Introduction

There’s a moment in the new HBO documentary about the January 6 insurrection, Stopping the Steal, in which the fringe-right Arizona state Republican legislator and proud Oath Keeper Mark Finchem solemnly intones the recipe for a stolen election: “Big Business, Big Tech, and Big Media all collude[ ] together… It’s that simple.”

Finchem was making an accusation, of course, about the 2020 presidential election.

But his words are relevant today not because of their relation to a past national vote he tried to help overturn in the most odious and unprecedented ways imaginable, but because they may well presage the axis MAGA Republicans are trying to create—or, as they might feel, re-create—in 2024.

If, as a defining adage of this decade goes, “Every MAGA accusation is a confession”, what we heard from one of the leading insurrectionists in his interview for Stopping the Steal is a terrifying forecast of what’s already happened within far-right media, the elements of U.S. big business aligned with Donald Trump, and the most reckless man in Big Tech today: Elon Musk.

It is only speculation to say that current Vice President Kamala Harris, current vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, and the Democratic Party can overcome the unholy trinity of 500+ MAGA influencers inside the United States amplified by various means—including financially—by the Kremlin, social media platforms run by unscrupulous far-right billionaires whose brotastic “libertarianism” is merely a fig leaf covering an aggressive neo-fascist bent, and a business sector (i) terrified of a future wealth tax, (ii) seduced by promises of Elon Musk slashing regulations left and right as a handpicked Trump “government efficiency czar,” and (iii) the idea that when businesses fail it’s not because of bad management or market factors outside the control of politicians but liberal bugbears like DEI, ESG and CRT.

The eminently provable truth is that Wall Street always does better under Democratic presidential administrations—but try telling that to a corporate executive who’s really just afraid of queer people and wants his own taxes cut as everyone else’s skyrocket.

The point is this: when incoming Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn said in November 2016 that MAGA had succeeded in winning the 2016 presidential election because it had transformed itself into “an army of digital soldiers”; when he later hopped on a 2022 call to tell online influencers attached to the QAnon domestic-terror movement “I love you guys” and one responded by saying to him, “You have no idea how much you are respected and loved and admired by your digital soldiers”; and when DOJ and the FBI announced in 2024 that Operation Doppelgänger, the newest Kremlin election-interference scheme—Flynn having been universally accused of participating in the first one in 2016 (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)—was focused on online influencers, it was a chain of events so blindingly obvious that historians a century hence will marvel at how so many in major media missed the signals. The simple fact is America is in the midst of a hot “information war”… but only one side is fighting.

And that fighting side—Trumpworld, MAGA influencers, and the most dangerous foreign autocrats on Earth—has been on the front lines since at least the middle of last decade, plugging away creating a network of disinformation platforms, agents, funding streams, strategies, tactics, and celebrity pantheons that would take Earth Prime denizens (those connected to phenomenological reality) 25 years to unravel if we started right now.

That’s another way of saying that in many respects it’s too late to win the battle the current U.S. presidential cycle represents—and perhaps even the war it’s central to.

It’s not just that one belligerent in Information War I has on its side the richest man on Earth (Musk), the most famous man on Earth (Trump), the two leaders waging the largest unilateral wars on Earth (Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu), a majority of the United States Supreme Court (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh), and most of the most-popular podcasts, radio programs, YouTube channels, Rumble channels, fake-news websites, and cable networks, they also quite simply have an understanding of the shape of digital culture that there’s presently no evidence anyone on the other end of the battlefield possesses.

DOJ can claim a victory in identifying six—yes, just six—of the nearly 600 influencers the Kremlin has identified as useful to its medium-term ambition of reelecting Trump or (failing that) utterly destroying America through an artificially manufactured slow-boil civil war, but that still leaves… well, nearly 600 MAGA influencers who are very much on that job whether they know it or not. And of course of the very small gaggle of MAGA influencers who presumably should be tucking their tails between their legs at having been caught taking $10 million (wittingly or, as they claim, unwittingly) off Kremlin agents whose rhetoric theirs echoes perfectly, the total number of them who have actually tucked tail is… zero.

One (Tim Pool) is suing the Harris-Walz presidential campaign. A second (Tayler Hansen) was last seen in Springfield, Ohio trying to prove that Trump and Kremlin false claims of Black people eating cats and dogs (and abducting geese, let’s not forget that) in the suburban Midwest are true. The four others are still vomiting out their mountains of vile content and making a boatload of money doing it; half the time a piece of disinformation intended to help Trump steal the 2024 presidential election goes viral on Twitter it seems to have originated with Tenet Six capo Benny Johnson.

And when Hillary Clinton—almost certainly unwisely—came out a few days ago and somewhat tepidly suggested that maybe there should be minor civil penalties for the mass dissemination of election-related disinformation, it was the gaffe that launched a thousand Rumble clips insisting she had said that everyone who’s ever said anything wrong on the internet should be jailed. The Tenet Six and their closest peers have in particular dined off misrepresenting Clinton’s suggestion every single hour since the easily misrepresented words were uttered; it’s undoubtedly been a great cash cow for the least scrupulous MAGA influencers.

Just so, with each passing day Elon Musk gets crazier and more audacious with his election lies and racist disinformation. Nothing that has happened to him or to any of his companies because of his hard-right turn into a muddy white-supremacist ditch has caused him to back off one iota. It’s an eerie echo of how—as Trump has spent every week of the last two months slowly losing ground to his Democratic opponent—his pre-election rhetoric has gotten more fringey and unhinged, not suburb-friendly.

Has no one thought to ask why?

Has no one wondered why Information War I not only has only one active belligerent at present but why every time it seems that belligerent takes a loss, it’s treated as a windfall instead? Maybe we just don’t understand what’s happening here? Or more to the point, perhaps we don’t really understand any of the key participants in it?

We certainly think we do.

We think, for instance, that we know Elon Musk pretty well, given that nearly all his biographies could double as doorstops.

We know, for instance, that he’s fond of lies, hyperbole, false promises, conspiracy theories, news sources that are neither “news” nor “sources”, and being functionally media illiterate at a time when media literacy is the most valuable skill-set an internet user can have. We know he’s a monster to his employees, a monster to anyone with whom he’s in a romantic relationship, and at a minimum a monster to the child of his he publicly referred to as “dead” when she announced that she’s a transgender person.

That Musk child, Vivian Jenna Wilson, has since successfully filed to completely and utterly disassociate herself from her dad and the Musk name.

And we know even more about Musk than all of this.

We know about the illegal emerald mines worked by cruelly underpaid Black workers.

We know about the lucrative sales of illegally smuggled precious gems in Manhattan.

We know about the years Elon Musk spent in the United States illegally, only to turn around and become the worst persecutor of other undocumented persons in America.

We know he is almost single-handedly funding the vile campaign against immigrants in this country.

We know about where the idea for Zip2—the company that made Elon Musk rich—really came from, and the lies he and his brother told as an origin story thereafter.

We know about the horse and the handjob, the creepy insemination of his employees, the inhumane treatment of animals in dystopian Neuralink testing labs, the innocents killed by Musk cars that actually could not drive themselves, all the supremely bizarre “supervised” (but not really) ketamine use, and the decades of false promises and civil lawsuits and federal investigations and racist online bluster.

We know his carefully orchestrated self-mythologizing is fraudulent—the dates and places and achievements and milestones he’s claimed for himself are mostly fiction, including his most recent temporally impossible claim that he spent three full years living in Pennsylvania in the 1990s.

He did not.

We know the trail of ruined companies and relationships he’s left behind, from those who fired him as their CEO to a tunnelling company that doesn’t make tunnels, from a ghastly hoax—“the Hyperloop”—merely intended to punish a local government to perpetually shifting space-exploration timelines that were merely lies seeking marks.

We know about the child who disowned him over his utterly grotesque transphobia and the child he all but kidnapped to keep from his mother. We know about initially secret calls to the Kremlin that led in time to the deaths of U.S. allies in Ukraine and we know about his years and years and years of kowtowing to the whims of dictators.

We know Elon Musk’s tech is now—despite aggressive U.S. sanctions—showing up in Russian drones and the eager hands of Russian warlords.

We know about the disinformation he spreads daily to try to steal an election for a would-be “dictator” and we know about the way he threatens his shareholders, on a whim destroys his companies’ valuations and abuses shareholders’ trust, and is in no way responsible for even one of the achievements Elongelicals unctuously credit him with.

We know Elon Musk.

Or do we?

What if his self-spun narrative of a Democrat-turned-Republican is also utterly false?

What if his reasons for evading military service in South Africa aren’t what he said?

What if he’s been angling, all along, not for an exploration of another planet (Mars, which scientists agree will never be inhabited by humans at scale for far too many reasons to count) but the subjugation of this one via a venal proxy who just promised him a job—Donald Trump? And what if Elon Musk’s plans for that job, according to his father Errol Musk, would cause the United States to collapse?

Now that would be something, wouldn’t it?

The Truth About Elon Musk and Errol Musk

If you’re an Elon Musk biographer like me, you have read the books and articles and interviews through which Elon tries to convince the world that he detests his father, wants nothing to do with him, and has spent the better part of a lifetime trying to be a force in the world diametrically opposed to his father’s open bigotry, graft, conspiracy-theorizing, sociopathy, womanizing, pathological deceit, manipulation, provincialism, and abuse.

But if you’re a Twitter user like hundreds of millions of people around the world, you have also started to notice that—unmoored from the need to seek new investors and now with the promise of a job he apparently always wanted dangling in front of him—Elon Musk seems to be acting exactly like the demented coot he has told a series of biographers he’s spent a lifetime trying to escape literally and figuratively. What gives?

Well, in a 90-minute interview Errol Musk just gave to Rob Moore of the podcast Disruptors, that circle has finally been closed. It turns out that, contrary to Elon’s repeated claims, not only are he and his father not estranged, not only is his dad one of his top advisers, not only are the two in regular contact, but Elon is pursuing a path to power and leadership of Earth’s most powerful nation that in every sense imaginable is a mirror-image of the value system and worldly ambitions his father set out for him.

In short, Errol Musk makes clear that his son has been conning everyone all along—and that only now, at the cusp of his ascension to real political authority as a possible Cabinet-level director of a government department allegedly aimed at promoting “efficiency,” are Americans seeing who the apartheid-era South African-born Musk has been all along.

And it’s not who he promised he was, not who his biographers assured us he was, not who the Democrats he off-and-on supported for years were well-fooled into thinking he was, not who his tech-bro pals or crypto-bro worshippers or Tesla-bro marks wish he was.

Janus has nothing on the two-facedness of Elon Musk, it seems.

But none of that matters.

Being betrayed by an icon is par for the course in America. “Never meet your idols” is a popular American saying, but a better one would be just don’t idolize. Very few who ascend to the top of the heap in American finance, business, politics, or entertainment do so without leaving a trail of broken hearts, false promises, and discarded principles behind them. The exceptions prove the rule—and Musk is by no means an exception.

What really matters here is the future. Who do the Errol Musk revelations about who his son is and what he really believes mean for the United States should Musk get all the power over others he has always craved and more? And the answer, oddly enough, doesn’t seem that complicated in view of the circuitous route we all took to the new revelation we now can’t escape from: if Musk is given any meaningful direct political power in America, the United States will soon collapse into a dystopian fascist state.

And if that happens, it’ll happen because it was more or less the Musks’ plan all along. The Interview

A link to the interview is below, but be warned: these 90 minutes are so jam-packed with stunning revelations that it’s taking this Musk biographer hours and hours to work through even just the first twenty minutes (hence this report summarizing all we have learned from just the first third of the interview).

The purpose of this report is not to collect the ephemera about Elon disgorged by his father Errol in the Disruptors interview—e.g., Elon collects Napoleonic paraphernalia (because of course he does); he weirdly valorizes dictators, for instance by insisting to anyone who’ll listen that the world would have had the internet by 1900 (not a typo) if those silly Frenchmen hadn’t opposed Napoleon’s ambitions of being an “emperor”—nor is it even to focus on minute details nevertheless are significant to confirming Errol’s claim that his relationship with his son is unlike what Elon has mischievously portrayed it to be (for instance, Errol crowing about Elon buying him a new Bentley).

The purpose here is not even to compare this interview to past ones, such as the now-infamous August 2022 Errol Musk interview (see coverage here and here) in which the Musk scion in rather catty fashion fat-shames his son,

No one disputes Elon has called Errol “evil” and a “terrible human being”; it appears the mistake many made was in assuming this meant he didn’t want to be like his dad.

And no one disputes that Errol’s odd way of seeing the world can confuse those trying to synthesize his interviews. For instance, Errol’s belief that it’s both necessary and natural for male children to exceed in accomplishments the life’s work of their sire caused him to answer “no” in 2022 when asked if he was proud of his son Elon, which was his way of saying he couldn’t be proud because that would imply he was surprised.

As if to confirm this, Errol said in the same interview that Elon had “surpassed the mark”—meaning, he had outstripped his father’s success even more than normally would be expected, which is the closest a man like Errol comes to saying “proud.”

{NB: As if to confirm what an idiosyncratic stickler Errol is—perhaps merely a euphemism for “jerk,” in this instance—the elder Musk then went on to explain, as journalists summarized his remarks at the time, that Elon is “five years behind schedule in his career.” Explaining why he would not say he is “proud” of Elon, he confirmed his unusual internal framing of how success must be measured—and it has a lot to do with dynasty: “You know, we are a family that have been doing a lot of things for a long time. It’s not as if we suddenly started doing something.”}

Certainly, this report is not going to underscore all that was left unsaid in Errol’s latest interview, especially as so much of it would simply be a re-recitation of all the ways Errol is odious. For instance, as the New York Post reports, “Errol also has five other children [besides Elon, Kimball Musk, and Tosca Musk] by other partners, including his two youngest sons and a daughter whom he’s welcomed in recent years with his 34-year-old stepdaughter, Jana Bezuidenhout.” Yes, you read that part correctly.

Some of the things Errol has said in past interviews certainly beg more questions—for instance, he claims not to take handouts from Elon but also suggests that Elon secretly is very much helping to support his dad’s lifestyle, with the elder Musk saying of these financial transfers, “We are a very frugal, stingy family; if I want to spend anything, I have to answer a hundred questions [from Elon about] why”—but they mostly serve as background to this new, ground-breaking new 90-minute interview (for instance, in offering some additional confirmation that Elon is linked to Errol in more ways than Elon has ever admitted as an adult).

With all that said, the Proof report on this shocking interview is divided by category.

South Africa

To understand Errol Musk and Elon Musk, you must understand the relationship they have with their home country, South Africa—particularly its harrowing racial politics.

Errol makes clear, throughout the interview, that his relationship to South Africa is also Elon’s; that this relationship was studiously passed down from father to son; and that it is only because Elon needs to hide things from U.S. friends, fans, and financial investors that he doesn’t speak openly of the relationship with apartheid (meaning, yes, racist apartheid) that ideologically he has inherited from his father, per Errol.

This is where Errol’s virulent racism emerges—indeed, just seconds into the interview.

According to Elon Musk’s father, “the European element” (for those following along at home, that would be white South Africans) is the only thing keeping South Africa “alive” and, more particularly, ensuring that it does not become “Zimbabwe” (a Black country that lacks the white population of South Africa).

Lest anyone miss that Elon’s father is saying that Black people can’t be trusted to run a government, he then makes clear that that’s exactly what he’s saying. “Running a first-rate country takes a different kind of person” than the current Black leaders of South Africa, Errol says, and while he briefly and flippantly concedes that “everyone has their values” (meaning, Black people as a class are not without any value system), those running South Africa now—which would be Black people—lack the values that required for leadership and creation of “first-rate country” that’s “[not] Zimbabwe.”

Here, as elsewhere, it will be necessary for readers to trace the echoes of South Africa in America, as it becomes clear—as the Disruptors interview goes on—that that’s what Errol Musk is doing. This interview is, of course, fundamentally about Elon and not Errol, so Errol’s goal is to explain Elon’s thinking about American politics in part by giving a recent history of South African politics. The parallels Errol intends to drive home will become clear shortly enough, but a summary is nevertheless useful here:

(1) Elon left South Africa in 1989, just before the 1990 end of apartheid—and these two facts are likely related.

While it’s true that Elon’s main goal since he was a child was becoming rich—and he felt sure America was the best place to do that—a concurrent fact is that Elon reached adulthood just as white South African men were losing their decades-long dominance.

It’s in this context, and with a level of awareness of white men suddenly becoming targets of pent-up Black ire in South Africa, that Errol “sent” (his words) his son Elon to America instead of having him stay in a country where it was about to become far harder than it had been for a white man from a rich, conservative family to get richer.

(2) Elon did not meet with any financial success in America, however, until the late 1990s—during the Clinton era (1993 to 2001)—which meant that when America suddenly elected its first Black president in 2008, ending an implicit political apartheid the United States had labored under for centuries, Elon was less than ten years into his post-South Africa coming-out party as a tech entrepreneur.

Errol implies that the ascension of Barack Obama (which we should remember really began in 2004, just 36 months after the end of the Clinton era, when then-Senator Obama gave a DNC speech that caused everyone to suspect he’d eventually be POTUS) was problematic for Elon because Americans had been conditioned—particularly by the Democratic Party, and particularly by those in the Northeast of America and on the West Coast—to think of South Africa as a racist country and South Africans as racists. Errol suggests that Elon, having just made his first financial killing at the very end of the 1990s, suddenly found in the 2000s that he had to come up with new stories to explain his heritage, political views, and values. Per Errol, these lies were made up to ensure that the liberals in Elon Musk’s chosen business sectors would accept him.

As both a Donald Trump biographer and an Elon Musk biographer, I am in a unique position to observe how creepily driven both these men have been by the success of a single Black American man: Barack Obama. Former president Trump’s obsession with a man who is his superior in every fashion imaginable has been well covered over the years; the timing of Trump’s first presidential run was determined in part by his anger at Obama over the latter’s speech at the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner; Trump fueled his political rise off the back of racist “birther” lies about Mr. Obama’s parentage and childhood; Trump’s paranoia saw him falsely claiming for years that as president Obama had “spied” on his “campaign”; and since 2016 Mr. Trump has been singularly obsessed with erasing every one of Obama’s presidential achievements, from the Paris Climate Accords to the Iran Nuclear Deal to Obamacare to (of all the things) the Osama bin Laden assassination, which Trump tried to “top” by killing Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and bringing America to the brink of World War III in January 2020. But Elon Musk has his own issues with Barack Obama, or at least he did as soon as President Obama was no longer politically or financially useful to him.

As WIRED reported on the eve of Musk taking over Twitter, “Musk’s views [on social media disinformation and online racism], expressed through prankster koans on the service he’s about to run, seem to indicate that he thinks the [Big Tech] issues that trouble [former president] Obama—and pretty much everyone except right-wing politicians who want to spread lies—are not worth discussing.”

While Musk met with President Obama only once, he made sure to let everyone know that he spent that meeting warning Obama to heavily regulate AI—which, true or not, is something that didn’t up happening in any meaningful way and that Musk’s recent emphasis on would seem to imply (in the Tesla CEO’s view, at least) is Obama’s fault.

The irony, of course, is that Musk’s incredibly dangerous, much lied-about “FSD”—i.e. “full self-driving,” which is in no way full self-driving—is exactly the sort of AI usage that needs to be regulated, as it has killed people. But in lobbying President Obama Musk wasn’t talking about government regulating him, of course; he wanted government to be used as a weapon to harm OpenAI (which Musk would eventually sue, multiple times, when government failed to act as he wished) to buy him time to get his own entry in the AI field, xAI, up to speed.

All this is important to remember. Musk wanted Obama to use the levers of power to help him get a leg up on his competition—which Donald Trump has now promised to do by assuring Musk he will put him in a government role that allows for self-dealing, conflicts of interest, and countless opportunities to hurt his sector competitors—but President Obama wouldn’t play ball. In the terms of the Musk Family Values we’ll be learning about in this report, Mr. Obama didn’t know his place as a mere government functionary. His place was to perpetually work to facilitate the ambitions of those men with the “right values” who Musk—and his fascist hero, Ayn Rand—believe are the only legitimate leaders of mankind (yes, in Musk’s world it’s very much man-kind, not human-kind), but instead of acknowledging, as Musk has put it before with respect to Obama, that a president is “like the captain of a very huge ship [which] has a small rudder”, Barack Obama exhibited supreme confidence in the size of his… rudder.

To be clear, the foregoing isn’t intended as a throwaway sex joke. Elon Musk and his father appear to have very negative feelings about strong Black men, especially those like Barack Obama who genuinely have not just swagger but a lot of power to swing around. Notice that Musk does not have this problem—and this is key—with Donald Trump acting (both when he was President of the United States and thereafter) like a man who feels he has a very big rudder, in fact the biggest ever. Why is it all right for Trump to have masculine swagger, but not Barack Obama? Why is it okay for Trump to promise he’ll be a dictator while President Obama must meekly act like a man with a “small rudder”? Because Trump, as we’re about to find out, is a man the Musks see as one of them—a rich white conservative man who doesn’t like the way progressive values have lately emboldened women and minorities. Trump is the right kind of leader, according to the Musk Family Values.

Meanwhile, there’s ample evidence that Musk has always resented the shadow cast by Barack Obama. When Musk met with Obama another time, in 2015 (for some reason Musk habitually says he only ever met “one-on-one” with Obama once, apparently to elide that in general terms he’s met with him on a number of occasions, including via a widely covered SpaceX tour and after “waiting on line for six hours to shake his hand” at an unspecified event)—the Tesla CEO had to park his car two blocks away from a restaurant he was meeting the former president at due to Obama’s security requirements, which surely rankled the tech entrepreneur. So it was little surprise that after Musk purchased Twitter he immediately directed his engineers to rig the site’s algorithm to ensure that he would quickly pass Obama to become the most followed person on the social media platform—which he soon did.

As Twitter morphed into “X” and Musk brought back to the platform not only known racists and disinformation agents but sought to give extremely lucrative programming options to these bad actors, he amplified and promoted a Tucker Carlson “episode” in which the white supremacist, Kremlinist disinformation merchant found a career criminal to absurdly claim he had been in a homosexual relationship with Obama.

While Musk later claimed to have found the interview less than convincing, it was his own amplification of Carlson generally and that contemptible bit of digital theater in particular that gave Carlson’s slanderous claim legs. It also made Musk a lot of money.

By the time Barack Obama arrived at the DNC in 2024 to give his speech backing Vice President Kamala Harris for President, he could utter lines on the danger of Big Tech and everyone would know he was talking about Elon Musk, including Musk. Thus:

So what does all this have to do with South Africa? Quite a lot, actually. The Musks felt themselves to be plagued by a rising class of Black politicians in South Africa, which development is part of what led Elon to flee to America. And then, suddenly, only a few years into Elon’s almost entirely unearned success in America—as the idea for his first company doesn’t appear to have been his—unexpectedly there was a rising Black politician in America who held values and principles and many domestic policies close to heart that were anathema to the Musk Family Values. Notably, ideas about equality.

(4) Elon Musk’s narrative of being a Democrat-turned-Republican is false, as in fact he never abandoned the vile ideologies he developed at his dad’s feet in South Africa.

Many people only casually familiar with Musk’s background are unaware that not only was he raised by the man he now (apparently disingenuously) claims to be estranged from, but he in fact chose to be raised by him. And not just “raised,” either: mentored.

Elon and his brother Kimbal had the option of living with their loving mother Maye, and they declined—they admit—because they preferred the strong, hyper-masculine model of their father and believed their father could show them the way to riches. He was the one whose life and ways they wanted to emulate, whatever they may claim now. And it’s clear that they inherited his ultra-hard-right politics as well, howsoever they had to pretend otherwise once they got to America and needed to try to fit in.

Indeed, keeping in mind that Elon was an illegal immigrant in the United States for years in 1990s, and didn’t become an active participant in U.S. politics until the 2000s, it’s important to understand that as Elon entered the twenty-first century having recently sold his first company for a massive profit, he immediately flirted with openly becoming a big Republican booster.

As Forbes reports, in 2003 Musk made his first-ever political donation. It was a. big deal, considering that he was a relatively new American citizen at the time. And that donation, which coincided with him becoming chairman of Tesla (starting a trend of him giving most to politicians when he realizes one of his businesses needs action from them) was a $2,000 donation to the leaders of the Republican Party, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And lest we forget, the 2004 Bush-Cheney presidential campaign was a very conservative one. While Musk did later make a $2,000 donation to the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, at that point it was pretty clearly an attempt to hedge his initial Republican bet.

Musk followed the same Republicans-first pattern during the second presidential election he participated in as a donor. In 2007, he donated $25,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee, then many months later—apparently just to, again, cover his bet—gave a much, much smaller amount to both Obama and Clinton.

The election Musk hangs his hat on in claiming to be a “former Democrat” is 2012, where his conduct reflects nothing of the sort. If you didn’t know what Musk was up to in his business dealings in 2011, of course, you might well think that Musk giving $35,800 to the Obama Victory Fund and then $30,800 to the Democratic National Committee was a dramatic public declaration of his abiding political principles.

But it wasn’t. It was just business.

As we know from consortium reporting from The Huntsville Times, The Birmingham News, and The Mobile Register—three major news outlets in Alabama—Elon had spent the year before his significant donation to Obama’s cause fighting with Republicans about SpaceX (his fourth company, but the first one he actually built up from scratch) and its future. As the consortium reported, “[Elon Musk] says U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican from Tuscaloosa, is fighting a new national space plan that would bring billions into North Alabama. ‘I just don’t understand what his beef is’, Musk, CEO of SpaceX, said in a telephone interview Friday night. ‘I don’t really understand why Senator Shelby is so opposed to commercial crew [on space flights]’, he said, ‘given that Atlas and Delta are right there in Alabama. Because no one’s going to be a bigger winner in commercial crew than United Launch Alliance.’”

If this sounds a little eldritch and coded, here’s the simplified version (quotes all taken from the same consortium report):

“President Obama decided this year to cancel Constellation, the [George W.] Bush-era NASA program that was to provide America’s next manned rocket and, instead, give NASA a new $6 billion to ramp up a commercial space industry while NASA studies deep-space missions” (emphasis supplied);

“[The Republican] Shelby has fought fiercely to protect Constellation, which employs 2,200 NASA and contractor employees here [in Alabama] and has already spent $9 billion in appropriations”;

“Shelby called Obama’s plan ‘a faith-based initiative’ and ‘a welfare program for the commercial space industry, where the taxpayer subsidizes billionaires to build rockets that NASA hopes will one day allow millionaires, and our own astronauts, to travel in space’; [Elon] Musk, a physicist who co-founded PayPal, the Internet purchasing system, and the Tesla electric car company, is the reported billionaire Shelby was referring to.”

So the Republicans wanted to murder SpaceX—Elon’s pet project, and again, the first company he built entirely by himself—in its crib. In comparison, the Democrat Obama wanted to take steps that would significantly disadvantage NASA as compared to Musk properties. And if there’s one thing that’s been a trend in Elon Musk’s business career, it’s that he spends as much time trying to destroy his competitors as trying to advance his own initiatives, and will support any politician who allies with him in deep-sixing those he considers rivals. So it was with Obama, who Elon clearly supported to ensure his SpaceX venture would survive and thrive.

So during the post-Obama 2016 election cycle, Musk was clearly torn. He hoped that a prospective Clinton administration would be the equivalent of a third term for Obama—which is what conservatives were all saying at the time—and therefore would bring with it a continuation of the space-policy agenda that had served SpaceX in such good stead, but (a) he couldn’t be sure of this, and (b) Clinton was—as can’t be emphasized enough—a woman, and therefore a prospective leader whose very existence was an anathema to the Musk Family Values he was raised on. Leader are definitionally white men, in this view. (This is why most stories about Musk and his female employees are gasp-worthy, with many suggesting he sees them primarily as semen receptacles: see, e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

So whereas Musk had given Obama—who is Black, yes, but also a man—$76,600 in total via two donations, Mrs. Clinton got just 6.5% of that amount: $5,000.

And this was at a time when Elon Musk’s net worth was $13 billion.

While Musk did say to CNBC, at the time, that Donald Trump didn’t have the “sort of character that reflects well on the United States”, this not only wasn’t a full-throated endorsement of Clinton but was more or less the least that one could have said about Trump given what Americans had learned about the man by Election Day in 2016 (and for reference, yes, Musk made his statement not long after the Access Hollywood tape dropped). In retrospect, it seems that Musk merely doubted at this point, as did Trump himself—and the Kremlin as well, for that matter—whether Trump could win. Once he did win, Musk was all aboard; per Forbes, in 2017 Musk was back to donating large sums to Republicans, as had been his primary practice prior to Obama: “He donated hefty sums to Republicans [in 2017]: $50,000 to Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and his McCarthy Victory Fund in March, and [later on] $39,600 to the National Republican Congressional Committee.” Elon subsequently became an adviser to Donald Trump.

While Trump and Musk would eventually have a falling out over the Paris Climate Accords—Trump wanted them gone to wound President Obama’s political legacy, but doing so would harm Tesla, which Elon simply couldn’t and wouldn’t abide—it is, as this summary implies, profoundly mistaken to see this as a political disagreement. It was, rather, a business split between two men with similar values and similar enemies.

Trump pulling the United States from the Paris Climate Accords was bad for Musk’s brand, bad for his public image, bad for Tesla’s bottom line, and bad for Elon’s future plans from the Boring Company to the so-called “Hyperloop”, from the rollout of his Supercharger Stations to the rollout of his Tesla Wall Connector. As if to underscore that his break with Trump wasn’t about values but bottom lines, Musk made clear that he only “reluctantly” voted for Joe Biden in 2020 (even as, per Forbes again, “he didn’t donate to any [2020] presidential campaigns and gave money to both Republicans (Senator Susan Collins of Maine) and Democrats (Senator Chris Coons of Delaware), according to FEC records, while also voicing support for then-Democratic primary candidate [and now ex-Democratic Forward Party politician] Andrew Yang”).

By 2021, Musk was “donat[ing] exclusively to Republican political operations.”

By 2023, he had confirmed he wouldn’t vote for Joe Biden again.

By 2024, he was so viciously attacking Biden on Twitter that it became a national news story—perhaps in part because Musk had claimed in 2022 (apparently falsely) that he was buying Twitter in part because its prior owners and executives had been too political. Today Musk is far more political, perhaps even by a factor of ten or twenty, than anyone who has ever been associated with running Twitter in the past.

The point here is that there is no evidence Elon Musk has ever been a Democrat. He came to America from South Africa as a far-right conservative; he made up a narrative about leaving South Africa to evade military service that he claimed (falsely) would have forced him to uphold apartheid; he “passed” as a progressive when it was clearly a necessity for his companies that he do so; but his commitment to far-right policy agendas has remained firm—except where his businesses are concerned—as has his apparent view that women and minorities are not well-suited to leadership positions.

(5) Just as Errol Musk spent his political career in South Africa setting himself up in opposition to local Black leaders, his son is now seen as the nemesis of everything Barack Obama believes in.

Barack Obama was only 60—and just a few years into his post-presidency—when a CNN article positioned him as the nation’s most important counterbalance to Musk.

“Instead of Musk, Twitter should be looking for guidance from people such as former President Barack Obama, who is making the problem of disinformation a central focus of his post-presidency”, the article opined. Obama having “made the problem of disinformation a central focus of his post-presidency” is something Musk couldn’t possibly have missed as he began dramatically ramping up his involvement with Twitter in 2021; indeed, the reason for major media setting up Obama and Musk as representatives of the two ends of a spectrum concerning public speech is that whereas Obama believes in using unobtrusive guardrails online to protect vulnerable populations, Musk wants not just a continuation but the expansion of that pernicious digital landscape in which study after study shows women and minorities being daily brutalized.

To oppose disinformation, in Musk’s framing, is to oppose free speech, and to merely ask private companies to have a “Terms of Service” page they enforce is a clandestine methodology for spreading what Musk calls the “woke mind virus” to society at large.

And all of this is the mirror-image of Errol Musk’s political pursuits in South Africa, which focused upon these four components of the radical white supremacist agenda:

Nostalgia for an idiosyncratic reading of “old” values;

contempt for the emergence and increasing dominance of “new” values;

association of the “new” with progressivism and women/non-white politicians;

proactive coddling of those who claim adherence to “old” values as a means of launching rhetorical attacks against (and disinformation about) both women and non-white politicians.

And so it is that when Musk began seeking to stoke a race war in the United Kingdom in 2024, The Telegraph (UK) wrote,

The[se] interventions marked the latest and, in Britain at least, most public, staging post in Musk’s political transformation to date.

A decade ago, the 53-year-old was a political “moderate”—socially liberal and fiscally conservative—who donated to Barack Obama’s Democratic Party.

Even then, however, his views defied easy categorisation. Financial support for the Republicans flowed just as freely as it did for the Democrats.

{Emphasis supplied.}

This italicized clarification has it right: Musk has always been fiscally conservative; has always voted more on the basis of fiscal policy than anything else, as he values money over values and thus at times has supported Democrats (like Obama) who he needs in order to earn more money from his companies; his status as a “moderate” requires massive air-quotes because it’s achieved merely by combining self-serving leftist social-policy views—like his desire to be able to do drugs freely, or his need to exude a faux tolerance in West Coast social circles—and a view of Big Business, Big Tech, media, and politics that’s never been anything but as hard right as his father’s. Hollywood and Silicon Valley

If South Africa is the root of all of Elon Musk’s values, it was also the root of all his problems when he came to spend much of his time in Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

The people in those places had money and knowledge he needed, and no tolerance for the white supremacist Musk Family Values that Elon had been dutifully raised with.

In his Disruptors interview, Errol Musk describes a mid-2016 lunch in Capetown that was attended by him, Elon, Kimbal, Jon Favreau, and some “pretty girls” (including, he says, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lawrence, and Amber Heard, with these last three actresses being not nearly as memorable as the men they were with, per Errol, which tells you much about how he sees women and appears to have taught his son Elon to see women), at which lunch Errol spoke up during a political conversation to say that he supports Donald Trump because of Mr. Trump’s views on crime.

In the interview, Errol explains that the reason he supports Trump’s criminal justice policy agenda—such as it is; no criminal justice expert would say he has any such agenda, at least not a coherent one—is because, Errol strongly implies, crime comes from poor non-white immigrants. By way of example, he says that England is now having the same crime problems as South Africa due to (again, the implication is clear) its progressive immigration policies. But back in Capetown in 2016, what Errol said to the assembled celebrities was far more revealing. Gesturing to himself, Elon, and Kimbal, he proudly told a room of Hollywood stars, “He [Trump] is just like us.”

According to Errol, his sons angrily accosted him after the celebrity-studded lunch, shouting at him things like, “Jesus! What the hell! You totally embarrassed us!”

As this anecdote underscores, the fact that the Musks and the Trumps are identical in their history, values, and intentions is supposed to be a secret—one not understood, to any degree, by the powerful left-leaning celebrities Elon spends time with, requires for eldritch professional purposes, and wants to impress. Elon later called his father “evil” in an interview expressly in response to that lunch, per Errol, as the younger Musk was worried that, in the ramp-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, his father’s words might be heard by the wrong people. We should recall here that, at the time, it was believed Hillary Clinton would win the election, so Musk needed to maintain the charade of being a “Democrat” for the sake of his several growing tech businesses.

This lunch clearly impressed itself upon Errol in a way that makes his memory of it indelible. One thing in particular he remembers is the anger of his son Kimbal, who like his brother Elon at the time had many oars in the water in America financially—indeed, arguably many more than Elon that required him to pose as a progressive.

According to Errol, he had never heard Kimbal swear before that post-luncheon argument in Capetown in 2016. “I’m done with you for saying this [in front of other people]!” Kimbal allegedly fumed to his dad—but apparently with many curse words interspersed in the invective.

Yet even now, years later, Errol insists that he and his sons all like “the sort of policies that Trump and people like that have” (emphasis supplied). Here, too—given that it comes just minutes after Errol’s racist description of what leadership requires—it’s clear that Errol is saying that Elon and Kimbal want leaders who are rich, male, and white. As if to confirm this supposition, Errol adds that the policies of Trump “and people like that” are “the right policies for people like us…” (emphasis supplied).

No wonder Elon pretends he’s estranged from his father when he’s not. His father sounds, in this interview as in some others, like a virulent racist and ardent Trump supporter whose views…

…are, actually, indistinguishable from Elon’s.

{Note: See the “Elon Musk” section of this publication for much more on this, particularly the four massive “Week in Elon” reports.}

While it lies somewhat beyond the scope of this report, Errol’s fixation on what it takes for a Musk to travel from South Africa to the American West and be a success takes up much more of the Disruptors interview than one might expect, and includes discussion of his youngest daughter (a 24-year-old) attending University of Colorado at Boulder and finding that her classmates there were a bit suspicious of her politics because of her South African heritage. In an anecdote one couldn’t possibly make up, Errol says that he advised his daughter to ask those friends of hers giving her a hard time to show her a local “red Indian” village in Colorado (yes, that’s what Errol calls indigenous persons living in the United States today). His point is that South African apartheid cannot be criticized because every nation has done bad things in its history.

And this nihilistic reading of history might have been pseudo-acceptable coming from an educated adult, but for Errol Musk’s sudden turn, in his Disruptors interview, to… Errol Musk’s History of the World

In trying to explain to interviewer Moore why his son Elon seemingly (but not really) underwent a political transformation from 2016 to 2024—again, to be very clear, Errol insists no such transformation ever occurred—he feels the need to run through a brief history of the world. While this wild romp through time begins all right (“-ish”), it quickly becomes a vile apologia for institutionalized racism and also for the need for those who’ve profited off institutionalized racism to “pass” as people who have not.

Here’s the beginning of Errol Musk’s almost unimaginably strange world history:

You have to understand that we are from South Africa. And although “separate-or-equal” [sic] racial discrimination was extremely rife under the British Empire—and in America, for that matter—up until about 1950 to 1960, the same policies that were followed in South Africa were followed all over the world, so apartheid was not just in South Africa, it was everywhere. The British had apartheid in all their countries around the world.

The Dutch had apartheid—no person of color was allowed into Holland. [Apartheid was] just “normal.”

{NB: It is not at all clear what Errol Musk is talking about here with respect to Holland.}

So we [the Musk Family] were left with the “end bit” of what they [sic] call “apartheid” or “separate facilities for different races.” I mean, in England—I was in America in the early 70s [and] they still had signs that said, “Whites Only” in certain places in the South.

{NB: Such signs indeed still existed in the Deep South in the 1970s, but to see a lot of them Errol would’ve had to have travel extensively in rural Southern towns, and to have done so for no particular reason he appears to be willing to identify.}