BIG READ: Trump and Musk, the new bromantics

A mercurial white SA boy genius from Pretoria with a violent family history and a penchant for conspiracy theories hurtles his way to become the world’s second most powerful man without being elected to anything. What could go wrong? 

It turns out, quite a bit. The past few weeks have not been kind to Elon Musk.

With “Go back to SA” signs popping up around the US and death threats against Musk accumulating, the backlash against his job slashing became turbocharged.

More than 80 Tesla cars were vandalised at a single dealership in Hamilton, Canada, with punctured tyres, deep scratches and Molotov cocktail-induced fires. Showrooms emptied.

In March, cyber-hackers switched off  his X platform three times causing outages for six hours. The same week his latest SpaceX rocket exploded after take-off, and Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim cancelled a $7bn Starlink deal.

Then all Tesla Cybertrucks had to be recalled because a panel on the body is prone to fall off.

Those closest to him on the Tesla board were disturbed enough to pile shares on the market to cut their risk. Musk’s brother Kimbal sold $28m in shares, Tesla chair Robyn Denholm about $76m worth, CFO Vaibhav Taneja $8m and board member James Murdoch just more than $13m.

With this many insiders unloading, the share price fell 53% in three months, from its December peak of $480 to below $240. By Friday it had bounced up to $263.   

German sales are down 75% after Musk used his X account to back the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. Canada’s sales collapsed after Trump declared a tariff war and blithely announced he saw Canada as his next acquisition.

As the former darling of liberals, Tesla drivers first reacted by pasting stickers saying “I bought this before Elon went nuts” on their Teslas. Then they sold enough of their cars to bomb the Tesla second-hand market. 

Backlash shocked him

After the president gave Musk the keys to the government safe — actually the passwords to the computers that make the payments — he had been on top of the world.

He and his youngster engineers cancelled hundreds of programmes and fired tens of thousands of staff members across the US, affecting services from medical to aviation and nuclear protection.

When it turned out Ebola could spread, planes could crash or nuclear plants become unsafe, he explained: “We aren’t perfect, but when we make a mistake we fix it.”

But he was not contrite. Invited onto yet another famous Washington stage, the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference, he grinned before the TV cameras: “The thing is, it also has to be fun.”

People losing jobs or healthcare missed the joke. A backlash was inevitable, yet when it came, he looked genuinely surprised that people didn’t like him any more.

“It’s come as quite a shock to me,” he told an interviewer solemnly.

Instead of seeing what anyone should have seen coming, he saw only a conspiracy.

“It’s from the left. They’re supposed to be the party of caring.  Tesla is a peaceful company. I’ve never done anything harmful, only productive things.

“There are larger forces behind it. Who is funding this?” 

Unfortunately, like the basis for firing workers on Ebola, aviation and nuclear safety, and Trump’s many exaggerated claims, Musk provided little evidence for his conspiracy theory.

Meanwhile, the scale of Trump’s unprecedented disruption is sinking in.

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof travelled to Africa and confirmed that lives were already being lost as a direct result of the USAID cut-off.

Most of the US government budget goes to fund pensions, military veterans’ benefits, medical aid programmes and multiple other services. Now, when your cheque fails to arrive, there is nobody to answer the phone, because the people answering the phone have been fired too.

The inevitable spotlight is now on this immigrant from SA and what his home country upbringing says about his nature, and the nature of the man who hired him.

Trump’s SA friends

Musk is the most famous member of the PayPal mafia, a group of spectacularly successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs dominated by men with SA childhoods who are now in Trump’s inner circle. But they are not the first South Africans Trump became close to. 

SA golf champion-turned-entrepreneurs Gary Player and Ernie Els both have luxury houses on Jupiter Island, minutes from Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, Florida. They have golfing and business in common with the US president. Player has designed hundreds of golf courses, and Els owns a farm in the Cape winelands.

Now 90, Player met Trump in the apartheid years. They still play golf together once a month. On January 7 2021, the day after the January 6 attack on the capitol that got Trump impeached a second time, Trump awarded Player the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

“I wish my father would simply and politely decline this ‘award’ at this time,” his frustrated eldest son and business manager Marc said at the time. “Tone deaf. In denial. Wrong!!”

It was not Player’s first lapse in political judgment.

In his 1966 book Grand Slam Golf, Player wrote: “I must say now, and clearly, that I am of the SA of [Hendrik] Verwoerd and apartheid.”

During the Muldergate scandal, Player was in the news for working for one of the front companies intended to whitewash apartheid.  

Les de Villiers, one of the government’s Muldergate operatives, quotes Player as admitting he “received a fee from the department of information for inviting and hosting top American visitors to SA”.  

By 1983, Player set up the Player Foundation to support education for underprivileged children, and in 1987 he disavowed apartheid: “We have a terrible system in apartheid … it’s almost a cancerous disease. I’m happy to say it’s being eliminated … We’ve got to get rid of this apartheid.”

He would later blame his early support for apartheid on “brainwashing”. The government had “pulled the wool over our eyes”, he said.

Nowadays Player is all in on Maga, and believes that SA should follow Trump’s example and stop refugees coming to SA.

“I find him an incredibly wonderful man,” he told BizNews of Trump. “He is going to change the world for the better … He will bring back law and order. He’s principled. He’ll stop socialist and communist rule.

“You can’t have an open border. Don’t let millions into SA. That will be the failure of our country. This determines if SA has a future or not.

“France is being ruined. France is not a Frenchman’s country. There will be no more England … We’ve got to look after our cultures. I’m not a racist. I love everybody. I respect their religions.” Player believes immigration must be curtailed to prevent cultural dilution.

The other PayPal South Africans 

Besides Musk, Trump appointed David Sacks, who was born in Cape Town but moved to the US at five, as his new crypto tsar. His job is to reverse the previous hostile policy on crypto.  

Another member of the PayPal team was Roelof Botha, grandson and namesake of Roelof (Pik) Botha, long-serving foreign minister from the apartheid era. Botha, who is not part of Trump’s inner circle, has kept his political views to himself.

But the most important ideological influence from PayPal days is Peter Thiel. Thiel was an early Trump funder, brought vice-president JD Vance to Silicon Valley, brokered his first meeting with Trump, and funded his entry into politics.

Thiel was born in Germany in 1967, moved to Johannesburg at three, then spent seven years in Swakopmund, Namibia, then still governed by SA.

Swakopmund is a small coastal town that was dominated by German-speakers, including Nazi supporters. Thiel said the authoritarian atmosphere at school in Swakopmund turned him against government and into a libertarian.

Libertarians found a natural home among the tech billionaires whose businesses thrive on disruption, ignoring rules and creating online communities that are hard to regulate.

He has taken libertarianism so far he supports a movement called “seasteading”, which means setting up communities next to the ocean that are independent of all government. 

In a 2009 essay, he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”, and that women gaining voting rights “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Are racist ex-South Africans infecting the Trump court?

What changed Musk from a Democrat-funding California liberal into a Trump acolyte?

Musk biographer Walter Isaacson attributes Musk’s switch to several incidents. He blames Democrats for the most searing, when his oldest child underwent gender transition. He believed he had been tricked into approving her treatment. She has since taken her mother’s surname and wants nothing to do with Musk.

The next incident came when he was snubbed by former president Joe Biden’s White House at an event for electric car makers. Tesla was excluded, even though it sold the most EVs, because Tesla is not unionised.

Musk’s family included racists, but children are not responsible for their parents or grandparents views.

Musk’s mother’s Canadian father, Joshua Haldeman, was a neo-Nazi who believed in replacing democracy with a government by a technocratic elite. Haldeman was imprisoned for two months in Canada during World War 2 for activities undermining the war effort.

Musk’s father, Errol, remembers his in-laws well.

“Her parents were very fanatical in favour of apartheid,” he told one newspaper. “Her parents came to SA because they sympathised with the Afrikaner government. They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff.”

But Errol’s own attitude to race carries the ambiguities common to many whites at the time. He says he opposed apartheid and joined the Progressive Federal Party of Helen Suzman, but then he left because he didn’t like its demand for one person, one vote.

In recent months Elon has moved further right, endorsing Germany’s AfD and announcing a possible £100m donation to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. And he wrongly claimed a “white genocide” in SA.

Musk’s continuing sensitivity about race was revealed in an interview with Don Lemon, a well-known African-American former CNN anchor. When Lemon turned to the subject of race Musk became unmistakably tense. 

He denied being white had given him advantages, and argued that racist history should be put aside.  

“Do we want this constant battle, or do we move on?” he asked. “Let’s just move on and treat everyone according to who they are. If we keep talking about it nonstop, it will never go away.” 

Why is Musk shocked that he is hated?

Musk seems genuinely taken aback that his firing of so many staff in government caused such rage. 

Musk biographer Isaacson explains Musk’s lack of empathy as a distinguishing feature of Asperger’s syndrome, which is on the autism spectrum, which Musk himself believes he suffers from. 

Isaacson quotes Musk friends who agreed he did not read social signals or expressions of emotion on people’s faces, and “lacks the empathy gene”.

Musk being Musk, he has gone even further. In an interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan, he said: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy … I believe in empathy … you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for, for civilisation as a whole, and not commit to a civilisational suicide.”

Tesla and Musk’s future

Liberal Tesla owners are abandoning the brand in droves. To save Tesla’s sales, Musk needs to replace liberal buyers with Maga conservatives, who traditionally reject climate change and prefer loud, manly gas-guzzlers.

But Harvard business school professor Mihir Desai suggests that Musk’s businesses are far more vulnerable than the other billionaires courting Trump.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple are immensely profitable. Tesla is not in that league. Even at its current reduced share price, Tesla is on a price earnings ratio of an astonishingly expensive 129.

Earnings per share in these others are between 20 and 35 (Amazon).  

“While Musk has built a car company from the ground up — no easy feat — his wealth is largely thanks to a financial cult, one in which legions of dazzled investor-followers have enabled him to start an ever-growing number of disparate initiatives,” Desai writes.

Desai is even more scathing about Musk’s other businesses. He called Solar City atrophied, is unsure if his high speed transport hyperloop company the Boring Company has any revenues or prospect of profits, and thinks his brain implant company Neuralink has even less.

X, formerly Twitter, which he bought for $44bn, is “a shell of itself economically and culturally”, and profitability at SpaceX may be far off.

He believes Musk could have made his best businesses secure if he had been more focused on business success than on new enterprises, and compares Musk’s business style to Trump’s.  

“Both men are fundamentally financial showmen who owe their success primarily to deftly handling investors.” 

The fate of the Trump-Musk bromance 

Musk has often said that he expects his work at the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) to be stopped at some point. That’s because closing any programme mandated by Congress, as Doge has done, is illegal, and the court orders saying so are coming in.

Trump’s strategy is based on the “fait accompli” theory — to keep going as long as he can, so by the time he is stopped, many staff will be gone and programmes cut, so they either do not return or Trump replaces them with his cronies.

If he thought he had the votes for it in Congress, Trump would have had no need for this strategy. He also may win some battles in the conservative supreme court.

As Trump did on January 6 2021, he will try more unorthodox cards first, like calling for the impeachment of judges who rule against him. The Republican chief justice John Roberts was sufficiently disturbed by this that he issued a rare statement warning off using impeachment for this purpose.

The reputation of the most prominent white South African in the world is tied to history’s verdict on Doge, Tesla and his other businesses.

Though big shareholders have sold off Tesla holdings, Tesla retains supporters on Wall Street. They place their hopes in the next product, the robotaxi, to turn it around. This week one analyst set a stratospheric price target of $2,600 by 2029.

But Desai believes the markets are Musk’s soft underbelly. “His fortune depends heavily on the inflated expectations of his rabid following. As those expectations deflate, so will his power, demonstrating that financial markets are an underappreciated guardrail against both Musk’s and President Trump’s agendas.” 

Both men are known for pulling rabbits out of hats, but the stakes have never been this high.

• Matisonn is an author and political journalist and a former senior UN official.