Elon Musk is on one. Again.
The world’s richest man has been flooding his own platform, X, with posts about South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment laws, calling them racist, calling South African politicians criminals, and repeating his now-infamous claim that Starlink cannot operate in his birth country for one reason only: because he is not Black. He wants the world to see him as a victim. He wants us to believe that a billionaire born into one of apartheid South Africa’s most privileged white families is now being oppressed by a policy designed to repair the decades of devastation that system caused.
Let that sink in.
This is not a story about telecom regulations. This is a story about a man who has never once reconciled with the world that made him, now demanding that world change its laws to accommodate his business model. And to understand why that is so deeply wrong, you have to understand who Elon Musk really is, where he actually came from, and why the BEE laws he is screaming about exist in the first place.
What Elon Said This Week
In a post that went viral over the weekend, Musk wrote: “South Africa won’t allow Starlink to be licensed, even though I was BORN THERE, simply because I am not Black! We were offered many times the opportunity to bribe our way to a license by pretending that a Black guy runs Starlink SA, but I have refused to do so on principle. Racism should not be rewarded no matter to which race it is applied.”
He did not stop there. In another post, Musk claimed South Africa had “passed 142 laws forcing discrimination against anyone who is not black” and called it “a shameful disgrace to the legacy of the great Nelson Mandela.”
Earlier this month, Musk directly responded to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa reaffirming the country’s commitment to BEE, simply calling it “extremely racist laws.”
When a senior South African diplomat named Clayson Monyela posted a meme mocking Musk’s frustration, pointing out that over 600 U.S. companies including Microsoft operate in South Africa while complying with local laws and thriving, Musk responded: “Stop being such a fucking racist, you asshole.
He has also posted: “South Africa now has more anti-white laws than there were anti-black laws under Apartheid!” and insisted there should be “a fair and even playing field.”
This is what we are dealing with. The richest man on earth throwing a tantrum because a sovereign country will not bend its post-apartheid reconstruction laws to let him operate a satellite internet company without a 30% local ownership stake.
The Actual Story Behind Starlink and South Africa
Before we go any deeper, let us establish one critical fact that Musk conveniently leaves out of every post.
South Africa’s foreign ministry said in March 2025 that Starlink was “welcome to operate in South Africa provided there’s compliance with local laws.” In April 2025, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa confirmed that Starlink “has not applied for a license.”
Read that again. Starlink has not applied. Musk’s company has refused to even submit the paperwork because they object to the ownership requirement. That is not a ban. That is a choice.
The matter centers on a law requiring telecommunications companies to give local Black firms at least a 30% stake in their operations within the nation. According to reporting from Semafor, the South African government was already considering an exception for Musk’s ventures. By May 2025, Bloomberg reported the country had struck a deal allowing companies to meet the requirement through “equity equivalent investment programs” instead.
Starlink has offered to connect 5,000 rural schools with free high-speed internet as part of that framework, an investment of roughly R500 million benefiting over 2.4 million children yearly.
So a pathway exists. A deal was struck. South Africa went out of its way to accommodate Musk. And he is still on X calling them racists. What this is really about is not telecom regulations. What this is about is principle, specifically Musk’s belief that he should not have to comply with any law built on the premise that Black South Africans deserve economic redress.
What BEE Actually Is and Why It Exists
To call BEE racist, you have to either be historically illiterate or deliberately dishonest. Let us make sure nobody reading this is either.
Black Economic Empowerment is a policy of the South African government that aims to facilitate broader participation in the economy by Black people. It is a form of affirmative action intended to redress the inequalities created by apartheid. The policy provides incentives, especially preferential treatment in government procurement, to businesses which contribute to Black economic empowerment through partial or majority Black ownership, hiring Black employees, and contracting with Black-owned suppliers.
Now here is the part Musk skips when he posts about “race laws.”
Apartheid was not simply a period of inequality. It was a comprehensive legal architecture specifically engineered to strip Black South Africans of economic participation entirely. The Population Registration Act classified every South African by race. The Group Areas Act forcibly relocated Black communities away from economic centers. The Bantu Education Act deliberately provided an inferior education to Black children, explicitly designed to produce workers, not leaders. Job reservation laws barred Black workers from skilled positions entirely. Pass laws controlled where Black people could live, work, and move, requiring them to carry documentation at all times or face arrest.
This was not a gap. This was a wall, built brick by brick over decades, and it produced one of the most unequal economies on the planet. When Nelson Mandela’s government took power in 1994, the challenge was not just political freedom. The challenge was that white South Africans owned virtually everything. The land, the mines, the financial sector, the corporations. Black South Africans, who comprised the overwhelming majority of the population, had been legally locked out of accumulating wealth for generations.
BEE was launched in 2003 as a political effort to address the injustices suffered by Black South African citizens as a result of apartheid policies. The South African government described it as “not simply a moral initiative to redress the wrongs of the past. It is a pragmatic growth strategy that aims to realize the country’s full economic potential while helping to bring the black majority into the economic mainstream.”
To call BEE racist is to eat at the table apartheid set for you and complain when someone else is finally offered a chair. When you have been standing on a platform your whole life, equality can feel like a step down.
That last line is the whole story.
Musk did not earn his start in a vacuum. He grew up in apartheid South Africa as a white child in Pretoria with private schools, servants, horses, and lavish family wealth. The system that produced that lifestyle for white families was the same system BEE was built to repair. The idea that correcting that imbalance constitutes racism against white people is an argument that could only feel compelling to someone who has never once been asked to account for what they inherited.
The Family Tree He Never Talks About
If you want to understand why Elon Musk speaks about South Africa the way he does, you need to understand where he came from. Not just his biography. His bloodline.
Errol Musk: The Father
Errol Graham Musk was a South African politician and businessman, elected as an independent to represent Sunnyside on the Pretoria City Council in 1972. He had a lucrative engineering business that took on large projects including office buildings and an air force base. He owned at least half a share in an emerald mine, and “one of the biggest houses in Pretoria.” At the time of his divorce from Maye Musk, he owned two homes, a yacht, a plane, five luxury cars, and a truck.
This was not a self-made man scrapping his way up. This was a white South African businessman who accumulated extraordinary wealth during the height of apartheid, operating in an economy where every competitive advantage was handed to white people by law. He thrived inside a system built on Black labor, Black land dispossession, and Black exclusion.
Then, in 2025, Errol Musk sat down for a CNN interview and denied the whole thing.
When CNN correspondent Donie O’Sullivan cited apartheid’s legacy and noted how white rule oppressed millions of Black people for decades, Errol Musk dismissed the notion outright: “No! How do you oppress? You know, we gave them work, we fed them. They grew from a tiny little group into a massive group. That’s not oppression, that’s feeding them!”
He also warned that the U.S. becoming majority nonwhite would be a “very bad thing” and asked, “You want to go back to the jungle?”
This is Elon Musk’s father. Speaking on camera. In 2025.
Elon has publicly called his father a “terrible human being” and has said “almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.” So he knows who his father is. But the ideology that shaped both of them, the worldview that sees Black economic advancement as a threat, keeps showing up in Elon’s posts whether he admits it or not.
Joshua Haldeman: The Grandfather
This is where the story goes deeper and darker.
Joshua Norman Haldeman was Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather. Over the course of decades, Haldeman repeatedly expressed racist, antisemitic, and antidemocratic views. In South Africa, he was a supporter of apartheid and promoted a number of conspiracy theories.
Haldeman moved his family to South Africa in 1950, right when apartheid was kicking into full force. Historians note that the apartheid laws of the 1950s were in many ways reminiscent of the Nazi Nuremberg laws against Jews in the 1930s, stripping Black people of the right to work in certain places, controlling their movements, and confining them to specific areas.
Weeks after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, Haldeman self-published a book claiming that international propaganda campaigns were being carried out against white people “because the white man’s integrity, initiative and independence make him the most difficult to control.” He described apartheid South Africa as the leading “White Christian Civilization” and criticized Black liberation movements for attempting to “oust the white man.
This man raised Elon Musk’s mother, Maye. According to Errol Musk, the Haldemans were “fanatical” in favor of apartheid. Elon’s grandmother told him stories of his grandfather’s travels and exploits throughout his childhood, including slideshows of his trips.
Musk biographer Ashlee Vance wrote: “Throughout his childhood, Elon heard many stories about his grandfather’s exploits and sat through countless slide shows that documented his travels and trips.”
Elon Musk grew up listening to stories told by people who believed apartheid was good for Africa. He was shaped, at a foundational level, by a family ideology that viewed the white economic order as natural and righteous, and Black economic empowerment as a threat to civilization.
That context does not make his business frustrations fabricated. But it absolutely explains why he frames a 30% ownership requirement for a telecom license as the equivalent of the oppression his grandfather championed.
From Democrat to DOGE: The Political Drift Nobody Should Be Surprised By
Here is something people forget. Elon Musk used to vote Democratic. He says he voted for Barack Obama twice. He voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. He voted for Joe Biden in 2020. As recently as four years ago, he was positioned as a progressive tech billionaire, a champion of electric vehicles, a man who wanted to go to Mars and save the planet.
So what happened?
Musk claims the Democratic Party moved further to the left over time, leaving him feeling politically closer to Republicans. He presents himself as a man who stayed still while the world changed around him.
That is the cover story. The reality is more complicated and more revealing.
Musk’s rightward shift accelerated following the COVID-19 pandemic. When California forced his Tesla plant in Fremont to close, he reopened it in defiance, declaring he was ready to be arrested. That confrontation with government authority planted a seed.
A variety of media outlets have pointed to a deeper motivation sparked by one of his children. In 2022, Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters from California to Texas after California passed a law banning schools from forcing teachers to notify parents when a child changes their gender identity. His child’s gender transition reportedly ignited something in Musk that regulation never quite had.
In May 2022, Musk stated that the Democratic Party had become the “party of division and hate” and said he would vote Republican. He later urged voters to vote for Republicans in that year’s midterms.
When Musk took over Twitter in 2022, he had pledged to make it politically neutral. Instead, he laid off employees responsible for monitoring disinformation, restored over 62,000 suspended accounts including white nationalist and neo-Nazi accounts accused of spreading hate speech, and reversed the ban on Trump’s account. By the 2024 election, X had effectively become an unofficial platform for the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.
By 2024, Musk established a political action committee in support of Donald Trump, becoming the election’s largest donor with over $277 million in contributions. He was appointed to lead the Department of Government Efficiency after Trump’s inauguration.
Analysts who describe this as a “libertarian to alt-right pipeline” are not being inflammatory. They are describing a documented pattern. A billionaire who always believed in minimal government, unfettered markets, and personal freedom eventually collided with a Democratic Party that wanted to regulate his companies, a culture that wanted to hold him accountable, and a South Africa that wanted him to comply with post-apartheid law. His response was to align with the people who told him he owed nothing to nobody.
Political analysts have argued that Musk’s shift to the right is shaped by several interwoven causes, including a sense of racial superiority rooted in his background as a white South African, a commitment to gender norms, and the natural proclivity of the ultrarich toward Social Darwinist economics.
When you see the whole picture, none of this is surprising. A man raised on stories of apartheid’s righteousness, whose father grew rich under that system and still denies it was oppression, whose grandfather moved to South Africa specifically because he wanted to live under white rule and wrote books defending it. That man eventually found his political home. It just took him a few decades and a few trillion dollars to get there.
The Irony He Refuses to See
Elon Musk invoking Nelson Mandela’s name to condemn BEE is one of the most dishonest rhetorical moves in recent memory. Mandela did not seek a colorblind South Africa in the sense Musk wants to use. Mandela fought for an equal South Africa, and equality after centuries of systematic exclusion does not mean pretending the exclusion never happened. It means actively repairing the damage.
BEE is a constitutional corrective measure aimed at broadening economic participation in a country where, until 1994, economic exclusion was state policy, not an unfortunate oversight. Apartheid’s architecture did not merely discriminate. It surgically engineered white economic dominance. To cry racism in response to redress is to mistake rebalancing for reversal.
Over 600 American companies, including Microsoft, operate in South Africa right now. They comply with BEE requirements. They are thriving. They did not go on X to call South African politicians criminals and demand that the country’s constitution be rewritten for their convenience.
The difference between those companies and Elon Musk is not the law. The difference is the ideology.
Musk does not object to BEE because it is inconvenient. He objects to it because he fundamentally believes, at some deep level shaped by everything his family taught him, that Black economic empowerment is not a legitimate goal. And rather than sit with that, he dresses it up in the language of anti-racism and calls himself the victim.
South Africa sees through it. The world should too.
