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Elon Musk, Apartheid, and America's New Boycott Movement (Clara Jeffery, Mother Jones)
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/elon-musk-apartheid-boycott-tesla-doge-trump/This is long, but worth reading in its entirety, and there's no paywall.
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I found myself reconstructing this history recently, as the protests and boycotts against Tesla began. Do you need a reminder as to why? Okay: Tesla CEO Elon Musk—the world’s richest man, and Trump’s biggest campaign donor; an unelected, ketamine-happy, video game cheating, transphobic, subsidy–guzzling, deadbeat dad—is leading a bunch of scythe-wielding mini-me shitposters through innards of the federal government, harvesting and compromising the most essential data of every taxpayer, government contractor, and NGO in America. Oh, and he’s also supporting fascists, using apparent Nazi salutes, and blasting antisemitic and racist theories to his millions of followers.
Anyway, the dude is bad news. And he’s threatening to use his hundreds of billions—again, money he would not have without US subsidies—to take out any politician, foreign or domestic, who opposes his and Trump’s agenda, which is a mix of toxic masculinity, grift, and a seeming desire to return to a gauzy form of racial apartheid.
Words like “apartheid” and “Nazi” shouldn’t be tossed around lightly. Musk has denied he’s a Nazi, and that his salute was a Nazi salute. But clear-eyed commentators aren’t buying it, and white nationalists like Nick Fuentes are downright jubilant: “That was a straight up, like, Sieg Heil, like loving Hitler energy.” And then there’s Musk’s history. His maternal grandparents were, according to Musk’s own father, members of the Canadian neo-Nazi party who decamped to South Africa because they were fans of racial oppression. Musk has been pretty mum about what it was like to grow up in South Africa and the influence that had on him. (Today he holds US, Canadian, and South African citizenship.) But the fact is that many white South Africans who left at that time did so because their position of privilege was coming to an end.
In any case, once in the States, Musk joined forces with fellow South Africans Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Roelof Botha—grandson of former South African leader Pik Botha; now the head of venture capital giant Sequoia Capital—to form PayPal. And they revealed themselves to be racial reactionaries. Thiel (who, according to his biographer, once called critiques of apartheid “overblown”) and Sacks wrote “The Case Against Affirmative Action” for Stanford Magazine in 1996. They’ve led concerted, organized attacks on DEI. Musk, who was under federal investigation for racial discrimination in his Tesla factories—that is, until Trump took over—is supporting extremist movements across the world, using Holocaust Remembrance Day to tell Germans they should no longer feel “guilt” over it, and echoing South Africans who claim they’re victims of “white genocide.”
-snip-
I found myself reconstructing this history recently, as the protests and boycotts against Tesla began. Do you need a reminder as to why? Okay: Tesla CEO Elon Musk—the world’s richest man, and Trump’s biggest campaign donor; an unelected, ketamine-happy, video game cheating, transphobic, subsidy–guzzling, deadbeat dad—is leading a bunch of scythe-wielding mini-me shitposters through innards of the federal government, harvesting and compromising the most essential data of every taxpayer, government contractor, and NGO in America. Oh, and he’s also supporting fascists, using apparent Nazi salutes, and blasting antisemitic and racist theories to his millions of followers.
Anyway, the dude is bad news. And he’s threatening to use his hundreds of billions—again, money he would not have without US subsidies—to take out any politician, foreign or domestic, who opposes his and Trump’s agenda, which is a mix of toxic masculinity, grift, and a seeming desire to return to a gauzy form of racial apartheid.
Words like “apartheid” and “Nazi” shouldn’t be tossed around lightly. Musk has denied he’s a Nazi, and that his salute was a Nazi salute. But clear-eyed commentators aren’t buying it, and white nationalists like Nick Fuentes are downright jubilant: “That was a straight up, like, Sieg Heil, like loving Hitler energy.” And then there’s Musk’s history. His maternal grandparents were, according to Musk’s own father, members of the Canadian neo-Nazi party who decamped to South Africa because they were fans of racial oppression. Musk has been pretty mum about what it was like to grow up in South Africa and the influence that had on him. (Today he holds US, Canadian, and South African citizenship.) But the fact is that many white South Africans who left at that time did so because their position of privilege was coming to an end.
In any case, once in the States, Musk joined forces with fellow South Africans Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Roelof Botha—grandson of former South African leader Pik Botha; now the head of venture capital giant Sequoia Capital—to form PayPal. And they revealed themselves to be racial reactionaries. Thiel (who, according to his biographer, once called critiques of apartheid “overblown”) and Sacks wrote “The Case Against Affirmative Action” for Stanford Magazine in 1996. They’ve led concerted, organized attacks on DEI. Musk, who was under federal investigation for racial discrimination in his Tesla factories—that is, until Trump took over—is supporting extremist movements across the world, using Holocaust Remembrance Day to tell Germans they should no longer feel “guilt” over it, and echoing South Africans who claim they’re victims of “white genocide.”
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