Cabinet of Curiosities
A podcast profiling the cavalcade of freaks and weirdos populating the second Donald Trump administration.
Cabinet of Curiosities
Elon Musk: Part 1
In this episode, we delve into the background of the co-president, first buddy, Phoney Stark…
It is, of course, Elon Musk.
The richest man on Earth dumped a quarter of a billion dollars into the US political process to effectively purchase a large chunk of the presidency. And then disciplined the Republican party by threatening to pour money into primary challengers of anyone who stood in his way.
But what made this 'man-child' the way he is? Why is he like this? There's probably only one way to find out...
Links:
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Website: www.curiositiespod.com
Sources:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk-peter-thiel-apartheid-south-africa
https://www.buzzfeed.com/chelseastewart/elon-musk-welcomes-13th-child
https://www.mercurynews.com/2012/08/13/greg-kouri-early-investor-in-paypal-dies-in-new-york-2/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/20/elon-musk-race-dei-doge/
https://www.salon.com/1999/08/17/elon_musk/
https://www.queensu.ca/alumnireview/articles/2013-02-01/elon-musk
https://money.com/maye-musk-career-net-worth/
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-grandparents-kalahari-adventures-2016-8
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0d7yq0l
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/09/books/review/elon-musk-walter-isaacson.html
When the richest men in America lined up behind Donald Trump it laid bare that the US system had moved from being the most unequal country in the Western world, but still a limited democracy, into a full blown oligarchy. Not satisfied with extreme wealth, the men surrounding Trump had decided, in the words of Elon Musk, that this kind of chance for ”major reform” - “may never come again.” And that “It’s now or never.”
But the question on everybody’s lips is, what KIND of major reform are they planning. Well, this series is an attempt to answer that question through a deep dive into the cavalcade of freaks and weirdos populating Donald Trump’s second administration.
There is a rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. Its PR sells us a glamorous vision of the future — products that will enhance our lifestyle, save us from boredom, from suffering, from our evolutionary defects, from each other and from ourselves — but a pattern has emerged that, despite all of these utopian promises, these elite-owned technologies are making our lives worse because the 0.01% have a vested interest in rolling back any progress that challenges their power, and birthing a new tech-enabled feudalism. Literally taking us back to the future.
When Trump says “we” were richer in 1876 the “we” he’s referring to probably doesn’t include you. That was the height of the gilded age, when a handful of men had all the money and through it – wielded all the power.
The Silicon Valley mantra is “move fast and break things” but what they’ve systematically broken are the constraints against their own power: protections to workers and minority groups won by unions, social movements and democratic intervention since that era. Take Tesla, it’s the only car maker in America that has no unionised workers, and as a result its employees make significantly less money in more dangerous conditions, despite the company’s inflated stock price.
Ever wondered why it's now so hard to get a taxi if you don’t live in a big city? Uber skirted regulations to “disrupt” the taxi market, now drivers have been pushed out of stable employment and into the gig economy and are paid less across the board.
Facebook, we were told, would bring us together, but before it began moderating content, Facebook’s algorithm promoted violent propaganda that violated its own terms of service, in the lead up to the Myanmar genocide.
And it shouldn’t take a genius to figure out who benefits and who loses out if the US postal service is privatised. Perhaps that’s why Jeff Bezos has banned ads critical of Elon Musk from appearing in the newspaper he owns. As Musk brings that logic to bear on the US government.
I’m Tom Brady, a journalist who has an unhealthy obsession with American politics. We’re about 4% into Trump’s presidency and news fatigue is already setting in. But know this is a deliberate tactic, as Sloppy Steve Bannon put it during The Donald’s first term, to “flood the zone with shit”.
But we’re putting together a map of the sewage system and hopefully giving you a few more reasons to ridicule those doing the pumping.
There was a time, not so long ago, when we were assured that history’s greatest monsters had disappeared, and would never come back. This is a tour of formaldehyde-preserved monstrosities, long thought extinct, as they begin to twitch back to life.
Welcome to Cabinet of Curiosities
INTRO MUSIC
In this episode we’re going to cover the background of the co-president, First Buddy, Phoney Stark…
Samurai? Is that still what he’s calling himself?
It is of course Elon Musk.
The richest man on Earth (at least on paper) dumped a quarter of a billion dollars into the US political process to effectively purchase the presidency. And then disciplined the Republican party by threatening to pour money into primary challengers of anyone who stood in his way.
It cost Musk a mere 0.1% of his net worth to anoint himself the most powerful man on the planet.. His position secured, the scumbag now seems intent on using this power to protect his companies from mounting legal scrutiny – and if he has time – to resurrect the rotten ideology of his bygone homeland – apartheid South Africa.
Some people might say words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism - and that's true, but to quote Hunter S. Thompson’s hilariously scathing obituary of Richard Nixon, “Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.”. (Which is apparently German for “badger dog”).
It’s the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that enables pathological liars like Musk to slither into power in the first place.
Musk looks so good on paper, an eccentric genius, a real-life Tony Stark, struggling to save humanity against the limits placed upon him by us bickering mortals.
For so long he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. Long after other parts of the tech industry had begun to receive blistering reassessments, Musk continued to enjoy fawning coverage.
He was referenced, or even appeared outright, across so much popular culture: from Iron Man 2 to Star Trek, Rick and Morty to the Big Bang theory. Musk’s plastic star rose until it transformed into a mega-constellation, stuck permanently in the front of our vision to obscure the universe beyond.
Even the Simpsons fell victim to Musk’s appeal. In a 2015 episode called The Musk That Fell to Earth, the show portrays him exactly how his PR team would’ve wanted – as god’s gift to mankind. A genius who happens upon Springfield one day, inspiring Lisa to approvingly crow: “Elon Musk is possibly the greatest living inventor” as he landed a rocket in the Simpsons’ backyard.
These fawning portrayals, like their journalistic counterparts, have not aged well. And both are complicit in creating the monster we see today. The man who, at the 47th President’s inauguration ceremony, warmed up the crowd by hitting not one but two full, chest thumping Nazi salutes.
We believe that false neutrality is just another form of bullshit. Musk’s plausible deniability of saying “My heart goes out to you” is feeble. That was not simply the awkward gesture of an autistic man, and anyone who’s been half paying attention to his online activity over the past year should know that.
He continued trolling critics in his captive social media platform X, tweeting a series of incredible puns such as “Some people will Goebbels anything down” and “I bet you did Nazi that coming”. And he’s right, many people didn’t.
There’s an instructive anecdote told to budding reporters at the start of their training attributed to the Texas journalist Hubert Mewhinney. It goes something like: If one person says it’s raining and another says the sky is clear, it’s your job to stick your head out the fucking window and tell me if it’s raining or not.
But as you may have noticed from the gathering storm clouds, actually following this principle is often discouraged.
But we’ve hated Musk for years, long before it was cool, and for damn good reasons. He’s what my grandmother would call a real piece of shit. And by the end of this series hopefully you'll at least understand why.
The aspiring comedian rubbing his grubby little hands all over the US government is now hiding a hairstyle that can only be described as third reich in the front, party in the back under a giant Trump-branded trucker hat.
So let’s take his jar off the shelf, shall we, and peer inside at the resistible rise of Elon Musk.
Our story begins in apartheid South Africa, with a mysterious emerald mine.
Musk, like all good confidence men, would have you believe he came to the Americas with nothing but a backpack and a dream — becoming the world’s wealthiest man with his special brain and some huge steel balls.
But give them any serious scrutiny and Musk’s claims, much like his rockets, tend to undergo a – what does he call it? – “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” And as for his “huge steel balls” that was a sarcastic comment from his ex wife when she heard he was divorcing her from a voicemail he’d left her therapist.
Elon was born into a wealthy family in apartheid South Africa. His father Errol initially wanted to name him after the French city of Nice where he was conceived; but eventually agreed to Elon — the middle name of his wife Maye’s grandfather.
Errol claimed in 2022 that he liked this name because it appeared in the science fiction book Project Mars: A Technical Tale written by Werner Von Braun, a Nazi rocket scientist brought to the US during Operation: Paperclip who was the famed chief architect of the American moon landings and served as partial inspiration for Peter Sellers’ character in the Stanley Kubrick movie Dr Strangelove.
In Von Braun’s book ‘Elons’ were the elected leaders of a future human society on Mars. But fact checkers have cast doubt on this claim. The term apparently only appeared in a 2006 reprint, not in the 1953 original.
Errol, like his son, is not the most reliable source of information. A construction magnate and politician, he made a significant chunk of his wealth from a mysteriously acquired 50% stake in an emerald mine in neighbouring Zambia — formerly northern Rhodesia.
A fact Musk now denies because it doesn’t fit his narrative but which he previously admitted in a 2014 interview with Forbes which was taken down much to the author’s confusion. The story was republished by AskMen.com but later redacted to remove this information.
When I tried to scroll past a certain point or search for the words “emerald” or “mine” in the Forbes article an error message came up saying “client-side exception has occurred” but searching words like “Musk” or “Tesla” was no problem.
Curious…
Thankfully the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine exists – for now.
In the original version, Musk, as part of an answer on how he handles fear said: “This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an emerald mine in Zambia. I was 15 and really wanted to go with him but didn’t realise how dangerous it was.”
In 1994 Musk reportedly gave his college girlfriend Jennifer Gwynne a gold necklace with an emerald set in it which he said had come from the mine. Gwynne auctioned the necklace off in 2022 along with an old photo of them together and a card he’d written to her saying Happy Birthday Jennifer (aka Boo-Boo).
And Snopes presents evidence that casts doubt on Musk biographers Walter Isaacson and Ashlee Vance’s respective claims that it never existed and even if it did exist it was tiny.
Business Insider South Africa reported in an article that’s also been scrubbed from the internet that Errol had a stake in an “informal” (read: illegal) mining operation near Lake Tanganyika. His story goes that he “met some Italians” there and effectively traded it for his plane during the “wild west” days of the 80s. Who knows how true any of this is – the point is they were very open about it a decade ago.
Isaacson says it didn’t exist but Errol was in the emerald trade. But he reportedly made around $400,000 adjusted for inflation from that concern and has claimed he was only getting 30-40% of his emeralds from that particular mine.
Musk’s father also told Insider he got up to all sorts of illegal “cloak and dagger” stuff which seems to be referring to international gem smuggling. Errol told The Daily Beast, “To try and compare this to business in Europe or the USA is so laughable that I would not try to attempt it.” Which may explain why Elon can now so cavalierly offer a million Dogecoin for proof – claiming that because there’s no deed the mine never existed.
We also know Errol was a successful electromechanical engineer and property developer and that they lived in a big house in one of the most swanky neighbourhoods in South Africa’s capital Pretoria that was popular with foreign diplomats.
Regardless, Errol's dodgy and legit dealings brought significant wealth to the Musks, the family patriarch once bragged to Business Insider that “we had so much money sometimes we couldn’t even close our safe” and that they’d pull out the excess cash and trouser it.
A 16 year old Elon, on a family holiday to New York, once walked through the city’s streets with emeralds he’d pinched while his father was asleep bouncing in his pockets and allegedly sold them to Tiffany & Co. Errol owned 2 houses, a yacht, multiple luxury cars and a private plane, not exactly the humble origins Musk would have you believe.
But despite his gilded upbringing, Elon’s childhood wasn’t easy, growing up with asperger’s syndrome he found it difficult to make friends. According to Vance his parents thought he was deaf and even put him through surgery to try and remedy the problem because he would zone out and ignore them.
Critics have cast doubt on the aspergers. He falsely claimed to be the first openly aspergers person to present SNL, that was actually Dan Akroyd, and some stories like the one in Vance’s biography about him dissociating as a child, could be chalked up to a coping mechanism for children in abusive households.
But he does seem to fit the profile that comes up when you google it, so it may have been a late or even self-diagnosis. Isaacson’s biography describes him as a “man-child” who has issues picking up on social cues and one theme he returns to throughout the book is his lack of empathy for others.
So a young Musk dedicated his time to reading nerdy science fiction novels and playing and designing video games. One of these games, called Blastar, was written by Musk at the age of twelve and published in a magazine, netting him $500. You don’t need me to tell you how a kid like that gets on at school: He was relentlessly bullied.
Vance recounts a harrowing incident where Elon is hiding from these bullies and they beat up his only friend and force him to lure Elon out so they can savagely attack him. It sounds like a nightmare. You can only imagine how badly that would fuck someone up. I really feel for him at this point in his life. But this goes some of the way to explaining the trauma that shaped his personality, forming the sucking hole of narcissism we see today.
But Elon’s version of the event which triggered this bullying, his hospitalisation after a classmate pushed him down the stairs, was recently contradicted by his father who remembered things very differently.
According to Errol, Elon liked to call people stupid and the bullying began after something Elon did when the father of a classmate committed suicide. Elon mocked the boy calling his father stupid. A sentiment Errol agreed with but said even the police and school told him what Elon did was beyond the pale. “You can’t say that,” Errol said.
Elon’s relationship with his father also played an important role. But despite reports that they were estranged the pair seem to have kept in contact over the years. The Musk boys reportedly paid his Zip2 investment back with massive interest and he recently set up a meeting between Elon and the South African pm.
Errol, for his part, was supposedly the most liberal in the family. Although that’s not saying much: he nominally opposed apartheid as a parliamentary member of the Progressive Federal Party (which was the country’s main opposition). But The Guardian’s former Johannesburg correspondent Chris McGreal reports, he left the party when it began demanding equal voting rights for black people, his resignation from the organisation made front page news.
Errol and Elon seem to have rekindled their relationship recently. On a podcast called “Wide Awake” Errol claimed the reason Elon called him evil in 2017 was because he was “brainwashed by those democrats”: And said: “At the time, he was mixing with the wrong people.” But had now “learned from his mistake.”
The two share a penchant for conspiratorial thinking, something that seems to run in the family as we’ll see. Errol during that podcast repeated the baseless claims that Michelle Obama was a man and that Trump had won the 2020 election saying he thought 15 million votes had gone missing.
He also said he and Elon were back in touch and that his son had recently gifted him a Bentley.
And this is from the Washington Post:
“We grew up in a bubble of entitlement,” said Rudolph Pienaar, who graduated with Musk from Pretoria Boys High School in 1988 and now works in the U.S. as a biomedical scientist. “I am not sure if Elon can conceive of systematic discrimination and struggle because that’s not his experience. His life now in some ways is how it was under apartheid — rich and entitled with the entire society built to sustain him and his ilk.”
In an email to The Post, his father, Errol, said Musk and his younger brother were “interested in motorbikes, computers, basketball and a little about girls. They were not into political nonsense, and we lived in a very well-run, law-abiding country with virtually no crime at all. Actually no crime. We had several black servants who were their friends.”
Which…
On the unregistered Zambian mine, which reportedly would have had dire conditions but would’ve made the owners fabulously wealthy. Errol told the Washington Post that it: “helped me and my two boys sustain ourselves during the collapse of Apartheid in SA,” he said in an email to The Post… Errol told Isaacson about the mine: “If you registered it, you would wind up with nothing, because the Blacks would take everything from you.”
South Africa at the time Musk was growing up was a hyper-masculine society which venerated strength and traditionally masculine traits according to journalist Paris Marx. And Errol tried to instill this form of masculinity in his boys and apparently had more success with Elon.
Elon’s mother Maye says Errol pestered her into marriage telling the BBC he even engineered their wedding against her will. He came one day with a ring and she rejected it but he went to her family and told them she’d said yes. So they began planning the wedding and when she found out 800 guests had been invited she just went along with it.
His mother Maye says Errol wore her down until she agreed to marry him. We’re going to play a couple of clips to give you some insight into their relationship and what it was like for women living under apartheid.
Maye said Elon grew up in a violent home and that the abuse he would witness as a child started immediately. She came back from the honeymoon bruised and pregnant with Elon. She told CBS this kind of abuse was so common in apartheid South Africa that there was a saying “when you get divorced you stop falling in the shower”. Referencing a common excuse women would use when they appeared in public covered in bruises.
Musk’s mother left Errol when Elon was 8 and took the children. But Elon moved back in with his father 2 years later. A decision he says was a mistake. Musk claimed he felt sorry for Errol because he seemed lonely.
But this does not seem in keeping with his character or the behaviour of a 10 year old boy. His mother suggested he chose to move back in with Errol because he had the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and because Errol also bought him a computer, an incredibly expensive purchase in those days which Maye could never have afforded.
In a 2017 Rolling Stone interview Musk said his father was a terrible person: “You have no idea about how bad. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done, almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done […] It’s so terrible, you can’t believe it.”
What Musk is alluding to here is much easier to imagine than it is to source, so we’re going to be careful, but there are a few clues.
Firstly, according to Vance’s biography, Musk and his first wife Justine agreed not to let their children be around Errol.
Thanks. Secondly, in 2017, Errol is widely reported to have, in his words, “reconnected” with his step-daughter Jana and fathered two children with her.
At the time their first child was born Eroll was 79 and Jana, who’d been part of the Musk family since she was 4, was 30.
But Elon, despite distancing himself from his father, has more in common with Errol than he might care to admit. Not in terms of the stuff I just mentioned, although he has been photographed multiple times with Ghillane Maxwell, but I digress.
Walter Isaacson identified a number of similarities between father and son. Elon’s brother Kimbal told Isaacson, “Errol changes reality around him” and “believes his false reality”. The Financial Times in 2021 published an article describing Elon’s “reality distortion field”.
The term was first coined by a disgruntled Apple employee to describe Steve Jobs’ Dutch Van Der Linde levels of yarn spinning which he used to keep employees in line and hype new products.
But Richard Waters, wrote in the FT, quote: “In the reality distortion stakes, Jobs had nothing on Elon Musk.” Detailing his masterful manipulation of Twitter to avoid spending money on advertising as well as blinding people to the reality of what he was doing.
Waters writes: “If Google was experimenting with implanting a device in your brain that could read your thoughts, it would almost certainly be seen as a sign of a dystopian future. To his fans, the fact that Musk is doing this, through his company Neuralink, makes it cool.”
Waters says Musk’s distortion of reality has ballooned Tesla’s stock price, which at the time was 30 times higher than its revenue, on the anticipation that any day now his self driving taxis will take over the world but he says the cryptocurrency Musk is hyping is a purer expression of his mythmaking because it is not hampered by the reality next quarter’s vehicle deliveries.
Musk’s cheerleading of crypto could make him a financial innovator but, he writes, the history of market excesses makes it far more likely that these are symptoms of a financial mania.
While Elon’s cousin Peter Rive compared his mood swings to how Errol could suddenly turn on someone. And Musk’s approach to masculinity seems to have been shaped by his father as Marx points out. And as we mentioned, neither is a reliable narrator.
Business Insider Senior correspondent Linette Lopez said: “Elon is easily flattered, because there is a deep dark void in his soul that his dad dug and then left him with”.
Which is really sad, Lopez likened it to “an open wound”.
Growing up, Musk was reportedly closer to his mothers side of the family. Maye Musk, a model and dietician, was born to parents who moved to South Africa from Canada BECAUSE of apartheid.
Yep, you heard me right. If you read about Elon’s maternal family from some of more fawning, courtly accounts of his life — such as the official biographies we’ve mentioned — you’ll hear Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, described as a dashing adventurer with a “quirky” taste in politics.
Now ask yourself what does a politically engaged, quirked-up white boy get up to in the 1930s?
Haldeman was a prominent chiropractor (of course – at the time the practice was less than a decade old and firmly rooted in pseudoscience, its creator D.D. Palmer claiming to have received it from “the other world”).
But Haldeman also led the Canadian branch of “Technocracy Incorporated” a movement which advocated for, (and I quote McGreal here): “abolishing democracy in favour of government by elite technicians but which took on overtones of fascism with its uniforms and salutes.”
Yeah, seriously, what the hell, right? There’s so much more that will blow your mind.
Technocracy Inc was banned by the Canadian government as a threat to national security — probably because the organisation believed the Canadian state, and all states for that matter, were getting in the way of the continental “Technate” they envisioned.
It also opposed Canada joining the war against the Nazis, and Haldeman spent two months in prison for publishing anti-war propaganda.
A quick aside on the founder of Technocracy, Howard Scott, a renowned engineer who wanted to become continental dictator of America. But a journalist quickly discovered he’d fabricated almost his entire backstory which included being an American football star at Notre Dame and that he’d once had to flee to Mexico after shooting the local archbishop.
Scott encouraged his followers to wear grey uniforms and shed their names in favour of numbers. One speaker at a rally was introduced as “1x1809x56”. Scott fear mongered about the government being on the verge of bankruptcy – why does this all sound so familiar – openly calling for the destruction of democracy.
Political theorist Langdon Winner later wrote: “In its best moments Technocracy Inc. was an organization of crackpots; in its worst, an inept swindle.”
After the war Haldeman became national chairman of the Social Credit party which peddled the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, arguably the most consequential modern conspiracy theory.
Its founder argued for similar policies to Technocracy and was also an engineer who’d concocted his personal history. What's more he was a virulent anti-semite who, in perfect truther fashion, believed Nazi Germany was “an instrument of Jewish power” and that Hitler was a secret Rothschild!
Social Credit’s theories were nonsense but they began to catch on in rural Canada partly thanks to a charismatic Baptist radio preacher called “Bible Bill” Aberhart.
Fluffier accounts will tell you Haldeman simply yearned for adventure, others will hint at the truth saying he thought the moral character of Canada was in decline. I think we all know what that means but nevertheless his endeavors to make Canada more racist failed, so he and his wife set sail for the refuge of the new Apartheid state.
Quoting Joshua Benton writing in The Atlantic to show how far these downplayed accounts of Haldeman, Isaacson’s biography being the most high profile, miss the mark, this is based on extracts from Haldeman’s private writing, quote: “Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead “White Christian Civilization” in its fight against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the “hordes of Coloured people” they controlled.”
So he was a Nazi. Straight up, full on Nazi. No ifs ands or buts. He literally self-published a book in 1960 laying out his ideology, and Benton tracked down the only available copy in the western hemisphere to Michigan State University.
In it he wrote there was: “a strong possibility that South Africa will become the leader of White Christian Civilization as she is becoming more and more the focal point, the bulwark, and the subject of attack by anti-Christian, anti-White forces throughout the world.
“She will fulfill this destiny if the White Christian people get together; if they realize the forces that are behind these world-wide attacks; if the people will make a study of who are their real enemies and what their methods are; if she will seriously combat the evils of Internationalism that are already taking cancerous roots in our society.”
Internationalism is a dog whistle for Jews – or leftists – take your pick, Nazis think they’re part of the same conspiracy, it's all very stupid. They use globalism as the same dog whistle nowadays, rolls off the tongue better I guess.
Still not convinced? Okay, in a series of letters to the editor of a local paper in Canada denying accusations that Social Credit had an authoritarian anti-semitic ideology similar to Adolf Hitlers he couldn’t help but tell on himself.
Haldeman claimed Hitler had been installed by “money.. [but he allowed that] Not all of it [was] Jewish”, he said the Jews had invented antisemitism to get sympathy and that even though the Protocols may be a forgery, the ideas were really true, claiming the plan was unfolding for anyone to observe. So… yeah. Great job publicly rebutting those anti-semitism accusations buddy. No notes.
Historian Janine Stingel said Haldeman was all about dog whistles, he would never publicly say Jew, “but he’d say everything short of it. He knew what he was saying, and his base knew what he was saying.”
Once they arrived in South Africa, the Haldemans reportedly began searching for the Lost City of the Kalahari which I can only assume is some Indina Jones villain shit. His decade of aerial exploration didn’t find any mythical ruins but it did make him a minor celebrity.
Elon never really got to know his grandfather, who died in a plane crash when he was 3, but the young boy was very close to his grandmother, Winnifred (or Wyn), who shared her husband’s views.
McGreal writes that, “Errol Musk described Maye’s parents as so extreme he stopped visiting them.”
Anyway, what baby Musk believed, and how much it really matters, is hard to untangle but given how closely his recent public actions and statements line up with Haldeman’s beliefs it's hard not to draw a connection to what he may have absorbed as a child.
South African writer Jonny Steinberg has cautioned against trying to tie Elon’s childhood too closely to the man he is now – and it is worth mentioning, as McGreal reports, that although they were whites-only, the English-language schools like Elon’s tended to produce anti-apartheid activists unlike the Afrikaaner schools.
But McGreal writes that what is indisputable is that Musk grew up in incredible privilege and that even South Africans in that position who opposed Apartheid, quote: “sought to explain this privilege not as the result of systemic racial oppression but the natural order of things thanks to their own abilities.
“That in turn led some of them to regard all forms of government as oppressive and true liberty as an individual battle for survival.”
When Elon was a child the country was convulsed by violence as the segregated black townships rebelled during the Soweto Uprising – which was put down under the leadership of prime minister John Vorster – by the police firing live ammunition into crowds of black school children.
Balthazar Johannes Vorster, also known as John, had been interned during WW2 for being a Nazi sympathiser; Vorster was the 15th child of a successful sheep farmer and became a general in a South African fascist militia called The Ossewabrandwag (OB) which allied with the Nazis and plotted with German military intelligence to stage an insurrection during which they would assassinate wartime pm Jan Smuts to prevent South Africa fighting alongside the allies.
Vorster openly compared his ideology, which he called Christian Nationalism, to Nazism. But why is this relevant? Well Christian Nationalism was the official ideology inculcated in all students who attended the segregated white schools.
Musk would’ve been taught that the Afrikaaners (or Dutch white settlers) were the country’s real victims. A view that Musk espouses in the present day.
In 1988, after completing his schooling at the age of 17, Musk left South Africa to avoid mandatory conscription into the apartheid military, taking advantage of his grandparents’ Canadian citizenship. But Vance writes that even early as he teenage years fantasy and reality had begun to blur for Elon.
Once in Canada he enrolled in Queen’s University. He chose it over Waterloo which had a superior engineering program because, “there didn’t seem to be any girls there”. Which is probably the most normal thing he’s ever done.
There’s a ludicrously hagiographic alumni review article about him on the university's website that’s aged about as well as milk left outside on a hot summer's day.
I know it's meant to be an ad to attract parents but get a load of this absolute pablum, quote: “A conversation with Elon Musk, (Com’94), is filled with pauses. He gathers his thoughts to answer questions about what and who has inspired him, about the differences between madness and genius, and about the high-flying ventures that have won him fame and fortune.
“You wonder if his stops-and-starts are the respites he needs to check on whether there’s a flash of inspiration trying to get his attention somewhere else in his brain on “line two.”
“Brainstorms, it would seem, occur with stunning frequency in the mind of this former Queen’s student who’s fast emerging as one of the 21st century’s foremost innovators…
“It was at Queen’s that this world-class visionary and entrepreneur extraordinaire began the post-secondary studies that helped to further unlock his mind and served as a kind of preamble to his stratospherically imaginative and successful career. It’s a career that promises to soar even higher, to the heavens and beyond.”
Musk quickly ditched Queens for the United States’ Ivy League, entering the country as an illegal immigrant. It’s fine, it’s fine don't worry, he was the first white South African refugee.
While at the University of Pennsylvania, Musk claimed he struggled with money as a student. Yet that didn’t stop him paying for half of a 10-bedroom frat house with his friend Adeo Ressi. In Vance’s biography this is presented as an entrepreneurial tale of Musk and Ressi turning the building into an unofficial nightclub to cover the rent – although it also suggests Ressi was the driving force behind all of this.
Musk says he stayed sober to “run the party”. But an uncharitable reading of that might suggest he was bone collecting.
Eroll claims he used emerald money to help the boys “get set up” in the US, eventually giving them over $100,000. And when they moved to the west coast Maye flew from Toronto to San Francisco every 6 weeks to visit and help out, buying their groceries, furniture and so on, and giving them $10,000 which was everything she had saved at the time.
Now, it’s often said that Elon is a genius with an IQ of around 155. But there are problems with this claim. The evidence is very thin, with reference made to him scoring well on early aptitude tests.
But this is a problematic claim for a number of reasons. The metric sounds pretty uncontroversial until you learn its history. Stanford, the university that shaped many of the modern tech elite including Musk was the epicentre of American eugenics a century earlier.
Eugenics is the now-debunked pseudoscientific theory that says humans can be improved by selective breeding which is based on a misunderstanding of genetics that claimed abstract human traits like intelligence were simply inherited.
It was adopted as part of the Nazis' race science and used as a justification for their treatment of Jews, disabled people and other minorities which ultimately led to their attempt to exterminate them.
In 1898 Stanford's president handpicked a man named Ellwood Clubberly to teach at the university. Clubberly shaped the Education Department and was one of many Stanford academics who heavily promoted eugenics.
Clubberly believed education should follow the same rules as agriculture, paying special attention to students heredity and selectively breeding them for peak performance. With so-called “unfit” populations being segregated or even sterilised.
In an article in the Stanford Daily, Ben Maldonado quotes a book Clubberly published in 1916: “Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life.”
The article continues: “For these “factories” to produce such children, they required the “elimination of waste” and the “continuous measurement of production.”
In 1910 Clubberly recruited Lewis Turman who developed the French academic Alfred Binet’s research into the Stanford-Binet IQ test which was not only meant to measure intelligence. It was explicitly designed to present non-white races as less intelligent.
Clubberly initially promoted it as an educational resource; but it would be quickly adopted by the state during one of the darkest episodes in modern American history as a tool to decide who would be forcibly sterilised.
Adolf Hitler wrote glowingly of the policy in “Mein Kampf,” published in 1925: “There is today one state, in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of citizenship] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.”
Studies of IQ show even today that childhood factors, education and wealth disparity contribute to differences in test results between races which white supremacists point to as spurious proof that racial hierarchy is natural.
So Elon’s wealth, access to better education and his reported early tendency to fixate on one thing for long periods of time, say absorbing the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica, would give him a significant advantage in an IQ test. But stay tuned because by the end of this episode we’ll try to unravel what happened to little Elon’s intelligence.
As you’d expect from the world’s richest man, Musk has been covered ad nauseum in the press, so this is far from a complete account. What we want to figure out in this episode is how he got his money, and is he really that brilliant?
The first company he started, alongside his brother Kimbal, was called Zip2, an online business directory that began in 1995. Errol says he bankrolled the company, the boys reportedly receiving $28 thousand dollars from him in an early funding round. Musk denied this claim in that Rolling Stone interview saying, quote: “The funding we raised for our first company came from a small group of random angel investors in Silicon Valley.”
“Random angel investors”? Mammon? Beelzebub? Azazel, Belial, Moloch? No, just Errol. Musk would later cop to this fact, but he still didn’t want to credit his fathers help. Journalist Eoin Higgins writes that Musk, true to form, said the money would have been raised in funding either way. Musk later admitted Errol had kicked in 10% of a $200,000 funding round. But this is still a minimisation of the truth.
A friend of Errols, the investor Greg Kouri, also kicked in $8,000 and came on board as a co-founder. I think it’s fair to assume his extensive rolodex may have been a factor in finding those other investors. When discussing privilege, who you know is just as important as having the cash on hand yourself.
And Kouri acted as a business mentor to the boys, and apparently a referee when fistfights broke out between Elon and Kimbal in the office, where they also reportedly lived. According to Vance he put a stop to these brawls, after a particularly nasty one over a business decision ended in Elon needing to get a tetanus shot.
Kouri’s contacts brought in Derek Proudian from VC firm Mohr Davidow which invested around $3.5 million in 1996 for a majority share.
more venture capital pouring into the company, and it soon had TK how much money.
Elon began as Zip2’s CEO, but his poor management skills quickly grated on employees. Creative Director of Zip2 Doris Downes told Vance: “Someone complained about a technical change that we wanted being impossible. Elon turned and said, ‘I don’t really give a damn what you think,’ and walked out of the meeting. For Elon, the word no does not exist, and he expects that attitude from everyone around him.”
Vance continues: “Periodically, Musk let loose on the more senior executives as well. “You would see people come out of the meetings with this disgusted look on their face,” [Craig] Mohr, the [company’s] salesman, said. “You don’t get to where Elon is now by always being a nice guy, and he was just so driven and sure of himself.”
But following the Mohr Davidow takeover Elon was relegated to Chief Technology Officer and replaced as CEO by the experienced Richard Sorkin, who’d served as head of business development for Creative Labs where he’d overseen a number of successful internet start-up investments.
According to the official story, Elon wrote most of Zip2’s original source code, but Sorkin soon hired professional coders to fix it.
Musk later claimed they weren’t as good as him, but they contest that his code was sprawling, idiosyncratic and poorly-written. For one, it was impossible to update — a key feature of a directory if you ask me — making it useless for a functioning product. Vances writes that Sorkin’s guys steadily worked through Musk’s code, diligently rewriting practically every line.
Musk’s misleading claims around his intellectual contribution to his first business is one pattern we’ll see replicated across every one of ‘his’ later companies. Another is that it was bleeding money.
Following Zip2’s launch, the company didn’t turn a profit in its first two years. Not unusual, but Elon almost tanked it entirely, attempting a Bounty-esque mutiny against Sorkin over a merger he’d previously agreed to.
This revolt was quashed, and the board member Derek Proudian stepped in to relinquish command from the exhausted Sorkin. And Proudian immediately began looking to offload this shitshow onto a willing mark.
But Elon’s megalomania and narcissism had its upsides. By marketing himself as both a genius nerd and business genius, the venture capital money kept flowing long enough for Proudian to find a buyer in Compaq, a now defunct Palo Alto IT company which integrated Zip2 into its AltaVista search engine.
Compaq bought Zip2 for a cool $307m, but the party didn’t last for long. As even a Salon puff piece on Musk accurately observed at the time: “Compaq’s decision to buy Zip2 in February 1999, in fact, might count as one of the more notable corporate rescue missions in Internet history.” In March 2000, the Dot Com bubble burst, and Compaq promptly collapsed before being swallowed up by HP.
But Elon kept dancing. As Paris Marx put it: “Musk didn’t get rich because he built a great business, but because the whole sector was soaring and the board brought in competent leadership that could offload it onto some old-guard electronics company.” Elon netted $22 million from his 7% share in the Zip2 purchase, which he funnelled into an online bank. Max, you have three guesses on its name:
Yep, X.com. Elon loves the letter X, it’s in SpaceX, the Tesla Model X, xAI, the name for one of his son’s X Æ A-12, he even likes to leap in the air on stage to make the shape with his body. The letter is the most common symbol in middle-school algebra, but it’s also a kiss, a poison warning, a roman numeral, nazi iconography, a feature of Christian symbolism, the letter of Musk’s generation, and one used in pornography.
X.com was founded by Musk, Harris Fricker, Edward Ho and Christopher Payne. But for a while you wouldn’t know that if you read its English-language Wikipedia page, which remains heavily edited.
The founders have since been restored but youtuber Common Sense Skeptic discovered the full story is now only available on the Spanish-language version of the page.
Harris Fricker, a Canadian with finance experience who Musk met during his time as an intern at Nova Scotia Bank, was likely the most important of the three according to Vance because he, “brought the knowledge of the banking world’s mechanics that X.com would need”.
But Fricker and Musk soon clashed. Fricker disliked Elon’s business strategy, and accused him of overhyping the product, Vance writes: “He found Elon’s visionary statements to the press about rethinking the entire banking industry silly because the company was struggling to build much of anything.
“We were out promising the sun, the moon and the stars to the media,” Fricker said.”
When he first entered Musk’s bedroom in 1999 it was littered with books about famous entrepreneurs like Richard Branson and Fricker said it clicked for him that Elon was studying how to be like one of them.
Musk’s ex-wife Justine pointed out in a Ted Talk that he continued to wear jeans and t-shirts even as he moved into the corporate world because, he said, he can’t look cool or hip because he needed to look like an engineer. Even Vance observed that by this point Musk, it could be argued, “had become a hyperbolic huckster”.
Jimmy Soni writes in The Founders that Musk “had a special knack for capturing the media’s attention. He discovered that his willingness to veer into exaggeration often did the trick.”
At that time Marx says Elon was fixated on integrating all aspects of banking into one seamless product, which would mean combining retail and investment banking. But this was still illegal in the US under the Great Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act which regulated the banks to prevent the behaviour that caused the stock market to crash in 1929.
But Musk was hell bent on ignoring the regulation. Luckily for him Bill Clinton began to repeal important sections of the act later that year, a move which was key in laying the groundwork for the 2008 financial crash.
Musk was still a horrible boss to work for, but perhaps more interesting is that his monomaniacal work ethic found expression in a new ideology that was beginning to coalesce.
He told CNN in 2001, “I think almost by definition, having a traditional american way of life is antithetical to Silicon Valley, or at least the two cannot coincide … there’s no such thing as an 8 hour day in Silicon Valley in any field.”
This is not necessarily true for a number of reasons. But in this statement you can see that the seeds of Tech’s neo-feudal attitude were already being sown. It’s no coincidence that Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently claimed 60 hours should be considered the minimum work week. But that's a topic for a later episode.
Suffice it to say Musk’s insane demands on his team caused intense conflict within the company. As Vance puts it, Musk during this period had “succeeded to a large degree despite himself. Musk’s traits as a confrontational know-it-all and his abundant ego created deep, lasting fractures within his companies.”
Paris Marx says “Musk’s companies often have a grand vision built around them, but it’s important not to get distracted by the public relations and actually understand the foundations of those businesses, the real impacts they’re having, and how Musk is actually using them. When you look past the rhetoric that Musk tells the public — and surely himself too — you often see quite a different picture than the marketing language suggests.”
It’s much easier to get your employees to commit to insane working hours if they’ve bought into the vision he’d already begun selling. What’s working 100 hours a week when you’re at the forefront of a revolution or, as it would later develop, when the fate of the world is on the line. It makes horrible sense, doesn’t it?
Marx continues: “He downplays the support of the government and hypes up the societal benefits while severely exploiting the workers below him who are responsible for the companies’ success. It’s only by challenging the stories he tells that we can start to see Musk and his capitalist empire for what they really are.”
Vance also mentions that Musk’s biggest critics went much further describing his unethical practices and vicious personal attacks but none would go on the record for fear of Musk’s wrath, which could result in him pushing them out of the market or hitting them with a severe lawsuit.
Soni writes the company had, in addition to low pay, an everyday workplace hostility,” and that, “bitter fights [roiled] the organization, with behind-the-scenes politicking and backbiting to boot.”
But the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Just 5 months after co-founding the company, Fricker tried to oust Musk as CEO. When this failed Fricker, Ho and Payne left, taking all the top talent with them.
What Musk was left with was a failing husk of a company. Vance quotes one of the remaining computer scientists Scott Anderson. “You look back and it was total insanity,” Anderson said. “We had what amounted to a Hollywood movie set of a website. It barely got past the VCs”.
But two more strokes of luck were to come to Elon’s rescue. Firstly, his potemkin website seemed to convince Sequoia capital’s chairman Michael Moritz to keep investing and Moritz also saved Musk from himself by persuading him to step aside as CEO and continued to invest after all the other co-founders left.
And secondly, X.com received an offer from Confinity, a start-up owned by another future Trump backer, Peter Thiel. Much like Musk, Thiel and three other PayPal founders — who would soon become known as the PayPal Mafia — also hailed from apartheid South Africa. But we’ll get back to him in a later episode.
Confinity announced the launch of what would become its breakout service PayPal in July of 1999, months before X.com would develop a similar product in December of that year.
Musk claimed to CNN in 2008 that when people got more excited about emailing money than consolidated financial services, the company pivoted to that and began to find success. This is a characteristically rose tinted retelling.
Musk was frustrated that customers were less interested in his financial superstore vision. And based on the timeline his company appears to have shamelessly copied Confinity’s successful innovation. The companies in their early days were literally next door to each other.
Depending who’s telling the story of the merger it either goes that they decided to pool their resources rather than waste ad money attacking each other or that Thiel, acting pragmatically, decided to absorb X.com rather than allow it to become a competitor.
Musk became chairman following the merger by virtue of having the largest stock share. Thiel briefly left the company due to a rift with Moritz’s handpicked CEO Bill Harris so Elon called an emergency board meeting to seize the CEO position, bringing Thiel back as chairman.
But Elon was doggedly insistent on keeping X.com, and began rebranding PayPal as X, a move the other founders bristled at, especially because the name performed much worse on trustworthiness in focus groups because it sounded like a seedy porn site.
Roelef Botha, another South African whose grandfather Pik Botha was the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, was the Chief Financial Officer of X.com. And Vance writes he began to suspect Musk wasn’t presenting the board with accurate assessments of the company’s problems.
An early Confinity employee Eric Jackson — who you could reasonably say was an adherent of the cult of Thiel rather than Musk — wrote a scathing account of Elon in his book The Paypal Wars. He claimed that even back then Musk couldn’t tolerate any dissent and that the company was losing money hand over fist to fraud. Musk, Jackson also claimed, was contributing basically nothing.
Musk responded to the book with a 2,200 word screed he emailed to SV gossip blog Valleywag in 2007 to “set the record straight”. In it he called Jackson a “sycophantic jackass” who “worships Peter [Thiel]” but who was “one notch above an intern” before laying out his case for why he deserved to be considered a co-founder.
And though Vance writes that most people he interviewed from those days leaned toward Musk’s assessment, even they agreed he’d mishandled the branding, technology infrastructure and fraud situation. I mean, for an online bank that seems like all of the most important stuff, right?
Botha, who’s now a partner at Sequoia, said, “I think it would have killed the company if Elon had stayed on as CEO for 6 more months. The mistakes Elon was making at the time were amplifying the risk of the business.”
But Elon, maybe thanks to his family fortune, knew he’d be fine if he failed and had developed an insane attitude toward risk. In his New Yorker profile of Musk, the journalist Ronan Farrow recounts a telling story which took place around the time of the X.com/Confinity merger.
Musk and Theil were out driving in Elon’s million dollar Mclaren, which he deliberately treated like shit to show how little he cared.
When Theil asked what the car could do? Musk floored it, hitting an embankment and sending them both spinning through the air. As they pulled themselves from the wreckage, miraculously unscathed, Musk turned to Thiel and boasted: “This isn’t insured."
“It was typical Musk,” writes Higgins, “over the top braggadocio barely concealing deep insecurity.”
Higgins continues that: “In all his relationships from marriage to business to his interactions with fans online, Musk has expressed a pathological need to be loved while also maintaining the illusion of control and power.”
“Recounting their relationship after their divorce Justine Wilson, Musk’s first wife, says that during their first dance at their wedding, Musk leaned in and whispered: “I am the alpha in this relationship”.
But he wouldn’t remain the alpha at PayPal for long. Thiel – and Musk’s other company rivals – waited until he and his lucky bride were boarding the plane to Sydney for their honeymoon, then they hit him with a broadside of no confidence letters, removing him as CEO.
But this vicious takedown was, yet again, to Musk’s benefit. His PayPal shares gave him a fat payout of $180 million when it was sold to Ebay for $1.5 billion. On top of that, Musk’s termination agreement contained legalese relating to the removal of details about “founders” from the company website.
Musk, not one to pass up a chance to burnish his credentials further, used it to falsely claim he had co-founded PayPal.
Perhaps it was this consolation that kept Musk uncharacteristically sanguine about the whole thing; he’d ditched his honeymoon to catch the first flight back to plead his case, but his pleas had fallen on deaf ears.
With his PayPal money, Musk was able to really indulge his fantasies. He founded SpaceX with investment from Kouri and set his sights on the electric vehicle startup Tesla,
Bibliography:
Books
Owned: How Tech Billionaires Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, Eoin Higgins
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Ashlee Vance
The Founders, Jimmy Soni
