But Musk, who is known for owning companies Tesla And SpaceX hasn’t spoken much publicly about a significant swath of its past: how growing up as a white person under a racist apartheid system. South Africa may have shaped it.
“It is telling; white kids were untouched by the harsh reality of it,” said Terrence Benny, who is white and graduated with Musk from Pretoria Boys High School in 1988.
Interviews with relatives and former classmates reveal an upbringing in elite, segregated white communities that were littered with anti-black government propaganda and alienated from the atrocities that white political leaders perpetrated on the black majority. .
Musk, 50, grew up in the economic hub of Johannesburg, the executive capital of Pretoria, and the coastal city of Durban. Their suburban communities were beset with rampant misinformation. Newspapers sometimes accompanied entire squares to the door, and nightly news bulletins ended with the national anthem and the fluttering of the national flag as the names of white youths scrolled across the screen.
“We were really clueless as white South African teens. Really clueless,” said Melanie Cherry, a classmate of Musk’s, during the two years he spent Bryanston High Schools in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, where black people were rarely seen, except for those serving white families living in princely homes.
Musk left South Africa shortly after graduating at the age of 17 to go to college in Canada, barely ever looking back. He did not respond to an email requesting comment about his childhood.
Musk declared his purchase of Twitter as a victory for free speech, criticizing the platform for deleting posts and banning users. It is unclear what the role of his childhood – coming to a time and place in which there was hardly a free exchange of ideas and where government misinformation was used to portray black South Africans – was that decision. may have played a role in
Two high school classmates described him as a loner with no close friends. No one offered to recall what he said or did, which revealed his views on the politics of the time. But black classmates remember that they spent time with black friends.
Musk’s father Errol Musksaid in an interview with the New York Times that Elon, his brother and sister knew from a young age that something was wrong with the apartheid system. Errol Musk, elected to Pretoria City Council in 1972, said he would ask him about laws preventing black people from patronizing restaurants, movie theaters and beaches. They said they had to calculate what they could do safely when they were going out with non-white friends.
“As far as avoiding it, it’s bullshit. They used to face it every day,” recalled Erol Musk, who said he belonged to the anti-apartheid Progressive Party. “He didn’t like it.”
Nevertheless, Erol Musk offered an account of his life that underscores how far he was from the violent reality of the country. He pointed to his children’s good relations with his domestic workers, he got along well with black people, and described life in South Africa during apartheid as much better and safer than it is now.
According to a biography of Elon Musk written by Ashley Vance, Musk stated that he did not want to participate in South Africa’s compulsory military service because it would have forced him to participate in the apartheid regime – and that he may have had to leave. May have contributed to his decision in South Africa shortly after graduating high school.
The apartheid system created a gap between white people, particularly those who spoke Afrikaans and those who spoke English, such as Musk’s family. While political power was held by Africans—apartheid provers who descended from Dutch, German, and French settlers—English-speaking white South Africans enjoyed wealth that felt like a birthright to some, Cherie said. said.
“We were the white, English-speaking elite of the world,” she said. “It really was our kingdom.”
The Pretoria Boys had a socially progressive undercurrent. The headmaster of the school had participated in the freedom struggle activities; Some students will travel to anti-apartheid meetings.
“I’m quite confident to say that in a place like Pretoria Boys High, you were exposed to progressive ideas, even if you didn’t embrace them,” said Benny, 51, who does policy work for public health and social welfare organizations.
Yet none of them experienced beatings and gunfire by state security forces, like black children fighting for basic rights in township schools. And many students bought into the government propaganda, Benny said.
He recalled a debate in the mid-1980s in one of his classes at the Pretoria Boys over the need for government to serve in the military by Black South Africans to defeat an oppressive regime.
Few said they would refuse to commit murder on behalf of an unjust political system. But others said that while apartheid was discriminated against, the country was in an all-out war. Some insisted that the fight was to defend against the Communists. Others justified the fight by arguing that black people were vulnerable to bad ideas.
Benny said another common point among students was that black people could not be trusted to vote because they had no traditions of democracy.
The apartheid system forced the black majority to live in some areas. The way the school was taught was that the country was made up of several tribes, some of whom opted for independence in their homeland, according to Stanley Netshituka, who became the first black student at the Pretoria Boys in 1981.
Netshituka said she has some friends from liberal families who understand how bad things are for the black people of South Africa. But they were the exception, he said.
“I would say the majority were blissfully ignorant and blissfully ignorant,” said 54-year-old Netshituka, who was allowed to attend school because his father was a diplomat for the Venda, one of the ethnic homelands in South Africa, which Was considered a semi-independent nation at that time.
In the same breath, classmates used to call black freedom fighters terrorists, but tell them that “not all black people are bad because I can see you’re not that bad,” he recalled.
According to Mashudu’s brother Nyadzani Ranwash, Musk became friends with Asher Mashudu, a cousin of Netshituka. Ranwash said that once at lunchtime, a white student used an anti-black slur, and Musk scolded the student, but was then bullied for doing so, Ranwash said.
Mashudu was killed in a car accident in 1987, and Ranwash said he remembered that Musk was one of only a handful of white men who attended a funeral in the family’s rural village.
“It was unheard of during that time,” he said.
Erol Musk, who worked as an engineer, said that his family did not buy into the negative publicity about freedom fighters, some of whom had resorted to violent sabotage to counter a regime that gave them political rights. And was denied freedom, as to where to live.
“But, I mean, we were worried about them, for example, putting a bomb next to our house,” he said.
Erol Musk, who split from Elon, said he believes apartheid has taught his son not to discriminate. but Elon MuskElectric car company Tesla has faced serious allegations of racism. The state of California is investigating allegations that the company allowed racial discrimination against black workers to flourish at its factory in the San Francisco area. Tesla was also ordered to pay $15 million to a black employee after a jury found last year that the company had failed to address the racism it faced at work.
Musk has remembered his life in South Africa as largely painful and incomplete. Born in Pretoria, about 45 minutes north of Johannesburg, his parents divorced before he was 10 years old. He moved with his mother to Durban on the south coast of the country but then returned to live with his father in Pretoria. Musk has said that they had a strained relationship.
At Bryanston High, where Musk completed the first two years of a five-year South African high school curriculum, he recalled that he was being heavily bullied.
If Bryanston High was said to be painful for him, Musk found more stability in Pretoria Boys, a sprawling complex suitable for a Harry Potter set, with evergreen forests, a pond, and English-Revival buildings.
Some students lived on campus, while others, such as Musk, came from home and were known as “Day Boys”.
The ghost of apartheid was embedded in the culture. Like many other schools of that era, there was a cadet program that prepared boys for military service. They wore brown uniforms and performed marching drills. was a Scottish pipe band.
Musk’s current views on free speech reflect the philosophies that students were exposed to in the Pretoria Boys, said Benny, to classmates—such as the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, champion of uncontrolled expression.
“I think his ideas about free speech are very classic libertarian and not nuanced,” Benny said of Musk.
Some people in South Africa who knew Musk from his youthful days said people should not belittle the development he could have gone through after apartheid and leaving South Africa behind. Andrew Panzera, who attended a German class with Musk at Bryanston High, recalled his own transformation.
Arriving as a white student in the quiet Johannesburg suburbs, he never saw the suffering of his black counterparts. This changed, however, when he did military service mandated by his government.
“People, at some point, feel like they’ve been fed complete crap,” he said. “At some point you go, ‘Jeepers, we were actually fairly educated.'”