e.w. niedermeyer

November 26, 2024Original Post

in other "look at where this guy comes from" news, Elon Musk's father just did a lengthy podcast episode that opens with the host saying "I bet the last time you had this many black people in your house someone was trying to rob you" youtu.be

EPISODE 613 | ERROL MUSK On Growing Up in SA, Elon Musk,Donald Trump,Dating Step Daughter,Ex Wife’s

YouTube video by MacG

youtu.be

in case your wondering, his answer was literally "oh no, I have lots of black friends... I actually just bought Cyril Ramaphosa's [the president of South Africa] Bentley"

this interview is so wild... Errol Musk insists that his father wasn't a racist and then goes on to explain that English speaking South Africans were deeply discriminated against at the time, don't you know

he tries to say that Elon and Kimball had black friends, but basically only says that Kimball did (the interviewer, who is black, performs polite surprise)

Apartheid was bad, and nobody wants to go back, says Errol Musk, but back then the white government had a paternalistic sense of obligation to help black people that is sadly lacking today. There it is, your nuanced apartheid take of the day.

"when I meet I guys at the top, I tell them they have to include more white guys in the cabinet" ok, not sure if I can keep listening to this

Errol Musk has always been anti-Apartheid, but during Apartheid P.W. Botha's [the National Party prime minister] wife and daughter would stay with them because they were such close friends... amazing how that works

staunchly anti-Apartheid but close personal friends with the guy who fought the end of Apartheid and refused to testify at the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, very cool

"we inherited South Africa from the European countries, Britain and everything you know, they gave us all the rules" there was really nothing to do but profit as much as humanly possible from the institutionalized racism that had absolutely nothing to do with me, a white South African

he was selling a plane he owned to raise some cash due to the economic downturn, and he wanted to save money by not flying to Jedda during the Eid festival and was killing time and Lake Tanganyika, where he met the Italian emerald mine owners and effectively traded his plane for a 50% share

Errol Musk effectively admitting that he sold emeralds around the world in defiance of the anti-Apartheid economic sanctions that got him into that business in the first place

Errol Musk has to catch himself after casually referring to Zimbabwe as "Rhodesia... um, the old Rhodesia."

cash for emerald deals, done in the middle of the street to avoid being robbed, real pillar of the community shit

Errol Musk confirms that Elon is lying when he says his father didn't own a mine and that he didn't benefit from it. Elon was both physically at the mine, and personally involved in selling emeralds to Tiffany's in New York.

"Elon knows all about the emeralds. It's just because, you see, he wants to tell the people in America that he also had a hard time." ~Errol Musk

Errol Musk insists he is not proud of killing three people in a home invasion, but the way he describes the fact that he only fired twice (one bullet killed two people) and his assailants fired more than 50 times strongly suggests otherwise.

an almost touching moment as Errol Musk talks about moving to England with his mother as a child, and being surprised to find that they were kind to children in England, unlike in South Africa where as a child you were "hiding every day... doesn't matter if you were good or bad, hiding every day"

Errol describe Maye Musk's parents as being "fanatical" in their support of Apartheid. "Her parents came to South Africa from Canada, because they sympathized with the Afrikaaner government"

"They used to support Hitler, and all that sort of stuff" (!!!!)

"Obviously they didn't know what the Nazis were doing, but in Canada they were in the Nazi, in the German party in Canada, and they sympathized with the Germans. So when the Afrikaaner government came into power here in 1948, then Maye's father... said he wants to be with the Afrikaaners"

Errol was involved in an anti-Apartheid student group, and it caused friction with Maye's parents, who were "quite rude" to him about it. Errol says he didn't want to deal with them, so he broke up with Maye, who spent three weeks crying and "lost all her weight." This is how she became a model (!!)

cable news outlets really need to start putting "Former Ms Transvaal" on Maye Musk's chiron

Errol says of his breakup with Maye: "we were top of the social pile, top of the economic pile, top of the political pile... when you have too much good life, you start to, as a man, you start being casual" sir, have you by any chance ever passed this lesson on to your son?

admitting that Maye no longer speaks to him, even when in the same room, Errol reveals that "Elon said to her (Maye) she must get back with me... but, no" ok, this is getting super weird as the conversation shifts to family stuff

of Maye's accusations of abuse, Errol says "she made that all up"... he insists they continued to see each other, and that she tried to get back together with him two years after their split ("I should have said yes")... abuse allegations only came "when these books started coming out"

"so when you now impregnate [your second wife's] daughter" "well that's a tough way to put it" OK, we've officially arrived at the grossest part of the interview

Errol and his second wife divorced in 2004. In 2014, his second wife's daughter (who he says did not live with them growing up) reached out to say she was struggling and needed money. Yadda yadda yadda, he impregnated his stepdaughter. I need a shower now.

he gave her a car and sent her money every week, because she was skinny and impoverished and living in what he describes as squalor... after two years of this her boyfriend threw her out, she's on the street, and Errol invites her to live with him "after a while... we sort of started a relationship"

Errol defends himself by saying that his step-daughter was 29, and had already had a child, by the time he took advantage of her impoverishment and dependence on him. Extremely classy stuff.

"she stayed here for two or three weeks, then she and her boyfriend made up... so she went back to the boyfriend, the one who had thrown her out, so then after about two months she came to see me... and told me she's pregnant." He thought the baby couldn't be his, but DNA testing confirmed it was.

"we still see each other... I provided her with a little house"

"Kimball said 'well, you know, it happens' and Elon said, you know, he's not worried about that, you know, because they're boys, they're not interested. My daughters, on the other hand, were shocked. This girl was like their sister so they were like *disapproving face* but anyway"

Errol denies that the gross family situation was responsible for his falling out with Elon. "I had a falling out with Elon because of my support for Trump," he says. EXCUSE ME WHAT

"I'm not into wokeness and gayness and transgender stuff. What these people in America, Biden and them, I like a country to be well-run... I followed Trump's career because he was in the same work as me... when he said he would stand for president, I said he's a good man."

"Elon was a Democrat at the time" "Well yes, if you go to America from South Africa and you're a white person, in those days you had to not be showing that you are a supporter of anything but, you know, being a Democrat"

"my daughter used to cry and say that the girls treated her very bad because she's a white girl from South Africa, so I said to my daughter, just ask them: 'where are the red Indians?'" Oh. My.

Elon shipped Scarlett Johannsen and Jennifer Lawrence (along with Sergey Brin) out to Capetown in order to go out to dinner for his dad's 70th birthday

At Errol's 70th birthday party in 2016, John Favreau told Errol "I hear you're a Trump supporter" and when he admitted he was the entire Hollywood contingent laughed at him.

When asked why he supported Trump, Errol said he was a good businessman who doesn't mess around. "You want to talk about race things, Trump has more awards for helping poor people and people across the race spectrum than anyone"

After his 70th birthday meal, where Errol outed himself as a Trump supporter in front of the Hollywood glitterati, Kimball Musk was furious, saying he'd embarrassed him in front of his friends, and Elon said "it's evil to support Trump." This was the cause of the family breach. ELL OH ELL

"He was just brainwashed by those Democrats, because now Elon supports Trump!"

"Did Elon ever come back to you and say 'you were right' [about Trump]?" "No, no, I wouldn't put him through something like that... I mean, he should say something like that, but no, no."

as a child, Elon wouldn't hesitate to ask adults "are you stupid or something," Errol says. He tried to teach the young Elon that it was rude to say that, even if the person was in fact stupid, but it would seem that the lesson didn't really stick

In second grade Elon's teachers asked Errol to come in to meet with them. He was worried his son had told a teacher they were stupid, but the teachers were actually worried that Elon was "retarded." "That's the word the used," Errol says. Apparently the problem was that Elon didn't engage with them.

Elon had been staring out the window for hours, and wouldn't respond to teachers, until one finally got his attention and all the young Musk said was "the trees are turning green." "So they came to the conclusion that he's retarded," Errol says. "What I did was put him in a better school."

"he was reading books very early on. At age 9 he was already reading, especially books about dungeons and dragons and you know all sorts of creepy stuff"

"as far as academics, or being really smart... eh, he was OK"

"Was he bullied?" "No, that's another story that's not exactly true. Some boy's father had committed suicide and everyone knew, and Elon said to this boy 'your father was stupid.' Now, you shouldn't do that... so the boy waited until Elon wasn't looking and he pushed Elon down a flight of stairs"

had to cut it from the quote, but Errol clarified that he also thought the boy's father was stupid for committing suicide, but of course one mustn't say that... fascinating that Errol can sort of walk that line (but still has to say it to someone?), but Elon obviously can't at all

Errol went to the school and the police over this incident, and they told him that what Elon had said to the boy "was too much, you can't say that" and refused to pursue charges. "And I agreed," Errol adds, saying "I felt very sorry for this boy... he was weeping all the time."

"Elon was a nerd with the ladies" least surprising reveal of this wild interview

"he's not a smooth operator"

Errol raving about Elon's underling and baby mama Shivon Zillis, who he describes as a "very smart, Indian sort of woman, but she's SMART and that suits him very well." This is how I found out Zillis's mother is Punjabi. Errol seems very fixated on ethnicity.

Errol on Elon's fixation on procreation: "If you're a dope, don't have kids. But you're not a dope, so you should have lots of kids. So the thing is if you can afford it, but you mustn't have kids if you can't afford it.

Errol says it's not just about money, you also have to have time for your kids. Elon regrets not spending more time with his first batch of offspring, he says, and he's having more to make up for it. Because that is DEFINITELY how that works!

Despite having declared himself "anti transgender" earlier, Errol says of Musk's trans daughter Vivian Wilson "my advice to [Elon] was 'you should love people for who they are, not who they were.'" He says transgender people have existed throughout history and preaches Christian acceptance.

to be clear, the way Errol speaks about this is absolutely soaked in transphobia and dehumanizing rhetoric, don't want to whitewash that at all here... but the quote above is more accepting and tolerant than anything Elon has ever said on the topic

very odd anecdote about women friends coming to him to reveal that their son is gay, and Errol already knowing, and telling them "it's not such a big thing"... just like his apartheid politics, Errol likes to feel just slightly more enlightened than the deeply bigoted society he's a part of

when asked if Elon is proud of being South African, Errol says "yes, of course"... when asked why he doesn't talk about this pride, Errol says Elon is "on the A team, so you only put out everything that's positive, you know what I mean?"

Tosca Musk wears an "Africa necklace" (?) and buys her kids clothes in South Africa, and Kimball would like to have a bush farm here, Errol says. "They are very happy with their background."

fascinating extended jag about how you don't tell Americans you're from South Africa if you're white, citing a whole bunch of odd reasons while dancing around the obvious one: because everyone assumes you're a flaming racist.

Errol says Elon and his other children come to South Africa all the time, and "head straight to the bush. They love the place." He says they get special treatment that allows them to visit in secret.

After he sold PayPal Elon "didn't know what to do," so he joined the Mars Society. People were "very seriously pretending to live on Mars in the desert... and Elon was very impressed with this." So he gave the Mars Society $100,000 in 2002, and fell in love with the idea, and tried to buy a rocket.

In 2016 Elon told Errol that Starlink revenue would be $80 billion. "That was 2016, I think now it will be more" Errol says NARRATOR: Starlink's 2024 revenue is in fact $6.6 billion spacenews.com

Starlink soars: SpaceX’s satellite internet surprises analysts with $6.6 billion revenue projection

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spacenews.com

"Now Kimball's task, Kimball, my other son, his brother, he believes he must teach everybody how to grow vegetables." I love Kimball's derpy yet wholesome version of Elon's mission-driven megalomania. Such a funny contrast.

"He doesn't talk to those Hollywood people anymore. In fact, those Hollywood people that came with him to Capetown that time, they say terrible things about him all the time now. That he's no good... they're no good themselves, those Hollywood people."

"I haven't got a conscience" something Errol Musk just straight up said

asked about the election, and if he favors Trump (this was recorded shortly before election day) Errol says "Trump is a businessman. He's a proper person." I wonder what might make the other candidate less of a "proper person"...

ranting about politics now, Errol seems nostalgic for the imperial era when "everything we bought was from England" because now nobody buys anything from England and the new Starmer government is trying to "taxi its way out of poverty" which is like "a guy living on his mum's savings" (??)

Errol Musk is writing a book about ancient Middle Eastern history that is "very pertinent in today's world." I'm sure that's going to be a delight to read, can't wait.

Asked about South African history, Errol lights up. He says SA experienced lots of things 200, 150, and 100 years ago that other countries are just now facing. Like what? "In terms of race involvement, clashes, you know, all that kind of thing. We were way ahead of the rest" I need to lie down now

Errol: "In many ways, [South Africa] is way ahead of the rest of the world" Interviewer: *staring, goggle-eyed* Errol: "in experience, you know?"

"A rundown of South African history is in many ways the meeting of two cultures: the black culture coming one way, and the white culture coming the other way, in a country that could really be called the garden of Eden." chat, my skin is crawling so bad right now listening to this

the interviewer asks Errol how a minority was able to rule a majority, "it's like 3% of you and 97% of us" Errol: "well, I don't think that's the correct way to put it" 😬

"I think that the culture that came down kept to themselves. If you look at the Xhosa and Zulu people, they stayed where they were, nothing really much has changed there. Zululand is Zululand, Xhosaland is Xhosaland. So white people came to the Cape which was more or less occupied by a small group

of people called the Khoi and the bushmen and so on, and they were very small in number, so they formed their little society and the agreements were generally they'd form their little society and black people would form their little society."

In "what we call the Transvaal, or used to call the Transvaal" Errol says Zulu would raid tribes who lived there, "they would take out everybody... so it was an empty country. Empty countryside. Only in the north where you come from, but that was beyond a mountain so the Zulus left that."

"The Zulus were sort of bad guys," Errol Musk says, by way of justifying both European colonization of Transvaal lands that were "emptied" by Zulu predation and of course the violence that made it possible.

Errol provides an anecdote about Boer Voortrekkers (early settlers in the Transvaal) having cattle stolen by "these black guys" and they went to go steal them back, but the Zulus had already massacred the rustlers. This story "gives you an idea of how things were in those days" he said.

"That was the black people fighting each other" Errol explains, before going on a digression about Zulu factional politics that sees him use the term "Rhodesia" multiple times before correcting himself.

When asked what it's like being the father of the richest man in the world, Errol Musk answers "It's important to remember that I also did well." That seems like a good place to leave this thread. Thanks for tuning in, sorry about all the weird, gross, racist stuff!