Spencer Pratt called Elon Musk “the most successful African American of all time” in a video now going viral on X, and the culture is not having it.
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In the video, the former reality star turned failed Los Angeles mayoral candidate runs down Musk’s résumé, from PayPal to Tesla to SpaceX, before landing on the line that set social media off. “All because he built something. Because of capitalism. Because of liberty,” Pratt says. “He’s the most successful African American of all time. And yet people still call him a loser?”
Pratt has been defending Musk all week, after Rep. Ilhan Omar called the billionaire an idiot. In a Substack post on Friday, Pratt lumped Omar in with Kacey Musgraves, who called Christopher Columbus a loser, and declared that “this nation was built by great men.” Musk returned the love during Pratt’s run for mayor, publicly agreeing with Pratt’s attacks on Mayor Karen Bass. Pratt finished third in the June primary with about 25% of the vote and did not make the runoff.
So let’s talk about the man Pratt just crowned the greatest African American in history.
Elon Musk is a white man who was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971, at the height of apartheid, the system of laws that kept Black South Africans segregated, stripped of their land and their vote, and locked out of the country’s wealth for nearly half a century. White South Africans like the Musk family sat at the top of that system. The very idea of a white South Africa was built on colonization, as European settlers took the land from the people who were already there and then wrote the laws to keep it.
Musk’s family did not stumble into that system. His maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was a Canadian chiropractor and political activist who moved his family to South Africa in 1950, just two years after the apartheid government took power. Haldeman was an open supporter of apartheid who pushed racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories. Musk’s own father, Errol Musk, has said Haldeman sympathized with Nazi Germany during World War II. Musk was raised on the privileged side of that line, with the schools, the neighborhoods, and the opportunities that white South Africans had and Black South Africans were legally denied.
Musk left South Africa at 17, saying he did not want to serve in the apartheid military. That is the part of the story he likes to tell. The part he does not like to tell is how he got started in America.
In 2024, The Washington Post reported that Musk worked in the United States illegally in the 1990s. He came to Palo Alto in 1995 to attend Stanford, never enrolled, and instead started his first company, Zip2, without the legal authorization to work, according to former business associates, court records, and company documents. Investors were reportedly so worried about their founder being deported that they gave Musk and his brother Kimbal a deadline to get legal work status. In a 2013 interview, Kimbal admitted that when investors funded them, “they realized that we were illegal immigrants.” Musk has denied it, saying he was on a J‑1 visa that later turned into an H‑1B, but he has never explained exactly how or when he got that work visa.
That is the same Elon Musk who spent the 2024 election pouring money into Trump’s campaign and attacking “open borders,” and who now cheers on the deportation of immigrants who did exactly what the Post says he did.
Then there is his record on race. Tesla’s Fremont factory has been the target of a string of racial discrimination cases. In 2021, a jury awarded former elevator operator Owen Diaz $137 million after he testified that he was called the n‑word and surrounded by racist graffiti at the plant, though the award was later cut. California’s civil rights agency sued Tesla in 2022 over what it called a racially segregated workplace, and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission followed with its own lawsuit in 2023 over racial harassment of Black workers.
When newspapers dropped the “Dilbert” comic in 2023 after its creator called Black Americans a “hate group,” Musk did not defend Black readers. He said the media had become “racist against whites & Asians.” He has repeatedly pushed claims of a “white genocide” against white farmers in South Africa, a talking point that South African courts and officials have rejected, and he championed the Trump administration’s plan to fast track white Afrikaners into the United States as refugees while refugees from the rest of the world were shut out.
None of that makes Elon Musk African American. African American describes the descendants of Africans who were stolen, enslaved, and brought to this country in chains, and whose families built America’s wealth without ever being allowed to share in it. It is an identity forged by slavery, Jim Crow, and the fight for civil rights. Musk’s family history sits on the other side of that story.
Calling Musk the most successful African American of all time is not a fun fact. It is a punchline that erases the people the term was made for, and it hands the title to a man whose family benefited from apartheid, who built his first company while working here illegally, and who has spent years pushing white grievance from the biggest platform in the world.
Pratt asked why people still call Musk a loser. A better question is why anyone would call him African American.
