Front Burner - Front Burner Presents: The Making of Musk, Episode 1

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Where did Elon Musk’s epic ambitions begin? In search of clues we return to his sheltered youth in apartheid South Africa, a world engineered for white supremacy. Along the way, we connect the dots between a bizarre White House ambush of South African president Cyril Ramaphosa to teenage Elon’s ego-powered quests in video games. Finally, was his “draft dodge” from military service a moral act or an opportunist’s exit? Know more, now. Understood is an anthology podcast from the CBC that takes you out of the daily news cycle and inside the events, people, and cultural moments you want to know more about. You can find Understood wherever you get your podcasts, and here: https://link.mgln.ai/FBxMoM

Of the seven great nations that make up the G7, it is Canada that imposes the highest taxes on beer. 46% of what Canadians pay for beer is government taxation. When the G7 leaders get together, I bet Canada doesn't brag about that. Enough is enough. Help stop automatic beer tax hikes. Go to hereforbeer.ca and ask yourself, why does the best beer nation have the worst beer taxation? This is a CBC podcast. Hey everybody, happy Thanksgiving.

Today we've got the first episode of a fantastic new series, The Making of Musk. It's about Elon, obviously, and you might be thinking, what's left to learn about this guy? Well, let me say a lot. The series looks at a much lesser-known side of him, his South African roots,

and it asks a fascinating question. Did the political and social climate of apartheid South Africa, shape Elon and his family's worldview. Did it make him the man that he is? It's hosted by Jacob Silverman, who you've probably heard on Frontburner over the years. In episode one, Jacob takes a look at Elon's early life in South Africa and talks to people who knew him then.

Later in the series, he examines Elon's grandfather's kind of bonkers political activism in Saskatchewan. Episode three is about Elon's 14 kids. It's really great. So follow the understood feed, and that way you won't miss those episodes of The Making of Musk I just mentioned for now. Enjoy episode one. And we'll be discussing that we'll have a nice conversation, and I really appreciate that you guys came along. It's May 2025 in Washington, D.C., the White House.

But it is a great honor to have you. and I appreciate you called. He called. I don't know where he got my number, but I picked up. President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa sits side by side with President Donald Trump in a crowded Oval Office. Relations with the Trump administration

have been strained of late, so the stakes for Ramaphosa are high. You might remember when I spoke to you, and we spoke about golf, you said, I should start practicing. And I've started practicing, President. So I'm ready. So he has come prepared, a full-on charm offensive.

Gifts, jokes, even bringing along two of South Africa's most celebrated golfers, Ernie Ells and Rathief Husson, as part of his delegation. You see, after years of strong relations, Trump recently cut off aid to South Africa, citing an issue that has been gaining traction among the American right. But we have many people that feel they're being persecuted and they're coming to the United States. Generally, they're white farmers and they're fleeing South Africa

and it's a very sad thing to see. White Afrikaner farmers, a minority population in South Africa, are seeking asylum in the U.S., bringing with them terrible stories of persecution. Violent farm attacks, murders that they claim are politically motivated. The word genocide has,

even been used. How, Trump asks, can Ramaphosa let this happen? I would say if there was Afrikanah farmer genocide, I can bet you these three gentlemen would not be here, including my minister of agriculture. He would not be with me. Ramaposa points to his racially mixed delegation as evidence against these claims. Violent crime, he admits, is a huge issue in South Africa. but it affects everyone, regardless of race.

But Trump isn't having it. But, Mr. President, I must say that we have none of wait. Trump directs an aid into action. Something appears to be happening. Turn the lights down and just put this on. It's right behind you. Trump points toward a TV. A montage has been prepared.

Opposition politicians in South Africa making impassioned speeches and singing songs calling for attacks on white farmers. News reports of murdered white farmers. As the video reaches its crescendo, Trump starts to narrate. Now this is very bad. These are burial sites right here. On the screen is an aerial shot of a long, straight road cutting through an expanse of farmland,

a line of cars piling up. Each one of those white things you see is a cross, and there's approximately a thousand of them. They're all white farmers, the family of white farmers. And those cars aren't driving to stop there to pay respects to their family member who's killed. President Ramaphosa is stunned, confused. Have they told you where that is, Mr. President? No, I'd like to know where that is, because this I've never seen. I mean it's in South Africa

The Honorable President Cyril Ramaphosa has just been Zelenskyed He's been ambushed during a public meeting With the most powerful man in the world His plan to talk about a trade deal And reviving U.S. foreign aid Seems like a distant dream However, there's something that Ramaphosa

Didn't know at that moment Those white crosses in the video those weren't burial sites at all. This was a fictional conspiracy theory that it somehow traveled from the margins of South African politics to the MAGA base and eventually to the White House, where it would be eagerly embraced by a president not known for his powers of discernment.

But how had this right-wing rage bait ended up on a big, beautiful TV in the Oval Office? But I have a great feeling for South Africa because I have friends. I have a couple of friends, a few friends here today. The answer was standing in the corner of the room, just out of view. Elon is from South Africa. I don't want to get Elon involved.

That's all I have to do, get him into another thing. The world's most famous living South African had been there all along, uncharacteristically quiet. Elon happens to be from South Africa. This is what Elon wanted. He actually came here in a different subject, sending rockets to Mars. He likes that better. He likes that subject better. Elon Musk, who left his native South Africa as a teenager

and spent years distancing himself from the apartheid regime, lurks off camera as conspiracy theories about his homeland get presented to its head of state. Conspiracy theories he's fueled as part of a dramatic turn towards right-wing politics that's consumed his life and his companies. Even Musk's AI chatbot Brock, which the tech mogul has promised to make anti-woke, has started to pepper unrelated queries with comments about white genocide. By the time Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, Musk had become an

omnipresent force in the administration. When he wasn't sleeping at Mar-a-Lago, he was sitting in on phone calls with foreign heads of state. Despite Trump claiming otherwise, Musk's interests now clearly extended far beyond rocket ships. Besides his support for Trump, Musk was waging a one-man cultural war on behalf of right-wing and populist movements around the world, often to the detriment of his stock prices. Liberal and centrist European leaders

denounced him for interfering in their politics. Musk didn't seem to care. Multiculturalism dilutes everything. We don't want everything to be the same. name everywhere, where it's just one big sort of soup. What meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have there will be decided by their elected representatives, then we don't live in a democracy.

We live in a bureaucracy. So my son Xavier is dead, killed by the woke wine virus. Us humans could do something crazy like World War III. Hopefully not, but it's possible. And then if you only have one planet, then that could be curtains. Musk was supposed to be someone who thought on the grandest of scales, conquering industries, escaping the bonds of gravity to colonize Mars. But here, quietly lurking in an awkward Oval Office meeting,

Musk was participating in a petty stunt, watching the President of the United States willfully misinterpret facts about crime in South Africa to ambush the country's president. Moments like this prompt the question. How did Elon Musk get here? What explains these bizarre twists and turns in his life, which now seem to affect us all? The world's richest man shows an insatiable drive for dominance.

He's compared himself to Alexander the Great, talks of raising a legion of children to colonize Mars, and displays a trollish disregard for others, from government workers to his own transgender daughter, who he said was killed by the woke mind virus. Can Musk's most outlandish ambitions and his most toxic qualities trace back to his youth in apartheid South Africa and might his past reveal where he's taking us next?

I'm your host, Jacob Silverman, and this is understood, the making of Musk. Episode 1, Escape from Pretoria. Elon Musk is a citizen of three countries, the U.S. by choice, Canada by heritage, and South Africa by birth. He was born into a racially segregated apartheid South Africa in June 1971, to May and Errol Musk, in a wealthy sub-Africa. of Pretoria, the country's administrative capital.

Just a few months after his birth, a new industrial revolution emerged that would shape baby Elon's life. You're looking at something so astonishing, it almost contradicts everyday conceptions of reality. It does the work of a room full of electrical circuits and is smaller than your fingertip. It's called a chip. That year, Intel launched the first microprocessor. and an engineer named Ray Tomlinson sent the first email through ARPANET, the network that preceded the internet.

The digital and tech revolutions underway took a while to reach the sleepy burbs of Pretoria, but by the mid-80s, they had made their way to Elon Musk's doorstep. I do remember once in the 80s going to his house, and as most of us did, we were in this computer game. It was one of these fantasy role-playing text games that were popular. at the time. The basic idea is you create a party of characters and you go and explore stuff in this computer fantasy world.

This is Rudolph Pinar and the scene he's describing might be pretty familiar to nerdier types who grew up in the 80s and 90s. Just some friends huddled around a boxy at the time very expensive computer in a dark room. The halcyon days of pre-in-earned days of pre-in-eastern internet gaming. So, you know, there's a prompt that flashes and you say, go north.

And you, you know, it says the next room. You've entered the next room and there is this and there's a treasure chest in the corner. And then you say, open chest. And they will say, there is gold. By today's standards, it's all very simple. No music or graphics, pretty much just white text on a black screen. But there is one place you can really let your creativity fly. When you create your party of characters, you obviously can choose, you know, whether it's an elf or an ogre or all these different, you know, classical fantasy trope type races.

And you also can give them a name. In my case, meaning you might choose something from Lord of the Rings or some something that has some meaning to you, whatever the case may be. For some kids, it was a chance to be someone else, an eight-foot-tall warrior or an elven thief, a time to let your imagination. nation run wild. So I do remember going to Elon's house and he fight up his game. And when he called up his party of characters that he had now created, there would be the ogre or something. And the name of that character was Elon the most strong. And then there was the mage or the wizard. And that one was called Elon the most intelligent. Elon the most agile was the thief character. And Elon the most handsome was one of them as well. For every single

character, it was some superlative Elon the most something. So if you were to read the narrative of the text, it would read like a story of Elon the something, does something amazing and great. Every action, every spell, every victory, it all belonged to Elon. He didn't want to be someone else. He wanted to be the ultimate version of himself. I was thinking, oh my God, I've never seen that before. Looking back now, I would say, are you so insecure, maybe, dude, that you have to name everything some supportive of yourself? Today, Rudolph is a biomedical researcher at Boston's Children's Hospital. He spoke to me from his home on the Massachusetts coast. I went to Pretoria Boys High School, and that is where my path began to cross.

with Elon Musk back in the day. We were all part of the sort of larger, nerdy, geek grouping. After a brutal bullying incident, Musk transferred to Pretoria Boys High, and he ended up in a school where he did not stick out. In fact, to a teenage Rudolph, Elon Musk was unexceptional.

Just another guy in his social sphere, even if he had shown a talent for coding and had managed to create and sell a computer game of his own. He didn't, in my memory, especially stand out for any particular thing, right? He didn't stand out academically. He didn't stand out in sports. He didn't stand out in his ideas. He was kind of there, but also not there.

Which is perhaps why that Elon the most moment stands out so clearly. Young Elon seemed to thrive in the virtual world, where he could try out different versions of himself. But in the real world, among his peers, There was no Elon the Great, even when it came to the level of material privilege he grew up with. So these houses were by American standards, if I compare it to stuff, certainly where I am in Massachusetts, these would be huge. They would be like McMansions. Musk's house was a large estate, luxurious by most standards.

At one point, it was the EU ambassador's residence in South Africa. But as Rudolph points out, in Waterclough, this was the norm. These were the sort of houses all boys like him lived in. The same goes for their school, Pretoria Boys High. For Americans, I would say imagine Hogwarts-ish kind of school sitting in the Pretoria High Feld. To an outsider, it looks like the stuff of boarding school fantasy. Grand-looking buildings, manicured lawns, garish blazers and straw boater hats. The sort of place with deep-rooted traditions.

Like regular practices of their war chant? This school chant, now reserved for sporting rivalries, is rooted in British colonial battles with the Afrikaner. Rudolph assures me, in 1980s South Africa, this was all completely normal stuff. Although at the time it was considered sort of standard middle upper class of school. Perhaps it was standard in their world, but most schools I'm familiar with don't look like Harry Potter sets, or have war cry practice, even the very nice ones. But what Rudolph seemed to be trying to impress upon me was that in their world, this sort of privilege with its upper crust traditions was taken for granted.

The system was designed that way. As a very typical white South African, you kind of lived a life of entitled or idle. isolated privilege. In their video games, in their elite schools, in their McMansions, boys like Elon and Rudolph were purposefully cloistered from the realities of South Africa. There was no real direct awareness of everything that was happening. The structure of society was such that you weren't really confronted by these gross and in your face inequalities. You just didn't see black people around living in the same neighborhood, but you would see black people working in the garden or helping out in the house.

You didn't see the inequality face to face. There's something profoundly ordinary about his upbringing in the sense that it was an upbringing that I want to say almost every wide South African accessed during apartheid. This is Will Shoki, a South African journalist who has written widely about Musk. that was what the system was designed to do. It was designed to, on the backs of an exploited class of black South African workers, produce a life of enormous privilege for a very, very tiny minority. And this is the kind of privilege where each family would at least have a four-bedroomed house

with a sewing pool, with two maid servants and a gardener. This wasn't wealth accumulate over generations. This was a system deliberately engineered. The bubble where Elon and Rudolph lived was a product of one of the most racially and socially engineered societies ever created. A society that believed only certain people could rule. Of the seven great nations that made, Make up the G7, it is Canada that imposes the highest taxes on beer.

46% of what Canadians pay for beer is government taxation. When the G7 leaders get together, I bet Canada doesn't brag about that. Enough is enough. Help stop automatic beer tax hikes. Go to hereforbeer.ca and ask yourself, why does the best beer nation have the worst beer taxation? Why BDC for my business? The timing's right. Everything's in motion.

Economy's changing. It's all about automation, AI. So I said to myself, take the plunge. Yes, I need a loan, but I also need a hand from a partner who's truly working with me, helping me, no matter what comes next. Not later. Now. Get ready for what's next. With BDC, you get financing and advice adapted to your projects. Discover how at BDC.ca.ca.ca.com financing, no-how. In 1948, South Africa, which had experienced 300 years of European colonial rule, was a racially segregated society, where the white colonial minority had more social and political rights

than the indigenous black majority. That year, the National Party, controlled by the white Afrikaans minority, won the general election, and it formally introduced apartheid, literally translated as separate or apartness. This is where the South African story diverges from the story of the Jim Crow South or other outposts of colonial Britain. A system of extreme segregation,

according to the color of a person's skin, was enshrined into South Africa's constitution and its laws. The state was fully empowered to preserve racial hierarchy and white dominance without ambiguity. By the time Elon Musk came of age, apartheid was an entrenched social order, the law of the land for decades.

And what he would have found then was a society structured entirely around white supremacy, spatial segregation, and militarized control. When he talks about control, Will is referring to the government's establishment of strict reservations for specific racial groups. They were called the bantustans. By the time Elon was born,

many of these bantustans had developed into cramped, impoverished shanty towns, with the residents providing labor for nearby cities or commercial zones, a stark contrast to must-s sprawling childhood home in suburban watercloof. But the differences weren't just material. It was a question of rights. These people in a shanty town outside Johannesburg are among the millions of urban blacks drawn to the cities by the prospect of employment.

Many stay here without work or residency permits. They run the risk of being sent to the distant black homeland designated to their particular ethnic group. Starting in the 1950s, the apartheid government forced millions of people to move to these Bantustans or homes. homelands. Then in 1970, in an Orwellian twist, these Bantustans were to be given independence. According to lawmakers, the residents of Bantustans were no longer South African citizens.

They were rendered foreigners in their own country. Cordoned off into these dystopian, militarized, highly regulated zones, the black people of South Africa began to resist and revolt. But the white nationalist government kept a tight grip on the media, controlling the narrative for its white citizens, cocooned in their bubble. As a wealthy, white English-speaking boy, he would have moved through that world insulated from its violence, but shaped by its foundational assumptions. Assumptions about the supremacy of the white ruling elite. The assumption that violence and social control were needed to maintain the system. and the assumption that a hierarchical social order is natural and that people like him deserve to be at the top of it.

Musk was not only born at the height of this system, he grew up in its epicenter. South Africa, in 1848, the Dutch pioneer leader of Pretorius led his followers into the Transvaal. A few years later, a town had sprung up, which was named after him, Pretoria. In 1910, the town became the capital of the newly formed Union of South Africa, and today Pretoria celebrates its centenary.

Pretoria wasn't just South Africa's political capital. It was the beating heart of Afrikaner culture. Walk around the city today, and you'll see monuments and grand buildings celebrating the Vortreckers, the Dutch pioneers who trekked inland during the 1830s to escape British rule. These settlers fought in did. indigenous peoples, seized the Transvaal region, and founded Pretoria as their capital. Over time, they developed their own language, Afrikaans, and started calling themselves

Afrikaners, the supposed true white Africans. Unlike those British newcomers, they belong to this land. This is the group that would eventually control apartheid South Africa, and it's their descendants, South Africa's imperiled white farmers, who today capture the attention of some of the most powerful people on the political right, including Elon Musk and Donald Trump. But there's an irony about Musk's role here. He's not one of them. He's an English speaker. And from what I have come to understand, those Afrikaner farmers appealing to Trump would be keenly aware of that. One thing to understand about the South African set up back in the day, and it still probably resonates to an extent today, is that it's not a monolithic culture or obviously not racially, but even culturally within the different racial groups, there are very distinct cultural identities.

This is Rudolph again. He's describing something that really hit home for me while reporting this series. This idea that you can't understand South Africa through the same lens as North American racial politics. The demographic complexity is staggering. The black indigenous population includes many different tribes, each with their own languages, cultures, histories. Then there's the so-called colored community, descendants of indigenous Coyson people,

enslaved Malays, mixed-race families, all caught up in the colonial prime. Then there is the large Indian and Asian populations, the Jewish communities, the Muslim communities, and of course the white minority, who historically ruled them all. And here's where it gets crucial for Musk's story. Even within that tiny white minority, there's a huge divide. The Afrikaans-speaking Afrikaners and the English-speaking whites like Musk's family. And those cultures, although they were lived side-by-side and somewhat intertwined, were

very distinct and unique. You might think that these two groups, the ones who benefited most from apartheid, would stick together, but they see their histories in place in South Africa completely differently. And that distinction puts Musk in an even more privileged position than you might imagine. English speakers enjoyed all of the trappings of apartheid with the morally convenient argument that they did not create the system. This lets them selectively distance themselves from the regime when the wheels begin to come off in the 1990s.

Even if Musk later distanced himself from a party, that formative environment must have given him, at least I argue, a colonial mindset that's centered on ideas of control, extraction and escape as solutions to the problems of living in society. Control, extract, escape. I mean, it's hard not to see today's Musk in those terms. The Musk who wasn't happy just being the most famous guy on Twitter, he needed to own it and control it too.

Or the Musk who wasn't just content to influence politics, he had to become practically a shadow president. The man who once resigned from a government advisory council in protest after Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords, now downplays the threat of climate change, while his AI data centers burn ever more fossil fuels. This is someone who, rather than save Earth, seems resigned to its inevitable apocalypse.

His solution is to aspire to become the world's first trillionaire and lead his own great pioneering trek to Mars. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We need to go back to teenage Musk and what Will mentioned about him distancing himself from apartheid. This is undoubtedly true. Here's Musk speaking to actor Rain Wilson, aka Dwight Shrut from the office, back in 2013.

You grew up in South Africa? Yeah. You were in the Army there? No. No, I left at 17. Well, in part, in order to avoid conscription into the South Africa. Oh, so you left so that you didn't have. to do the army. You know, spitting two years, suppressing black people didn't seem to be a great use of time. I think that's probably the worst use of any human being's time. Right. Good for you. Right on. Elon Musk,

draft Dodger. Elon Musk, draft Dodger. Was it that straightforward? When you finished high school, you had to do two years of national service. It was mandatory conscription for all white males. Mandatory military service was introduced in South Africa, in 1967. For white schoolboys like Musk and Rudolph, the prospect of conscription loomed over their futures. There was the sense that, oh, when I finish high school, I have to go to the Army, unless I go to university.

That was a very real thing. Most people were concerned more about that than anything else. When they were growing up, going to university deferred your mandatory service till after graduation, but it didn't put it off completely. joining the military meant that you might be sent to fight in the South African border war, a long-running conflict in which the apartheid government invaded some of its neighbors

to smash anti-colonial and independence movements. The undeclared border war dragged on for more than 23 years, becoming one of the major proxy wars of the Cold War era. There was a sort of undeclared hot zone skirmish war, if you will, between South African-supported forces in Angola and Cuban-slash-Soviet-supported forces on the other side. And that was a reality that we all had to prepare ourselves for. A heady prospect for any team.

This idea of nations as a bulwark against communism is a familiar one, West Germany, Korea, Vietnam, and in South Africa's mind, it deserved a place on that list, and the political kudos that came with. If only the West, the quote-unquote West, knew how valuable South Africa was. If it wasn't for us standing against the communists, then Russia would be here and take over. Growing up, Rudolph remembers this feeling that South Africa was an unrecognized victim of the Cold War, unappreciated for its contributions to preserving the global order.

In the late 1980s, there was this huge kind of, you know, lager mentality that the entire world is against us. If only they knew what the reality of Africa is, and they don't know because they're not here. When Rudolph says Lager mentality, he's describing what we'd call a siege mentality, a tendency by the white Afrikaans community to feel like it was them against the world. And they weren't wrong.

By the 1980s, the tide was beginning to turn against the apartheid government. During the height of the Cold War, the West might have tolerated or even supported South Africa, America's racial caste system. But then came anti-colonial and civil rights movements that upended political systems from Algiers to Washington, D.C. As the Cold War thawed,

South Africa's argument that it was one of the last lines of defense against the March of Communism found few takers. Since the 1950s, the black people of South Africa and some white allies had been organizing against this cruel, racist system, forming nonviolent and violent movements against apartheid. This struggle became a global story with the opposition's jailed leader Nelson Mandela

becoming an icon of the fight for basic freedoms. By the early 1980s, many Western cities had anti-apartheid movements that organized rallies, handed out flyers, and held concerts. Attracting everyone from radical students to Hollywood celebrities, it was a political movement with pop cultural appeal as kids across the globe danced to the special AKA's incredibly catchy song, Free Nelson Mandela. It wasn't until 1986

that the United States finally brought sanctions against South Africa. It was no longer possible to turn a blind eye to apartheid, or to defend some of the Cold War's grim moral compromises. The old myths were unraveling. In 1988, with South Africa's townships riven by uprisings, the apartheid government moved Nelson Mandela to an open prison to improve his health and facilitate peace talks. That same year, Rudolph and Elon finished high school.

By now, it was clear that the old system was colloquy. This is when Elon finds his exit, escapes from Pretoria, and dodges the draft. Or at least, that's the story he tells. Did you end up serving in the military there? No, no, I didn't. I went to meet at university after high school. In those cases, what would have happened was that your national service would have been deferred until you were finished. When he graduated high school, Rudolph went to the university,

of Pretoria, the prospect of military service still loomed but not for long. By 1989, when Rudolph started university, parts of the apartheid system were already being dismantled. There was a sense of change that is going to be

happening that was inevitable. By my second year of university, National Service was scaled down to one year only. This was 1990. By 1991, the writing was really on the wall. Apartheid was ending, was over, and national service was no longer an issue.

So this is where, for Rudolph, this story that Musk tells, leaving South Africa to dodge the draft, doesn't quite land. There was no need to, quote, unquote, flee the country to escape national service. You just didn't pitch up, as we would say, in South African slang. Everyone knew at that point that if you just didn't even show up, nothing would happen to you. So it wasn't a real concern. Rather than viewing it as something that required bravery from Musk, I would say that he saw the riding on the wall

and probably just hopped on a bandwagon that was already in motion. This is Will Shoki again. Like Rudolph, Will isn't quite buying the Elon narrative, that it was some kind of noble-minded act, that there was some kind of moral reasoning at the heart of his decision. It's fair to ask how much can a place that Musk lived until he was 17 really tell us about the man he eventually became. South Africa provided a young Elon Musk with many advantages.

Material privilege, an elite education, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a desire to plant his flag in the world, or perhaps even on another one. Must's desire to emigrate lay more in what the world offered than in what his country would deny him. It was an opportunistic plan. Musk's sought adventure. It was time for Elon the most strong

to claim his place in history. Growing up in South Africa, obsessed with technology and computers, a teenage Musk would have had one eye on the source of it all. Whenever I'd read about cool technology, you would tend to be in the United States. So I kind of wanted to be where the cutting edge

of technology was. And, of course, within the United States, Silicon Valley is a heart of things is. So, although at the time, I didn't know where Silicon Valley was. It sounded like some mythical place. But how would he get there? After high school, Musk also enrolled in the University of Pretoria. He was 17. Rudolph remembers seeing him about the campus.

This was a calculated decision for Musk. He wasn't much interested in the academics on offer, but being in school deferred the immediate threat of being called up. He didn't plan to stay there long. According to Ashley Vance, Musk's biographer, he was essentially counting down the clock until a vital document arrived. You see, Musk had a golden ticket, acclaimed to Canadian citizenship. Canada was not California, but it was a hell of a lot closer than Pretoria.

He was able to claim Canadian citizenship through his mother May and her father, Joshua Haldeman, a man whose incredible life story shaped Musk in untold ways. Coming up on this season of Understood, the Making of Musk. Here's a guy who fought elections against two Canadian prime ministers. I think where this movement becomes alarming, is when it bleeds into authoritarianism and oligarchy. This kid's got a kind of reality distortion field that goes around him.

He feels he has unfettered executive power that cannot be challenged and cannot be questioned. We contacted Elon Musk through his family office. He did not respond to our request for comment. Understood the making of Musk is a chalk and Blade production for CBC. It is written and produced by Jason Phipps, M. Wally, Eva Chrysiac, and me, Jacob Silverman. In this episode, you heard clips from CBC, BBC, BBC, CNBC Television, Pretoria Boys High, Associated Press, British Pathet, Soul Pancake, The Specials, NBC, NBC, SpaceX, Jordan Peterson, The Independent, and the Computer History Museum.

Matthew Blackman is our South African story consultant. Fabiola Carletti is our coordinating producer. Mixing and sound design by Julian Uzieli. Our story editor is Derek John. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe Locos. Thanks as well to Thula Simpson, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pretoria, for sharing his insights with us in the background research for this episode.

You can follow Understood on whatever app you're using to listen to me now. And check out my previous season, The Naked Emperor, a deep dive into fallen Crypto King, Sam Bankman-Fried. That was the first episode of The Making of Musk, a brand new season from CBC's understood. Follow understood by searching for it or by searching the making of mask wherever you get your podcasts.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.