Today, Explained - Elon's African roots

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

President Trump is offering to resettle white South Africans in the US, and his white South African bestie may have something to do with it. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Travis Larchuk, edited by Miranda Kennedy and Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Tech billionaire Elon Musk in the Oval Office of the White House. Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The South African situation is very, very dangerous and very bad for a lot of people. There's tremendously bad things going on, including the confiscation of property, and worse, much worse than that. You know what I'm talking about. You might not know what he's talking about. We got you. President Trump says that Afrikaners, white South Africans who decades ago architected a brutal system of segregation laws known as apartheid, are now themselves victims of discrimination after the passage of a law that allows their land to be expropriated without compensation.

Trump is offering these white South Africans resettlement in the U.S. and they are gently turning him down. We see our future in Africa. And they are gently turning him down. But what got Trump interested in South Africa? And is it unelected white South African Vice President Elon Musk? We're going to ask on Today Explained. Sick of dreaming smaller? Sick of high fees eating away at your investments but just don't have the time to invest on your own?

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maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. investing. This is Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Chris McGreal. Chris is a reporter for The Guardian who covered South Africa for many years, including the end of apartheid and the start of South Africa's democracy. Recently, Chris wrote a piece about the influential white South Africans in President Trump's orbit. The argument is being made that Afrikaners who were the group that imposed apartheid

on South Africa in 1948, the very rigid form of racial segregation, are now victims of the post-apartheid era, that they're being targeted with, as the White House and others characterize it, racist laws, that they're victims of discrimination in the post-apartheid order, and that they are victims of politically targeted violence. This is the argument being made. What are these so-called racist laws? What's Trump referring to? Well, what's upsetting Trump and others is that essentially South Africa has an affirmative action program for the black majority and other minority people of color who were discriminated

against and left very much at a disadvantage by apartheid. So there's, for instance, a black empowerment legal requirement for businesses. There's upliftment in education, in job opportunities, in the civil service. That is now being characterized as discrimination against the white minority. Although it's worth bearing in mind that the white minority at the end of apartheid, which is 30 years ago now, 30 years later still hangs on to its big houses, its swimming pools, its Mercedes-Benz. When does Donald Trump become interested in South Africa and why? So there's a group in South Africa which describes itself as an Africana rights group called AfriForum.

And the Southern Poverty Law Center has described it as white supremacists in a suit and a tie. The leadership of that group came to the United States in 2018 and amongst other things, they appeared on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News. South Africa is a diverse country, but the South African government would like to make it much less diverse. They laid out the case that whites were the victims of discrimination in South Africa, but particularly latched onto this issue of the killing of white farmers. Basically threatening white farmers that if they do not voluntarily hand over their land to black people, then there would be a violent takeover.

So the situation is very dire in South Africa. They would be tortured to death and it would receive very little news coverage. Which is totally untrue. But they appeared on Tucker Carlson, Trump was watching, this is when he's president in 2018, and he tweets to his then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo telling him to watch the situation in South Africa with the whites and how they're being victimized. And others pick up on this around the states afterwards, and it starts to gain some momentum. In the meantime, President Trump has become very close to Elon Musk, who of course is

a white South African. Do we know whether Elon Musk's ideas about South Africa have influenced Donald Trump at all? Well, you'd have to assume they did because there's no real explanation otherwise as to why Trump is so engaged with this issue, why three weeks into his second term of office, he's suddenly issuing this executive order about one country. So one has to imagine that it's Elon Musk who was born in apartheid South Africa and

grew up there, left at 18, but he's not the only one. There's a group of white men that all have apartheid South African childhoods in some form or other, known as the PayPal mafia. They all get to know each other at the top of PayPal, they all get rich through PayPal. These include the billionaire libertarian Peter Thiel. Now Thiel was born in Germany but his father took him to South Africa at a young age. And then the other kind of two major players, a guy called David Sachs, who is another tech billionaire, he's now Trump's AI and crypto czar. He was born in Cape Town, although his parents moved to Tennessee when he was five. So he did not grow up fully kind of imbued with the apartheid system, although he grew

up in the white South African diaspora of the time. What would life have been like in the 1980s for a kid like Elon Musk growing up under apartheid? What was the deal? It separated every aspect of life. So jobs were reserved only for white people. Interracial marriage and interracial sex was illegal under the Immorality Act. Every aspect of daily life was separate. But Musk's teenage years would have been in the huge tumult of South Africa's uprising against apartheid. By the mid-80s you've got a state of emergency, you've got civic society constantly protesting,

you've got mass arrests, children incarcerated in their thousands. Under the sweeping powers of the state of emergency, an estimated 30,000 people, the majority black, have been detained. Cape Town was under siege. Police vehicles on every street corner. The city overwhelmed with protesters defying the government with marches. In a situation of injustice and oppression, there can be no neutrality. You have to take sides. You have to say, am I on the side of justice or am I on the side of injustice?

There's a country increasingly ungovernable, the army attempting to keep some kind of order in the townships. So Musk was growing up at this time of incredible turmoil. And on the streets of Pretoria where he went to school, he would have seen the Afrikaner resistance movement, which was an openly neo-Nazi group that actually modeled its badge on the swastika and had the same colors as the Nazis and marched up and down the streets doing Hitler salutes.

marched up and down the streets doing Hitler salutes. Errol Musk, Elon's father, has described his parents-in-law as open neo-Nazis and fascists and supporters, enthusiastic supporters of apartheid. They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff. Now, Errol himself was a member of something called the Progressive Federal Party. And that really was a small opposition party in parliament opposed to apartheid. We never supported apartheid really, but it was something we inherited from the European countries. But leaves the party eventually in the 1980s because it was advocating one person, one vote. In other words, complete equality of democracy. And he didn't agree with that.

You know, he was like a lot of white South Africans of that era, particularly English speakers who were doing quite well out of the economics of apartheid, who said that they were against it in principle, but actually didn't do very much to oppose it and certainly benefited from it enormously. And so he was the liberal in the family, but obviously only up to a point. So to bring us back to the present day, has Elon Musk said anything about white South Africans and what he believes is happening in that country right now? Yes, he's had plenty to say. He's retweeted or commented on tweets that essentially argue that there's either a genocide underway against whites or a genocide coming. He recently openly challenged the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, on Twitter, accusing him of imposing racist discriminatory laws against white people.

So he's very much taken an adversarial position on this, which I suspect at least goes some way to explain why Trump has done the same. One thing we learned during the first Trump administration was that Donald Trump and the people close to him often have more than one motive for their beliefs. And some things that might seem ideological are not ideological or less ideological than we might think. Does Elon Musk have any other incentive to push Donald Trump to take a stand on this other than thinking white South Africans are being discriminated against? Well, as it happens, we watch Musk's commentary on white South Africans ramp up at a time when he was starting to get into conflict with the South African government over Starlink,

his satellite business. He wanted to get it into South Africa, but part of the present dispensation, compensating for apartheid, is that all foreign businesses investing in South Africa have to have a local black empowerment component. In telecoms, which is the area of Starlink, it's 30%. So there has to be 30% investment in the local business. And Musk objects to this. He says he doesn't want anybody else in his business.

And he's trying, and may actually succeed, to break down the requirement that he has to have this black empowerment element in his investments in South Africa. There are other motives, and I think this isn't the only case where you can look and see a financial incentive in some of these decisions that are being made. So I guess I would say, you know, read up on South Africa.

Look at what's really going on rather than just take the word of those who have the power to set policy. That was The Guardian's Chris McGreal. Coming up, What Do Afrikaners Think about President Trump's Offer? And we're going to dig into the accusation that white farmers' land has been stolen in South Africa. Support for Today Explained comes from Factor. If your plan in 2025 was to eat more healthily, but already you're back on the delivery apps, you might want to consider Factor.

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This week on ProfG Markets, we speak with Alice Han, China economist and director at Greenmantle. We discuss the potential impact of tariffs on China's economy, how Tesla is faring against BYD and how a Trump presidency could shape China's foreign and domestic policies. Trump is the biggest dove in a house full of hawks. Everyone else around him wants to push him towards being more hawkish on China, on trade, on tech, on military. And I sense that, you know, whether it's Rubio or Hegseth or Waltz, they're going to try

to push the agenda of being tougher on China and having more deterrence vis-à-vis Taiwan. You can find that conversation exclusively on the ProfG Markets podcast. It's early in the year, and so people might still be hard at work on those New Year's resolutions. Dry January, sober October, whatever you're doing, you are not alone. No buzz boos is all the rage these days. And now to the growing movement of sober, curious living. It's a trend rising in popularity among younger generations

who are choosing to reduce their alcohol consumption or just not drink at all. And that got us wondering, how in the world do they get the booze out? For that non-alcoholic beer, do they start with regular beer and somehow de-boosify it? Or do they recreate it from scratch without ever touching a drop of the hard stuff? This episode of Gastropod, we've got the weird history…

Welch's grape juice, anyone? And breakthrough technology fueling today's non-alcoholic boom. Plus, why is it so hard to make it taste good? We've got the answers. Find Gastropod and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. I'm Noelle King. This new law that has caused so much controversy in South Africa allows the government in certain cases to take white South Africans land without compensating them. It has divided the government and it's being challenged in court.

For more on who the Afrikaners are, we called Johnny Steinberg. Johnny is an award-winning South African writer, author of many books, including Winnie and Nelson Portrait of a Marriage and Midlands, which is about the murder of a white South African farmer. Johnny, what are Afrikaners? Afrikaners are the descendants of the first white people who settled in South Africa. That dates from 1652. At the time, Holland was a great imperial power.

About a century and a half later, when Holland was in trouble in the Napoleonic Wars, Britain took over the Cape Colony. A whole lot of English-speaking white people arrived. And it was the descendants who formed themselves into Afrikaner nationalists, into a nationalist project in the late 19th, early 20th century. And I guess it was to stand up against the British and to suppress black people.

And that project saw its culmination in 1948, when the party of Afrikaner nationalism, the National Party, came to power and instituted apartheid. And what was it like? What was apartheid like? You know, apartheid is famously one of many brutal regimes in the 20th century. The policy of apartheid, literally separateness, has been elevated by the government of South Africa from a mere theory of racial superiority to the law of the land. For decades, the National Party enforced racial segregation and violently repressed any dissent. Many died fighting it, some famous, others forgotten by all but their families.

Many millions of people were displaced from their homes. The political struggle against apartheid, many thousands of people were killed and detained. It was a long, bitter, bloody, difficult struggle for democracy, which miraculously ended peacefully in a negotiated settlement in 1994. What happened in 1994? Well, four years earlier in 1990, the last president of apartheid, F.W. de Klerk, released Nelson Mandela. There's Mr. Mandela. Mr. Nelson Mandela, a free man taking his first steps into a new South Africa. Unbanned his party, the ANC, and decided that apartheid would end by a negotiated settlement

with the people who were once his enemy. The eyes of the world are presently focused on all South Africans. All of us now have an opportunity and the responsibility to prove that we are capable of a peaceful process in creating a new South Africa. You know, a lot of people died in those four years. There was a lot of violence. It was a complicated process, but it was in the end a peaceful settlement that both sides agreed to, bringing in democracy in April 1994.

More than 300 years of white domination ended for good with the swearing in of Nelson Mandela as this African nation's first black president. So the Afrikaners went from having all of the power and from having this system, apartheid, that basically kept them in power. After the negotiated settlement, what happened to this group? It was a pretty gentle settlement on white people. Afrikaans people were about just over half of the white population. Most people carried on living their lives pretty much as they were before, to be honest.

You know, that's a simple version of the story when you scratch underneath more complicated things that are happening. One of the things happening is that crime rates absolutely soared in the later apartheid and early post apartheid era. And white people became victims of crimes in ways that they didn't know under apartheid, which was very frightening. I mean, another thing happening, and this is about the land, this is not about all white people or all Afrikaans people, but it is about farmers. A policy of land redress was introduced in the mid-1990s. And to explain what happened, it's necessary to go back to 1913 when law was passed disallowing black ownership of land in South Africa.

Many, many people displaced from their land in the decades after that by the early 1970s. Several million people had been displaced from their land. And the policy of redress was set in place in the mid 1990s and among other things that allowed people who could show that they had had their land taken away from them after 1913 to get it back. But not by confiscating land, not by taking it away from those who owned it, but by buying it back at market prices. So that was the core of the land reform scheme, just stated at its most simple.

So in the mid 1990s, there's this process of land reform, and it's now 30 years later. Is that process still underway? It is underway. And, you know, I think many white people's grievances about that process are less about the policies themselves and the way that they've been implemented. Black and white South Africans are both enormously, enormously frustrated with South Africa's government for its levels of inefficiency and its corruption. And very often anger at that melds with anger of the substance and the content of policy. You know, a fair amount of land has been redistributed. It has not been a particularly

successful or particularly well managed process. It has left both poor black people and white landholders and others dissatisfied. So a lot has to do with the corruption and inefficiencies of the process itself. President Trump doesn't always speak with a great deal of accuracy. When he talks about South Africa now, as he has been doing recently, he will say things like, the land of white South Africans is being stolen. Is this an idea that Donald Trump just came up with himself or is this idea prevalent in South Africa also? of white South Africans is being stolen. Is this an idea that Donald Trump just came up with himself, or is this idea prevalent in South Africa also?

Well, if you look at South Africans' response to Donald Trump saying that, nobody has agreed with him. Huh? Land has not been stolen from anybody in South Africa since 1994. A lot of land has been bought at market prices and redistributed, but not stolen. As for where these ideas come from, you know, there have been South African organizations

that have lobbied Trump very, very vocally, very persistently for a number of years on matters of land redistribution, but also on matters of crime, of the extent to which people who live in rural South Africa are vulnerable. And many white farmers have been victims of very violent crime. And Trump has heard about all of that from a very vocal, very articulate lobby that says that violent crime against farmers is not coincidental, that it's organized, that there's something behind it, it's an attempt to push them off the land. He has been told that by pretty extreme forces in South African society, not mainstream ones. Could you dig in a bit more on violence against white farmers?

What does that mean? What does that look like? So farmers generally live in remote areas. They're far from rapid response. They're far from police. There are a lot of guns in South Africa. There's a lot of unemployed young men in South Africa, a lot of people making a living from crime.

People enter a remote property and hold up the people at gun points to take their possessions, sometimes kill them. Sometimes there's a terrible level of brutality in South African predatory crime. In the last 10, 20 years in this area, I can name 20, 30 attacks, murders on farmers. We were busy having breakfast and they just walk around with a shotgun, two pistols and

a stick and they said, we are going to kill you today. Some of them they have that past ideology of saying no, the farmers took our land for free and when they go there they take out the anger on them. So you think there is a racial... There is that racial element in it as well. Levels of violence in South Africa are extreme. You know, in a country of 62, 63 million people, there are 20,000 murders a year that is breathtaking. It's a violent place.

And it's absolutely understandable and natural that, you know, the white farming community would feel under siege, would feel vulnerable, would feel scared. But it's another thing to say that there's an organized plot against them, that this is a manifestation of a deeper attempt to throw them off their land. You know, if you look at who is killed in South Africa, if you look at per capita murder rates, those

most vulnerable to being killed are unemployed young black men. And that's not for a moment to say that white farmers should not feel afraid and should not take action to defend themselves. But the idea that they're especially victimized is untenable. And so responding to this, President Trump has made this offer to help resettle Afrikaners in the United States. Have any of them said, yeah, we'd like to go? What's the response there? People are pretty bewildered by the offer, you know, including the people who've been lobbying Trump.

Nobody has taken them up on it. The head of Agri South Africa, it's pretty mainstream, perhaps a center-right organization, said, we're farming here and we're farming successfully. We don't see large-scale land grabs in South Africa. What we see is at this stage still very reasonable, as is any country in the world. The day after Trump made that announcement, I was on a flight from Johannesburg to London and boarding the plane, it was full of white South Africans who were joking about it saying, well, let's divert our flights to New York. Let's go and live in America. It was really an object of fun.

So if Afrikaners are not interested in coming to the United States, and many of them, as you've laid out, will say, look, the politics in this country are messy, but it's not like a genocide is being committed against us, which is another rumor that we've talked about. Why do you think President Trump is making this offer? Do you have any sense of what is really behind this? Well, I think it's because it's easy for him because there's no downside. He gets to perform a very powerful and entertaining anti-DEI performance in front of the world. He also potentially gets a

middle-sized country to change its foreign policy or certainly be under enormous pressure to do that. So South Africa becomes an exemplar. It becomes a lesson to the world in what American power under Trump might mean. It causes others to move with caution. I think what Donald Trump is doing has shaken up South Africa and is sharpening divisions. Because although nobody thinks that there's genocide taking place, although nobody thinks that white land is being confiscated en masse, you know, there are powerful forces in South Africa which would like to use what Trump is saying to further their own legitimate

agendas, which is to contest the government's policies of racial redress, to contest its policies of land reform. And this strengthens their hand. And it's natural that they would do that. So I think that matters that are contentious in South Africa, matters that are highly, highly disputed, have become more contentious, more volatile. You know, they're forced in South Africa, which are using what Trump has done to open up space for their agenda.

But that's kind of expected. Of course they're gonna do that. And in a democratic country, why shouldn't they? Johnny Steinberg, he teaches at Yale. His latest book is Winnie and Nelson, Portrait of a Marriage. He's also the author of Midlands. Avishai

Artzi and Travis Lartuch produced our show today. They were edited by Miranda Kennedy and Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christens' daughter. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Music