon is the target of separate protests due to its headquarters construction on sacred Goringhaicona Khoi Khoi land in Cape Town.
Musk’s projected prices for residential internet service won’t be competitive with existing urban systems: e.g. $30/month for a typical high-speed optic fibre cable, at least 20% lower than Starlink. Musk does have low-key satellite operations providing internet in Botswana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland and Zambia, with the most profitable regional market in Zimbabwe where by early 2026, there were still fewer than 70 000 subscribers (out of 17 million people).
Of all the critiques of – and attempts to regulate – Musk, the most powerful have hit his wallet, mainly coming from a liberal, environmentalist mindset in the U.S., EU and Britain, where impromptu boycotts of Musk began in early 2025. There were several physical attacks on the car company’s dealerships (including arson) and, after he appeared at an AfD rally in February 2025, a 76% crash in German Tesla sales, which drove an overall 1/3rd decline in his European market through mid-2025.
Musk’s message to the far-right party was that Germans are too “focused on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that,” because “It’s OK to be proud to be German, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”
Anger at Musk grew across the world. As a result mainly of his DOGE budget cuts (as well as Trump’s anti-EV policies), Musk’s net worth crashed by $126 billion in the first half of 2025, in large part due to a 45% slump in Tesla’s share value. By June, Musk’s other shareholders pressured him to leave Washington, which he did in an exceptionally acrimonious manner – revealing Trump’s appearance in the notorious Epstein Files – apparently as a result of DOGE’s failure to cut the state deficit due to Trump’s desired tax cuts (which Musk opposed).
But he continues to arrogantly wreak political, environmental and societal damage, and it remains vital to oppose him on all fronts. Conscientized South Africans will continue fighting a potential Starlink presence, and to look for ways to make amends for sending out into the world an Elon Musk replete with the depraved mindset that was so common in his formative years.
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