Elon Musk’s dad tried to prove his son wasn’t racist in all the wrong ways.
Errol, the 79-year-old father of the world’s richest man, insisted that his children were not into “political nonsense” while growing up in apartheid-era South Africa.
“We had several black servants who were their friends,” Errol touted in an email to The Washington Post in response to questions about his son’s hostility toward diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
Errol fondly recalled the South Africa of Elon’s childhood—during which the country was run by a white supremacist regime that kept its Black-majority population in poverty and under strict racial segregation—as a “well-run, law abiding country with virtually no crime at all.”
The Musk patriarch said he worked as an engineer and imported emeralds from an unregistered Zambian mine, which “helped me and my two boys sustain ourselves during the collapse of Apartheid in SA.”
Musk bragged about his father’s share in an emerald mine in a 2014 interview but began to distance himself from it in the years that followed. In 2021, the billionaire claimed “there’s no evidence whatsoever of an ‘emerald mine.’”
Speaking about the mine, Errol told Musk biographer Walter Isaacson: “If you registered it, you would wind up with nothing, because the Blacks would take everything from you.”
Rudolph Pienaar, who graduated with Musk from Pretoria Boys High School in 1988, told The Post that the Musks grew up “in a bubble of entitlement,” shielded from the realities of oppression under the white supremacist system that persisted until 1994.
“I am not sure if Elon can conceive of systematic discrimination and struggle because that’s not his experience,” he said. “His life now in some ways is how it was under apartheid—rich and entitled with the entire society built to sustain him and his ilk.”
As he shot to the top of Silicon Valley, Musk became known as an environmentally conscious entrepreneur. In 2017, he left the first Trump administration’s business advisory council after the president announced that he was withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord.
In recent years, however, Musk has positioned himself as an outspoken critic of “woke” culture and has made purging DEI initiatives from the government one of his top priorities as chief of the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency.
Last month, Musk reinstated Marko Elez to DOGE after he was fired over racist X posts. Among other inflammatory statements, Elez had called for the Civil Rights Act to be repealed and said: “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”
Musk’s political transformation has made him a darling of the far-right not just in the U.S. but all over the globe.
The tech mogul has thrown his weight behind the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD). During Trump’s second inauguration, Musk caused a stir when he threw out his arm in a gesture that many have likened to the Nazi salute.
Gideon Fourie, another former classmate of Musk who now lives in Germany, told The Post that he was shocked by Musk’s support for AfD.
“I am incredibly sensitive to racism because of where I came from, and for him to support this far-right party really blows my mind,” Fourie said. “Everything that has happened in the last few years was very contrary to the trajectory I thought he was on.”
