The Emerald and the Rocket: What Young Africa Must Know About Elon Musk
A young Black South African recently pleaded online for Elon Musk to “include Black people too” at SpaceX. This journal is written for that young person — and for every African who assumes that because Musk was born in Pretoria, he carries Africa in his heart. With respect and with receipts, we trace where this family’s wealth truly began, how one man reached a trillion dollars while ordinary people struggle, and why the next great African fortune must be built like Mansa Musa’s — to last a thousand years and to be seen — not hidden in a rocket or a coin.
For the Young Person Who Asked Him to Care
I read a comment that has stayed with me. A young Black South African, sincere and hopeful, was almost pleading for Elon Musk to “include Black people too” at SpaceX — as if appealing to a brother who had simply forgotten his own. That hope is beautiful, and it is exactly why I must write this. Because hope without information can be exploited, and a young African’s admiration is too precious to hand to someone who has not earned it.
Let me be clear about my purpose. This is not envy of a rich man, and it is not hatred. It is information offered so you can choose your heroes wisely. Elon Musk is undeniably brilliant in certain ways, and SpaceX has done remarkable engineering. But brilliance is not the same as goodness, and being born in Pretoria is not the same as loving Africa. Before you give him your loyalty, you deserve to know three things: where his family’s money really came from, how he reached a trillion dollars, and what he has actually done with his power. Then you decide. That is what respect for your mind looks like.
The Wealth Did Not Begin With a Rocket
Every fortune has a foundation laid before the famous person was born. To understand the Musk story, you must meet the two earlier generations — and you must read their own words, not mine.
The grandfather: who chose apartheid on purpose
Elon’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was a Canadian chiropractor and political figure who led the Canadian branch of “Technocracy Incorporated” — a movement that wanted society run by engineers rather than elected politicians. In 1950, he moved his family to South Africa. The apartheid government had taken power just two years earlier. As journalist Chris McGreal, a former Guardian Johannesburg correspondent, documents, Haldeman looked at the new apartheid state and concluded “that’s just my kind of place.” He became, in Errol Musk’s own description of his wife’s family, “very fanatical in favour of apartheid.”
This is not rumour. Haldeman published pamphlets promoting conspiracy theories, and in a 1951 newspaper article he wrote of his Black South African workers in terms so demeaning they are painful to reproduce — describing grown men as “boys” who “must not be taken seriously.” That was the worldview at the root of this family tree: a man who crossed an ocean toward apartheid because he admired it.
The father: emeralds, Zambia, and a telling reason
Elon’s father, Errol Musk, was a successful engineer and property owner in apartheid South Africa — already wealthy in a system that reserved opportunity for whites. But it is his mining venture that matters here. In interviews — with Elon’s own biographer Walter Isaacson, with Business Insider South Africa, and on South African podcasts — Errol has described how, from around 1986, he acquired the rights to the output of three emerald mines in Zambia.
Read carefully what Errol told Isaacson about why he never formally registered the arrangement: “If you registered it, you would wind up with nothing, because the Blacks would take everything from you.” Sit with that sentence. It tells you the mindset, and it tells you the conditions: a white South African extracting gem wealth from independent Black Africa during apartheid, while assuming Black ownership was theft to be evaded. Errol has boasted he had at times “so much money we couldn’t even close our safe.”
From Comfortable to a Trillion
So how does someone go from a privileged-but-ordinary start to becoming, in June 2026, the first person in history worth more than a trillion dollars — while the average American skips meals to make rent? The honest answer is a mix of genuine ability, relentless drive, extraordinary risk appetite, brilliant timing — and two things Africans are rarely told about: massive government support, and a financial system that showers the already-rich. Follow the ladder.
“Dark MAGA,” DOGE, and What It Did to Africa
Here is the part that should matter most to the young African weighing whether to admire him — because it is not about the past, but about how he used historic power in the present. After helping fund Trump’s victory, Musk led the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), embracing an aggressive “Dark MAGA” politics. “Efficiency” sounds neutral. Watch what it meant in practice.
The Aid Woodchipper
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Under DOGE, about 83% of USAID programs and 5,200 contracts were cancelled. Musk boasted of feeding the agency “into the woodchipper.” USAID funds frontline outbreak response in Africa — Ebola, Marburg, mpox, HIV, malaria. Aid and health agencies warned the cuts crippled exactly the surveillance and treatment systems that contain deadly outbreaks, and Oxfam estimated the cuts put a child under five at risk of dying every 40 seconds by 2030.
The Conflict of Interest
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The watchdog Public Citizen found over 70% of the agencies DOGE targeted had matters that posed conflicts of interest for Musk’s own businesses. A congressional oversight letter cited some US$9.5bn in Department of Defense contracts to his firms and a combined US$38bn in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits — asking how a “special government employee” cutting agencies that regulate and compete with him was not enriching himself. He set the rules while holding the dice.
The Platform & the Narrative
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Musk has used X, which he owns, to promote the false narrative of a “white genocide” of Afrikaner farmers in South Africa — a claim repeatedly debunked by data, which the Trump administration then used to cut aid to South Africa and offer white South Africans refugee status. A man who left South Africa amplifies a myth that paints its Black-led government as persecutor. Ask yourself whose interests that serves.
Starlink, on Whose Terms?
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Starlink can genuinely help connect rural Africa — we have praised satellite-and-solar connectivity in this very journal. But note the friction: Musk publicly resisted South Africa’s Black-ownership (BEE) requirements rather than comply, framing Africa’s own equity laws as the obstacle. A true partner adapts to your sovereignty; a master asks you to drop it for his convenience.
One Man, Richer Than Half the Planet’s Poorest
Hold up the mirror this fortune makes. Oxfam calculated that at a trillion dollars, Musk is richer than the poorest 46% of humanity — about 3.8 billion people — combined. His wealth grew by an estimated US$550 billion in a single year: over a million dollars a minute. In that same year, ordinary Americans queued at food banks, and the African programs his DOGE cut left children without medicine.
This is the thing a young African must truly absorb: extreme wealth on this scale is not a sign that the system is working — it is a sign that it is rigged. No one earns a million dollars a minute by effort; they earn it by owning the right assets while the rules protect them and tax the worker. To admire the size of the fortune without asking how it was built, and who paid, is to admire the very machine that keeps Africa poor. You are allowed to be impressed by the rockets. You are not required to bow to the rocketeer.
Build Like Mansa Musa, Not Like This
Now the empowering turn, because criticism without a better path is just complaint. Africa has its own model of what wealth is for, and it is greater than anything in Silicon Valley. Consider two ways to be rich.
Wealth taken out of a place and its people — emeralds from Zambia, labour from apartheid, contracts from the public purse — and concentrated in one man, stored in stock and satellites and crypto, defended by cutting the aid that keeps the poor alive.
It leaves the ground it came from poorer, and builds nothing the community can see or touch.
Mansa Musa of Mali, the richest man who ever lived, turned gold into universities, libraries and mosques — Timbuktu, Djinguereber — institutions of learning and beauty that stood for centuries and still teach us today.
He built what could be seen, what would last, what lifted his people. Wealth as legacy, not as scoreboard.
This is my charge to you, the young African who will one day be rich — and you will, this continent is rising. When Africa makes its billionaires and its trillionaires, let them build like Mansa Musa. If a person is truly South African, let it show in South Africa — in schools, hospitals, factories and universities you can walk into — not in a Bitcoin wallet or a rocket to Mars. Do business with ethics and kindness. Champion equality, especially racial equality, because we of all people know its cost. Pay your workers as if they were your family, because in unhu/hunhu, they are. Measure your success not by how far above your people you rose, but by how far you lifted them with you.
Born on Our Soil Is Not the Same as On Our Side
To the young person who asked Elon Musk to remember Black people: I understand the longing in your question. We have so few global giants who look like the place we come from, that when one is born on our soil we want to claim him, to believe his triumph is ours. But love must have its eyes open. Elon Musk has shown us, again and again, where his heart points — and it does not point home. He amplified a lie that paints our liberation as your persecution. He helped cut the aid that guards African children from Ebola. He resisted our equity laws as an inconvenience. These are not the acts of a brother who forgot us. They are the acts of a man who was never facing this way.
So I will not ask him to include you. I will ask you to stop waiting at his door. You do not need Elon Musk to put Black people in his rocket. You need to build the rocket. The same continent that his grandfather found “his kind of place” because it crushed Black ambition is now yours to run — the lithium, the gold, the youngest population on earth, the rising economies this journal documents every week. The cruelty of his family’s story is also its lesson: wealth built on taking from Africa can be matched by wealth built on growing Africa. That is the harder, nobler road, and it is yours.
Be impressed by the engineering; I am. But give your loyalty to those who give it back to you. And when your turn comes — and it will — be the anti-Musk: the African who got rich and stayed African, who built the visible, lasting things, who paid the worker and lifted the village, who measured a fortune by what it healed and not by how high it stacked. Africa does not need its own Elon Musk. Africa needs its own Mansa Musa — a thousand of them. Pamberi nevana veAfrica vanovaka — forward with the children of Africa who build.
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