If ever the phrase “watching a train wreck in slow motion” was apt, this is it. SA-born Elon Musk driving the Trump Train through the US federal government is a disaster in the making.
The stopping of US foreign aid for three months is an unspeakable travesty on its own, let alone the shuttering of USAID, one of the greatest and most benevolent organisations on Earth.
Millions of Africans will die because of Trump’s catastrophic assault on decency and dignity. And the man driving that train wreck is Musk, until last year someone South Africans were proud to call our most famous son.
Though he is the world’s richest person, he is by no means its nicest. He has demonstrated callousness and bullying on a scale seldom seen before. He berated and bullied Twitter’s hard-working employees, culling 80% of its staff and shutting server farms down manually to save costs.
The end result is that Twitter, now rebranded X, is a pale shadow of itself. Once quite rightly described as the “digital town square” it is now a hate-filled, troll-friendly marketplace for discredited ideas, blatant disinformation and rapid right-wing trolling. It isn’t a nice place to be any more.
And it’s bankrupt. After Musk condoned antisemitic posts by people he unbanned, including Kanye West and various right-wing trolls, many advertisers fled the platform. When anti-hate groups pointed out the rampant anti-Semitism, Musk sued them and accused them of causing advertisers to flee.
But there was nobody to blame when Musk told the New York Times investor event last year, in a direct comment to advertisers: “Don’t advertise. If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go f**k yourself.”
That is clearly not a clever strategy for a business that makes its money from advertising. But in the context of Musk’s closeness to Trump, his otherwise abortive takeover of Twitter for an overpriced $44bn in October 2023 takes on a whole other complexion.
Musk’s personal wealth surged after Trump’s victory — helped in no small part by Musk taking over the president’s “ground game” and spending $250m of his own money sending pollsters door-to-door in swing states.
Respected entrepreneur and New York University Stern professor Scott Galloway called Musk the “first lady elect” because of his closeness to Trump, who has reportedly rented a cottage at Mar-a-Largo to be close to the president and has since been given an office in the White House.
This was all before this week’s frankly weird controversy over the Expropriation Act, which both Trump and Musk have weighed in on. Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi has brilliantly debunked the hype around this bill, over which Trump has warned he is “cutting off all future funding to SA until a full investigation of this situation has been completed”.
This is misinformation at its ultimate nadir. Trump’s post on Sunday on his ironically named Truth Social that “SA is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY” and a “massive Human Rights VIOLATION, at a minimum, is happening for all to see” is of course accurate if you’re talking about apartheid a few decades ago. The irony is, sadly, lost on all the protagonists.
Meanwhile, the wholesale assault on human dignity continues through the capture of USAID. “Trump scoffed that USAID was ‘run by radical lunatics’,” wrote Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times opinion columnist. “Is it radical lunacy to try to save children’s lives? To promote literacy for girls? To fight blindness?”
“The world’s richest man is boasting about destroying USAID, which saves the lives of the world’s poorest children, saying he shoved it ‘into the wood chipper’,” writes Kristof in a piece correctly titled “the world’s richest men take on the world’s poorest children”.
He calculates Musk’s “net worth is “greater than that of the poorest billion people on Earth” and has “grown by far more than the entire annual budget” of USAID, which is below 1% of the US federal budget.
“It’s callous for gleeful billionaires like Musk and President Trump to cut children off from medicine, but, as president John F Kennedy pointed out when he proposed the creation of the agency in 1961, it’s also myopic. Cutting aid, Kennedy noted, ‘would be disastrous and, in the long run, more expensive.’ He added: ‘Our own security would be endangered and our prosperity imperilled’.”
That it is being driven by a man who was born in Pretoria is all the more ironic and tragic. If growing up in Africa, with all the poverty and indignity it fosters on people, hasn’t conscientised you, nothing will.
A close friend of mine lived on the Greek island of Lesbos during the height of the influx of poor immigrants on European shores a few years ago. What struck her, a former business journalist and now author, was how the Europeans reacted to the destitute refugees. They had never seen people so poor that the only thing they possessed where the clothes they wore, she told me. They just couldn’t comprehend it.
There is a lot of commentary that the fact that the current crop of US Congress people and senators haven’t lived through a war is part of the reason for America’s lacklustre response to supporting Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Joe Biden is old enough to have lived through the effects of World War 2 and the Vietnam War. But the former US president is an exception to the relative youngsters who have lived in an age of American might since the end of the Cold War.
Humanity seems destined to repeat the mistakes we’ve already made. So much for the mistaken belief that smart people, or independently wealthy business people, can make a difference in the world — and in politics.
Despite being the world’s wealthiest person and a bone fide genius, Elon Musk is no better than the bullies who harassed him at school, or the National Party racists who created apartheid. Where they wrecked millions of African lives, Musk is now devastating hundreds of millions of poor people’s lives.
• Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.