Why, The Washington Post wanted to know, does Elon Musk harbor such intense animosity to anything related to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion)? For help, they turned to the tech CEO’s father, whose answer revealed a lot about how Musk looks at the world outside his billionaire bubble.
“They were not into political nonsense, and we lived in a very well-run, law-abiding country with virtually no crime at all,” he said of Musk and his brother. “Actually no crime. We had several black servants who were their friends.”
Elon was raised in a South Africa quite different from the one that exists today. When he left in 1988, apartheid, which instituted racial segregation and limited opportunities for the country’s majority Black population, had not been abolished. The country’s white minority ran the government, and opposition leader Nelson Mandela was entering his third decade behind bars.
Elon’s upbringing features some contradictory evidence as to where and when his aversion to diversity took root. Errol Musk belonged to an anti-apartheid political party and served on the city council in Pretoria. He told The New York Times Elon questioned apartheid from a young age; former classmates recalled him defending a Black student from a slur in his multicultural school.
But his grandfather, J.N. Haldeman was “a pro-apartheid, antisemitic conspiracy theorist who blamed much of what bothered him about the world on Jewish financiers,” according to the New Yorker.
Rudolph Pienaar, a biomedical scientist who graduated with Musk from Pretoria Boys High School in 1988, told the Post that their privileged upbringing typically isolated them from the harsh reality of systemic racial oppression.
“I am not sure if Elon can conceive of systematic discrimination and struggle because that’s not his experience,” Pienaar said. “His life now in some ways is how it was under apartheid — rich and entitled with the entire society built to sustain him and his ilk.”
Which may explain his shift from being what the Post called a “tacit backer of DEI” to someone who now regularly highlights perceived ‘anti-white’ bias.”
Besides his efforts as head of DOGE to gut the federal government of all DEI initiatives, Musk has allowed a glimpse into his thoughts on race through his account on X, the social media platform he has transformed into a right-learning bulletin board.
There, the Post details, he has warned that lower birth rates and immigration are diluting American culture, writing earlier this year, “We should be very cautious about having some sort of global mixing pot.
He has called unchecked illegal immigration “civilizational suicide” and warns that declining birth rates are leading to “population collapse” while stressing the importance of “smart people” having more children (he’s fathered at least a dozen).
He’s also promoted the unsubstantiated claim that diversity measures have made air travel less safe, claiming that DEI contributed to the fatal collision in Washington of a U.S. Army helicopter and a passenger plane.
“DEI has caused people to DIE,” Musk proclaimed to his 220 million followers on X.
On another post that compared DEI to Jim Crow, Musk commented, “DEI is racism and sexism.”
“He is in a position of considerable political power, with the ability to withhold or increase government funding based on his whims,” said Imran Ahmed, founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonpartisan watchdog group that tracks extremism. He accused Musk of “spreading hate and disinformation on his platform.”
But many of his opinions are offered indirectly, sometimes by merely reposting incendiary content like this post from far-right reactionary Tucker Carlson.
“There is systemic racism in the United States, against whites. Everyone knows it. Nobody says it. How come?” Musk added a brief comment, “Concerning.”
Musk follows some virulently racist accounts on X and even subscribes to one pro-apartheid account which regularly disparages South Africa’s Black population while calling for power to be returned to whites. Since purchasing X, then known as Twitter, Musk has reinstated a slew of accounts that push hate, claiming he’s doing so in defense of free speech.
