Elon Musk’s eccentric, right-wing grandfather, who many analysts believe was a major influence on the billionaire tech bro, was a “pain in the ass”, according to Elon’s father Errol.
US-born Joshua Haldeman, who spent much of his life in Canada before emigrating to South Africa in 1950, “was totally committed to apartheid, and hated the Jews”, Musk snr told the Sunday Times this week. “He was a pain the ass … damn difficult.”
Haldeman, the father of Maye, Errol’s first wife and Elon’s mother, was a farmer in the Canadian wheat-growing province of Saskatchewan before being driven off his land by the Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s.
An ardent anti-communist, he was also a member in the late 1930s of a now defunct movement called Technocracy Inc, an educational and research organisation that believed democracy had failed and wanted a fundamental restructuring of political, social and economic structures in the US and Canada.
They were not fun people. They used to talk down to me. If I said I don’t agree with their attitude or what they were saying, they laughed at me as though I was too stupid to understand.
— Errol Musk
Among other things, it believed Canada and Greenland should be merged with the US — as US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk believe today. The Canadian government declared the movement illegal and Haldeman was briefly jailed for promoting its agenda.
Two years after the National Party took power in 1948 and introduced apartheid, Haldeman moved his family to Pretoria, where he practised as a chiropractor. According to a report in the Canadian media outlet CBC in March, Haldeman told Die Transvaler newspaper: “Instead of the government’s attitude keeping me away from South Africa, it has actually encouraged me to settle here.”
Haldeman became obsessed with finding the mythical Lost City of the Kalahari, and regularly flew his family into the arid region in his light aircraft. He was killed when his plane crashed in 1974, three years after Elon's birth.
“They [his Haldeman in-laws] were not fun people,” said Errol, who lives in Langebaan. “They used to talk down to me. If I said I don’t agree with their attitude or what they were saying, they laughed at me as though I was too stupid to understand.”
At one stage this “resulted in me not seeing Maye any more. They decided I shouldn’t see her and she should find someone else.”
Elon, born in Pretoria and now the richest man in the world as the head of Tesla and SpaceX, seems to share his grandfather’s ideas, despite having been just a toddler when Haldeman died.
US historian Jill Lepore, author of the podcast X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story, said in an interview with public radio station WBUR last month that Technocracy supporters during the 1930s Depression believed all power should be yielded to scientists and engineers, who were “the only people who understood how to run a country”.
“Things like politics, banking, the court system, all the apparatus of the modern state, is obsolete in the eyes of the Technocrats of the 1930s, and, I think, of the tech bros today. They know better, we should just trust them,” Lepore said.
“Musk and the White House are implementing those ideas. Technocrats’ ideas are widely held in Silicon Valley.”
In 2015 Vanity Fair quoted Elon as speaking admiringly of his grandfather’s willingness to take risks. “Maybe that sort of adventurous spirit is in all of us [Musks],” he said.
Musk’s role as head of the department of government efficiency (Doge) in Washington has rattled investors and the Tesla price, which hit $479 (about R8.700) in mid-December, was just $285 on Friday.
Musk snr, a staunch supporter of Trump, said the president’s first 100 days in office had been “absolutely brilliant” and his tariff hikes were “a very good idea, of course. We don’t believe in tariffs but if somebody’s going to tariff us, then we tariff them too. Simple. It’s not rocket science.”
He said he had no contact with his trans grandchild, Vivian Jenna Wilson, 20, who is estranged from her father, Elon. In an interview with Teen Vogue in March, Wilson called her father “a pathetic man-child” who made her cringe. “I don’t give a f**k about him,” she said. “I really don’t. It’s annoying that people associate me with him.”
Elon, who regularly dead-names Wilson, has said she was “killed by the woke mind virus”.
Errol told the Sunday Times: “I don’t read Teen Vogue so it’s totally irrelevant to me.”
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