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What should be done about Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and all that he represents? Here in South Africa, it is tempting to contrast South Africa-born Elon Musk to our other most famous recent personality: Nelson Mandela.
Where Mandela stands for ending Apartheid, Musk symbolises a crisis-prone, ultra-exploitative racial capitalism whose ideology fuses corporate-dominated economic libertarianism with a surveillance-centric militarised state.
On the day Trump took power in 2025, Elon Musk raised his right arm in a gesture widely read as a Nazi salute. For former Johannesburg Business Day editor and former MP Songezo Zibi it was a breaking point. Zibi had once admired Musk. He reversed course and came out against Starlink's presence in South Africa: "Musk has actively promoted white supremacist ideas, including giving the Nazi salute. Call me naïve and idealistic but I still think character matters, but apparently to some people it really doesn't. He has also spread racist lies about black and brown immigrants in the US and elsewhere."
Zibi's break with Musk is one sign of a broader shift. Across South Africa, a coalition of activists, politicians, and civil-society groups is organizing against Musk's growing footprint in the country.
“Simply Because I am Not Black”: Musk’s Starlink Stand Off
Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet project, was slated to be rolled out in South Africa, but Musk is refusing to follow so-called “Black Economic Empowerment” policies that compel him to find a Black local co-investor. So the South African government has blocked access to Starlink. He refuses to do so since apparently “South Africa now has more anti-White laws than there were anti-Black laws under Apartheid,” a patent falsehood.
In April 2026, he tweeted: "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."
Musk has also frequently alleged a supposed genocide of white Afrikaner farmers. The underlying economic picture contradicts that narrative. Commercial farmer wealth has risen dramatically since 1994. This is largely because the end of Apartheid coincided with the end of international sanctions. It is also because the state has not redistributed the farmland that was taken from black South Africans within living memory. Yet thanks to Musk’s misinformation, Donald Trump granted more than 6,000 Afrikaners special refugee status in the US, while rejecting nearly every other refugee applicant. As many as 10,000 more Afrikaners may be admitted. but 2.7 million remain in South Africa.
A Violent Apartheid Childhood
To understand why Musk sees South Africa – and perhaps the world – the way he does, it helps to look at where he came from. As historian Efthimios Karayiannides observed in 2024, there is a “surprisingly high number of white South Africans among dot-com moguls turned conservative crusaders against liberalism. Four of the founders of PayPal have some connection to Southern Africa (including Musk and Peter Thiel). Parallels have been drawn between Musk’s and fellow PayPal mafioso Peter Thiel’s authoritarian approaches to corporate governance and the Apartheid regime’s white supremacist baaskap (‘bossism’) ideology.”
The roots of Musk’s ideology run deep into white South Africa’s own psychoses. Musk was born in South Africa’s capital Pretoria in 1971 and partly raised in Johannesburg – the world’s most unequal city – and the coastal city of Durban. Musk’s mother, Maye, was Canadian, the daughter of a Nazi-sympathiser who moved to a welcoming Apartheid-era South Africa in the 1950s. Musk’s father Errol had enriched himself in the mid-1980s as a merchant of emeralds illegally extracted from Zambia. Their relationship does not seem to have been close. In a 2017 Rolling Stone interview Musk described his father as “terrible human being... Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.”
Musk has described his childhood as “violent” and “unhappy”. In 1984, ´he “was almost beaten to death” during a high school bullying incident that left him hospitalised for a week. Nearly three decades later, the incident required corrective surgery: “Was beat up pretty badly as a kid & left me w jagged septum. Harder to breathe as I got older, so time to fix.”
Musk’s family does not seem to have supported their child: Errol Musk told his own son’s biographer that the bullying attack occurred in retribution, because his son teased someone who “had just lost his father to suicide and Elon had called him stupid. Elon had a tendency to call people stupid. How could I possibly blame that child?”
The Johannesburg school at which this happened, Bryanston, was an all-white public school, training the country’s racist elites to run a society that required extreme brutality by the mid-1980s. Perhaps in an attempt to flee this violent society, Musk moved to Canada in 1989 at age 17 and therefore just prior to compulsory military service.
In 1992, Musk enrolled at the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia, the same school Donald Trump had graduated from in 1968. Musk’s undergraduate degree combined economics and physics, at a time when financial training was increasingly mathematical, promoting market-speculation modelling.
The African Lives DOGE Threw Into the Woodchipper
Musk’s skill at financial fabulation is central to what American historian Quinn Slobodian and the tech journalist Ben Tarnoff have coined “Muskism” to describe an economic system, a regime of accumulation named after its leading industrialist, recalling the Fordism of an earlier era.
This is not an economic system based purely on innovation, as Musk likes to claim. His dirty secret is that it is not business acumen but public money that sustained the growth of his businesses. In 2025, the Washington Post found that Musk and his companies had received at least 38 billion USD in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits including 6.3 billion USD in 2024 alone. These infusions repeatedly arrived at critical moments, helping him to become the world’s richest person.
It therefore makes perfect sense that Musk moved quickly and decisively to exercise control of the state when opportunity presented itself. In early 2025 he established a “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) reporting directly to president Trump, while his companies continue to harvest vast federal subsidies: Even as DOGE gutted major parts of the U.S. state, SpaceX was awarded major new defence contracts.
Within days of joining the Trump White House, Musk went after the US Agency for International Development, writing on X: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” DOGE cut ten thousand USAID jobs, leaving the department with just 300 employees. At the same time, Trump froze funding to almost all US projects on democracy abroad.
It is worth remembering that both “developmental aid” and “support for democracy” are often primarily tools of soft power. USAID staff were employed to promote a neoliberal economic-policy ideology, for instance through the consultancies that were prolific in South Africa’s transition in the 1990s. At the same time, Nelson Mandela bemoaned the fact that USAID only gave ‘peanuts’ after U.S. corporations profited so much from Apartheid.
Nevertheless, the US had sponsored various projects in South Africa, health programmes around HIV receiving about 400 million USD a year. Musk took particular aim at these: He was responsible for 2.1 billion USD cuts to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) medicines support, including a 51% cut in prevention funding. This resulted in closure of 1,714 service delivery sites in 46 countries, mostly in Africa.
According to a recent report by the International AIDS Society the impact on South Africa was particularly severe: The rainbow nation “recorded the largest absolute decline, with 30,880 fewer children receiving treatment support from PEPFAR – a 45% drop.” An AIDS vaccine locally developed thanks to 45 million USD in USAID funding was also derailed, and many South African health workers lost their jobs, including more than 15,000 positions previously funded by PEPFAR. A 2025 study published in the Lancet anticipate DOGE’s cuts to USAID leading to 14 million excess deaths worldwide by 2030.
When The Economist asked Musk about fatalities he claimed that “Zero people died because of DOGE… How many NGOs are there that could that could that could step in… the Gates Foundation has 50 billion dollars…what about them?” In reality, only 2% of respondents in one survey of 166 former USAID recipients had found alternate sources of programme financing a year after the cuts.
Union Busting and State Capture
Musk’s pattern of attack is not random. DOGE trimmed those parts of government that protect society and environment while keeping and expanding the parts that benefit capital. This is the core of Musk’s ideology. Musk might be famed as a disruptor of ossified systems, but underneath the narrative of the genius-founder, underneath the spectacle of rockets and online trolling, there is simply the prime example for how ultra-speculative capital operates today: dependent on the state it claims to despise, extremely hostile to the labour it needs in order to function, and financially and politically committed to far-right movements that strengthen its power around the world.
Tesla is the only major American automaker whose workforce is not represented by a union; despite allegations of high injury rates, long hours, and below-industry pay, every union drive across Musk’s facilities has failed. In 2021, US National Labour Relations Board (NLRB) found Tesla repeatedly violated labour law through coercively interrogating activists engaged in organising, and using gag orders to silence or fire them.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Musk’s DOGE moved against the NLRB as part of a broader effort to dismantle the legal architecture of collective bargaining, a system erected in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression. DOGE implemented austerity but not only in the classical sense. It also promoted a deliberate shift of power from workers to employers, using the apparatus of the state to hollow out the very agencies meant to reasonably constrain capital.
The mythology of Musk’s genius as an innovator of internet payment systems, electric vehicles and space exploration is itself ideological. It flips the real relationship between capital and labour, rendering invisible the tens of thousands of workers whose surplus value underwrites every satellite launch and every fevered tweet. Musk did not build the future, he extracted it.
Selling Fairy Tales of the Future
It is not only in exploiting labour that Musk has been innovative. The financial engineering Musk learned at Wharton continues to be pernicious, especially in Musk’s grasp of ‘financial fabulism’. This term was coined by Slobodian and Tarnoff to describe the way Musk and others construct fantastic stories of future success to draw in investor confidence. If they manage to drum up enough confidence and therefore financing the fantastic stories become self-fulfilling prophecies of success; they have successfully pulled off a financial bluff.
SpaceX’s Initial Public Offering offers a revealing example for such financial fabulism. The IPO demonstrated the willingness of investment index providers to relax or reinterpret their requirements in order to accommodate a company whose scale makes exclusion increasingly difficult. Inclusion in the major indices signals that SpaceX belongs among the core firms of the American economy, crucially even though it may not have satisfied the older criteria that other established firms were required to meet.
What is at stake is whether the institutions that govern capital allocation remain constraints on economic power or become increasingly responsive to it. The political-economic structure this reveals is not competitive capitalism in any classical sense, but the state capture monopoly capitalism inherent in Muskism.
South Africa Has Fought Worse Enemies
Faced with this record, South Africans have not stayed quiet. A ‘Stop Starlink’ campaign has begun mobilising around a number of demands of the state, starting with a ban on the use of Grok AI by government, universities and schools, and any public institutions, and removing all state institutions from the X.com platform. In the process, government should request non-profit agencies – especially those involved in education and the well-being of children – to seek alternative platforms with safeguards against online sexual abuse, and thus raise the issue of online sexual violence as a national dialogue, especially AI-generated non-consensual use of images.
But this is not South Africa's first fight of this kind. The Treatment Action Campaign beat back restrictive intellectual-property rules on AIDS medicines, winning free generic drugs that have saved millions of lives (a victory that did not extend to Covid-19 vaccines, blocked by opposition from Berlin). The #FeesMustFall student movement challenged the exclusionary, neo-colonial structure of tertiary education. Activists fought Bill Gates's philanthro-capitalist expansion into low-income communities, and pushed back against highway e-tolling schemes whose surveillance costs fell disproportionately on workers. A World Bank microfinance subsidiary was beaten back for predatory lending. The fight against data centres and gig-economy exploitation is still underway. Stop Starlink is the latest chapter in this history.
South Africa is not alone in resisting Musk. Since he bought X in 2022, users elsewhere have been quitting the platform as it has increasingly reflected his personal politics. Some African governments have pushed back directly on Starlink itself. According to analyst Karayiannides, several countries have declared it a threat to their digital sovereignty: "Namibia, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Cameroon, and South Africa have all either issued formal bans or demanded regularisation." Karayiannides argues this resistance may not hold. Musk built his career on regulatory arbitrage, fighting banks, credit card companies, and government regulators in the 2000s. Starlink's satellite architecture lets it operate across borders before formal agreements are even reached, which Karayiannides expects Musk to exploit to enter reluctant markets anyway.
Cameroon illustrates the underlying economic critique. Georges Macaire Eyenga of the University of Dschang argues that Starlink's business model works against the inclusion it claims to offer: its pricing "privatises access and makes it unaffordable for a large portion of the global population." In his view, Starlink's market-driven logic deepens existing inequalities rather than closing them, making a long-standing access problem more visible and more politically charged.
Can Pretoria Say No to Washington?
Back in South Africa, the practical stakes of the fight are just as concrete. If local regulators do license and stop blocking Starlink, the clearest corporate losers will be domestic providers: MTN and Vodacom, both of which already face resistance elsewhere in Africa over South African xenophobia. Musk's projected residential pricing is unlikely to undercut existing urban fibre packages, which run around 30 USD a month for high-speed service. His strongest card in in rural areas: he has pledged USD 30 million to connect 5,000 rural schools to free, high-speed internet — an offer that will be hard for a resource-strapped government to refuse.
That leaves the campaign facing a difficult opponent: not just Musk, but a South African government with a track record of folding under US pressure. It showed up clearly at the G20 summit Johannesburg hosted in November 2025. According to one senior official, Trump sabotaged that summit. Pretoria then "collapsed" its global governance agenda in an effort to appease the United States.
Whether the Stop Starlink campaign can hold the line against that pressure is the open question the coming months will answer.
