🔒 FT: Musk, Thiel and the Shadow of Apartheid South Africa

The FT’s Simon Kuper highlights the striking parallels between apartheid-era South Africa and contemporary American politics, particularly through figures such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks, all of whom spent their formative years in southern Africa. Kuper explores how their experiences of inequality, fears of racial uprisings and libertarian contempt for government have shaped their support for Trumpism. Kuper draws attention to the racial underpinnings of both South African apartheid and the current political climate in the US.

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By Simon Kuper

The parallels between South Africa then and the US today are striking ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist turned Donald Trump fundraiser and Ukraine troll, left at age 5 and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent his childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s secret effort to acquire nuclear weapons. And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg, has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the creator of the QAnon conspiracy, which shaped Trump’s Maga movement. (Furber denies that he is “Q.”)

In short, four of Maga’s most influential voices are fiftysomething white males with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa. This is probably no coincidence. I say this as fiftysomething white males whose formative experiences included childhood visits to my extended family in apartheid South Africa. (My parents left Johannesburg before I was born.) We swam in my grandparents’ pool while the maid and her grandchildren lived in the garage. These experiences were so shocking, so different from anything I had experienced growing up in Europe, that they are my most vivid childhood memories.

So what connects these men’s Southern African backgrounds to Maga today? Southern Africa under apartheid offered an extreme version of some of the most important themes in American life today. For one thing, there was massive inequality. The mine where Thiel’s father worked was “notorious for conditions not far removed from indentured servitude,” writes Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin. “White managers, like the Thiels, had access to a brand-new medical and dental center in Swakopmund and membership in the company’s country club.” The mine’s black migrant workers lived in labor camps.

For whites of a certain mentality, this inequality was not due to apartheid. They thought it was hardwired into nature. Certain people were equipped to succeed in capitalism, while others were not. That was just the way it was, and there was no point in trying to mess with nature. Two of Thiel’s contemporaries at Stanford in the 1980s recall him telling them that apartheid “worked” and was “economically sound.” His spokesman has denied that he ever supported apartheid.

The looming white nightmare of South Africa in the 1980s was that one day black people would rise up and slaughter white people. Like the US, South Africa was a violent society, and became even more violent in the 1980s. Musk’s teenage memories of train murders may not be entirely true, but they do evoke the mood of the era. He warned in 2023 of the potential “genocide of white people in South Africa.” Trump’s recent claim about “American girls being raped, sodomized and murdered by barbaric criminal aliens” played on similar white fears.

The final common ground between many white South Africans who lived through the end of apartheid and the American right today: contempt for government. The apartheid regime and then the African National Congress left millions of South Africans without electricity, dignity, security, or a decent education. That experience can fuel anti-government libertarianism. Furber has said that the first online message of what would become QAnon — “Open your eyes. Many in our government worship Satan” — made perfect sense to him.

If you are a libertarian who believes that inequality is natural and fears racial conflict, then you will be attracted to a certain type of American politics. You certainly will not want the government or institutions to try to intervene against racism. In 1995, a year after the ANC began trying to do so in South Africa, Thiel and Sacks, who met at Stanford, published The myth of diversity in the US. It is a well-written defense of “Western civilization” against “multiculturalism” (or what the right now calls “woke”), written by two white twenty-somethings who are certain that racism is not the problem. They even explain: “There are almost no real racists . . . in the younger generation of America.”

Three decades later, the duo and Musk, with whom they formed Silicon Valley’s “PayPal mafia,” are backing a white Republican ticket that peddles fabricated stories about black immigrants from Haiti eating pets. The opposing Democrats are fielding a black presidential candidate for the third time in five elections. The racial dimension of politics is almost as apparent today as it was in South Africa.

Of course, Musk et al. have been influenced by many other influences besides apartheid, ranging from science fiction to billionaire fears of the tax code. Yet an old, white South African mentality lives on in Trumpism.

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