CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Why Elon Musk Should be Boycotted, as Seen From South Africa   

Musk on 20 January 2025, at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration in Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.

What should be done about the world’s richest man, and all that he represents? Here in South Africa, it is tempting to contrast Elon Musk to our other most famous recent personality, Nelson Mandela, a symbol of freedom, justice and political equality for all.

Mandela led one of the last century’s greatest human achievements – ending Apartheid, a crime against humanity – by invoking the decency of people across the world, in unity with the oppressed in Black South African society. The result in 1994 was the achievement of democracy based on his liberation movement’s demand, ‘one person, one vote, in a unitary state.’

Musk, in contrast, symbolises a no-holds-barred, crisis-prone, ultra-exploitative racial capitalism whose ideology fuses corporate-dominated economic libertarianism with a surveillance-centric militarised state and a personal drift to the ultra-right. Musk is advancing what former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis terms ‘techno-feudalism,’ which is now generating a series of social, political, economic and ecological disasters.

Currently, the most ferocious South African battleground is Musk’s attack on affirmative action; specifically, so-called ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ policies that compel him to find an indigenous co-investor for the Starlink satellite network to be licensed here. (Such arrangements are typically achieved through loans.) Musk refuses to do so because “Starlink is a global system, and we must retain sole ownership of all our subsidiaries for operational purpose” – an unconvincing excuse similar to any other time a corporation will evoke ‘operational’ reasons for anything they don’t want to explain.

The real reason for Musk’s opposition to black empowerment appears to be ideological, for he claims, “South Africa now has more anti-White laws than there were anti-Black laws under Apartheid” – a feeble argument that implicitly denies the way white South Africans committed what the United Nations termed a ‘crime against humanity.’ There is no ‘anti-White’ law on the books restricting voting, residence or other aspects of formal segregation, or even reversing the outright, widespread thefts of land and property committed during colonialism and Apartheid to Black people in the land of their birth.

Hence Musk’s local allies are seeking a non-partnering alternative for him to empower people considered the victims of settler colonialism from 1652-1994, e.g. the $30 million worth of free internet services Starlink has offered to rural schools. But this process has coincided with Musk both buying X.com (Twitter) and making absurd claims (to 240 million followers) about alleged dangers to the country’s white citizens, especially the nonsensical ‘Afrikaner farmer genocide’ trope. That, in turn, informed Donald Trump’s maniacal opposition to anything South African (aside from his friendship with white golfers).

While we do not see Mandela as the all-conquering hero beyond criticism, he is a figure who inspires a sense of pride for South Africans. Musk reminds of our need to apologise to the world on behalf of a society that from 1971-89 raised such an individual – and it also reminds of the same solution that Mandela promoted to end Apartheid: boycott the oppressor’s operations as much as possible, so as to shift power relations and delegitimise his hate speech.

Applied to Musk, that spirit could result in regulation or even nationalization of Big Data firms – especially given AI’s existential threats, as he himself identified back in 2014 – and will depend upon contexts, but the urgent necessity of weakening ‘Muskism’ cannot be denied.

A violent childhood in South Africa

Although at the time of writing, Forbes estimates Musk is worth $709 billion, he did reach $1.45 trillion in June, just after his SpaceX was offered to New York Stock Exchange investors – in part because of tricks that will compel many ordinary investors to buy his shares in the weeks ahead. Losing such a vast share of wealth on the speculative New York stock market reminds of his early-2025 net worth shrinkage – but then, it was a consumer boycott against his Tesla cars and X.com social media that wiped out a quarter of his wealth, as recalled below.

Such erratic personal wealth reflects Musk’s chaotic way of relating to the world around him. The roots of his ideology run deep into white South Africa’s own psychoses. Elon captured the soul of his father Errol – who was enriched during the mid-1980s as a merchant of emeralds illegally extracted from Zambia – in a 2017 Rolling Stone interview: “He’s a 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 was born in the capital, Pretoria, and partly raised in Johannesburg – the world’s most unequal city – and Durban, but the most important moment in his South African years was when in 1984, as he put it in a CBS 60 Minutes interview, “I was almost beaten to death” during a high school bullying incident that left him hospitalized for a week. Describing his 1970s-80s life growing up under Apartheid, he continued, “It was very violent. It was not a happy childhood.”

His younger brother Kimbal was an eyewitness when a group of boys pounded Musk: “When they got finished, I couldn’t even recognise his face. It was such a swollen ball of flesh that you could barely see his eyes.” Nearly three decades later, the incident required corrective surgery, as he tweeted in 2013: “Was beat up pretty badly as a kid & left me w jagged septum. Harder to breathe as I got older, so time to fix.”

Errol told Elon’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 High, was a well-located all-white public school in 1984, training the country’s racist elites to run a society that required extreme brutality by the mid-1980s. Nearby was Sandton, a commercial area that, within a decade (as wealthy whites fled the center of town), would become Johannesburg’s central business district, the so-called ‘richest square mile in Africa.’ This space has consistently been cited by PwC consultancy as the world’s worst site for ‘economic crime and fraud.’

By 1989 at age 17 (prior to compulsory military service for Apartheid), Musk had fled to Canada, his mother’s home country, where his grandfather was supportive of Nazi Germany before moving to a welcoming Apartheid-era South Africa. In 1992, Musk enrolled at the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia, from where Donald Trump had himself graduated in 1968. Musk’s 1997 undergraduate degree there combined economics and physics, at a time financial training was increasingly mathematical, promoting market-speculation modelling.

Muskism’s deadly days at the wood chipper

Musk appears to have amplified the values of white South Africa and Wharton, leaving behind whatever he had briefly experienced in social-democratic Canada. Musk is a man who was built up during Apartheid and later in the U.S. through massive infusions of public money, yet presents himself as a rational critic of waste, fraud, abuse and privilege.

The ideology of ‘Muskism‘ – as dissected by Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian – is one way to capture Musk’s ‘techno-king’ role. As New York Times book reviewer Jennifer Szalai put it, “Muskism – with its uncanny mix of ruthless state power and juvenile memes – is already bigger than its namesake.”

Worse, behind Trump’s project lies not just the immediate neo-fascist ideology – whether the paleoconservative ‘non-interventionist’, isolationist 2024 election rhetoric or the revived neoconservative militaristic reality – but the danger of a longer-lasting Muskism as what political economists term a ‘regime of accumulation’: to replace what in South Africa we know of both so-called ‘Fordism’ – which Antonio Gramsci coined to capture mass production plus mass consumption – and late-20th century ‘Post-Fordism’.

In early 2025, prior to a temporary but hyperbolic falling out with Trump over the U.S. state deficit, Musk established a ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) reporting directly to the President and Cabinet, at the same time 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, while apparently addicted to ketamine, Musk demolished the U.S. Agency for International Development, typing on his X.com platform: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

The result was not only devastation to life-saving programmes, but the re-empowerment of the U.S. State Department (which took over distribution of residual USAID funds)........

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