A day with Errol Musk: Apartheid nostalgia, white supremacy and the making of Elon Musk

Dilly Hussain recounts his meeting with Errol Musk, the father of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, in light of the owner of X increasingly revealing his white supremacist beliefs while stoking racial and political unrest on both sides of the Atlantic.

Last May, I spent a day with Errol Musk, Elon Musk’s father, at his home in the Western Cape, on his 79th birthday.

Initially, I was surprised that he had agreed to do a podcast on his birthday after being in comms for a couple of months to get a podcast arranged.

When I arrived at Errol’s house, the first thing I noticed was that he lived alone. The house itself was very large and classy, a bit untidy and disorderly inside — not chaotic, but somewhat neglected. In person, Errol was very courteous, respectful, accommodating and pleasant throughout.

He cleared space for me and my team to pray, ensured there was no alcohol anywhere near us, and was very respectful of me and my team. I genuinely could not fault him as a host.

The two-hour podcast we filmed did not fully capture the totality of the conversations we had, both on and off camera, over the course of five to six hours.

What was obvious is that Errol came from a wealthy, affluent background, from a family that benefited immensely from apartheid-era South Africa. His views about his wives and partners were revealing. When it came to Elon, he had nothing but praise and spoke positively of his son throughout.

But there were views he held that were deeply concerning, though unsurprising.

Errol is firmly of the belief that non-whites, particularly black people, are incapable of building a functioning society or civilisation. When I challenged him on this and cited Arabs, Persians, Turks, Egyptians, Malians and Indians, he hesitated and then said they were “historical exceptions” for particular eras. When I raised the dire condition of Europe during the Middle Ages — the medieval period, pre-industrialisation — he had no real response.

He repeatedly asserted that the more white people there are in a country, the more likely that society will be high-trust, developed and functional.

This position was held with no acknowledgement of European colonialism, no awareness of modern-day Western imperialism, no recognition of the industrial-scale looting of natural resources, or the deliberate destabilisation of the global South — particularly Africa and the Middle East by Western states. There was no reflection on the fact that many “independent” post-colonial nation states were left broken and then ruled by corrupt despots, Western-backed regimes, or usually both.

Errol seemed entirely oblivious to historical facts such as the Mughal Empire accounting for roughly 25 percent of global GDP when the British arrived in India in the 1700s.He did praise the Abbasid Caliphate for the “Islamic Golden Era” during the podcast, but despite this, he would not budge from his core belief: that non-whites, especially black people, are inherently incapable of building functioning states and high-trust societies.He went on to cite Rhodesia and South Africa as white success stories in comparison to the rest of the post-colonial African states.While he claimed on the podcast to be anti-apartheid in his youth, much of the surrounding conversation, both on and off camera, amounted to explaining, contextualising and ultimately justifying the greater and lasting benefits of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa, and Africa in general.

Taken together, alongside the fact that his former father-in-law — Maye Musk’s father — was a card-carrying Canadian Nazi, and that the Musk family were major beneficiaries of apartheid, Elon Musk’s behaviour, politics and worldview make absolute sense. Whether this worldview is rooted in eugenics or something generationally rationalised over time, the ideology is clear: a belief in white superiority; a belief that non-whites are inherently incapable or incompetent without white people.

We also discussed Errol’s marital and love life, an area of much interest (and concern) for his critics. His romantic relationship with his former stepdaughter, Jana Bezuidenhout — whom he later married and had children with — is well-known, and strange, to say the least.

There have also been allegations of sexually inappropriate behaviour towards other stepchildren, which had not surfaced at the time of filming.

In terms of faith, Errol claimed to believe in God and to be a Christian, yet he did not believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipotent God/Jesus, or in a Hereafter.

He told me he prayed more than 50 times a day, yet when I asked who he prays to and what he prays for, he could not answer — except that he saw himself as one of “God’s little helpers”. In reality, like many white “cultural Christians”, he appeared to be a closet agnostic who uses Christianity as a disposable identity marker.

And that, in many ways, explains Elon Musk: the white supremacy, the transhumanism, the god complex, the detachment from history and Godly morality. Everything you see and hear from Elon Musk should be understood with this in mind: the apple does not fall far from the tree.