The Making of Elon Musk | E1: Escape from Pretoria

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Making of Musk: Understood

Episode 1: Escape from Pretoria
Host: Jacob Silverman (CBC)
Date: October 7, 2025

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Overview & Main Theme

In the series premiere of “The Making of Musk: Understood,” host Jacob Silverman dives into Elon Musk’s formative years in South Africa under apartheid, unraveling the roots of his character, ambitions, and political leanings. The episode sets the stage by linking Musk’s childhood and national context to his present-day role as a controversial global influencer, particularly within far-right political circles.

The episode opens with a dramatic recounting of a 2025 Oval Office meeting, using it as a lens to examine how Musk’s past informs his present actions and media narratives. Silverman and a range of guests interrogate myths about Musk’s early life and trace how the legacy of apartheid shaped both Musk and the society that produced him.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Oval Office Incident: Musk, Trump, and South Africa ([00:45])

• Setting the Scene: President Ramaphosa of South Africa meets with President Trump after US aid to South Africa is cut off, allegedly due to right-wing claims of "white genocide" faced by Afrikaner farmers.
• Media Manipulation: Trump ambushes Ramaphosa with conspiracy-laden video footage about supposed farmer killings ([03:06]), prompting confusion and denial from Ramaphosa.
  • Ramaphosa: “If there was Afrikaner farmer genocide, I can bet you these three gentlemen would not be here…” ([02:24])
  • Trump: "Each one of those white things you see is a cross. And there’s approximately a thousand of them. [...] Those cars aren’t driving. They’re stopped there to pay respects to their family member who was killed." ([03:44])
• Musk’s Involvement: Musk is quietly present, having pushed similar narratives on social media and through his AI chatbot, Brock. Silverman notes Musk’s transformation from tech visionary to a "shadow president" and provocateur in global right-wing politics.
  • Silverman: "Musk was waging a one-man culture war on behalf of right wing and populist movements around the world..." ([06:05])
  • Musk: "Multiculturalism dilutes everything. We don’t want everything to be the same everywhere, where it’s just one big sort of soup." ([07:05])

2. Musk’s Childhood in Apartheid Pretoria ([09:53])

• Birth and Setting: Elon Musk is born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, during the height of apartheid. The backdrop includes both deep racial divisions and the rise of the digital age.

• Material Privilege: Musk grew up in a wealthy, segregated suburb. Homes described as "McMansions," elite private schools reminiscent of "Hogwarts" ([15:09]), and daily life untouched by the realities of apartheid for Black South Africans.

  • Rudolph Pienaar (former schoolmate): "As a very typical white South African, you kind of lived a life of entitled or isolated privilege." ([16:24])
  • Will Shoki (journalist): "It was designed to, on the backs of an exploited class of Black South African workers, produce a life of enormous privilege for a very, very tiny minority." ([17:31])

• Social and Emotional Landscape: Musk found social validation in computer games, naming all his characters after himself – "Elon the Most Strong," "Elon the Most Intelligent," etc.

  • Pienaar: "Every single character, it was some superlative: Elon the Most something." ([12:06])
  • Reflects an early tendency to project himself as extraordinary in virtual worlds, though he appeared “unexceptional” among peers in real life ([14:02]).

3. Apartheid’s Structures and Cultural Context ([18:59])

• Apartheid Overview: Apartheid, introduced in 1948, enforced racial separation and privileged a white minority.
  • Will Shoki: "A society structured entirely around white supremacy, spatial segregation, and militarized control." ([20:46])
• Bantustans and Segregation: Black South Africans were confined to impoverished homelands, while media and education shielded white children from direct exposure to the system’s brutality ([22:41], [23:15]).
• Nuanced White Identity: Within the white minority, Afrikaners and English-speakers, like Musk's family, maintained cultural distinctions. English-speakers often distanced themselves from authorship of apartheid while benefiting fully from its privileges ([24:55], [26:16]).

4. Musk’s Escape: Draft-Dodging, Emigration, and Mythmaking ([28:40])

• Conscription Context: White South African boys faced compulsory military service aimed at upholding apartheid and combating perceived communist threats.

  • Musk: “Spending two years suppressing Black people didn't seem to be a great use of time.” ([28:48])

• Reality Check: Both Pienaar and Shoki argue Musk’s draft-dodging was neither brave nor dangerous by the late '80s. The system was collapsing, enforcement lax, and leaving required little risk ([34:55]).

  • Shoki: "Rather than viewing it as something that required bravery from Musk, I would say that he saw the writing on the wall and probably just hopped on a bandwagon that was already in motion." ([35:11])

• Migration to Opportunity: For Musk, leaving South Africa was about seizing opportunities abroad, not rejecting apartheid on principle.

  • Musk: “Whenever I’d read about cool technology, it would tend to be in the United States. So I kind of wanted to be where the cutting edge of technology was.” ([36:34])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Game Character Naming:
  • "The name of that character was Elon the Most Strong. And then there was the mage or the wizard. And that one was called Elon the Most Intelligent… For every single character, it was some superlative: Elon the Most something."
    — Rudolph Pienaar ([12:06])
• On Privilege & Blindspots:
  • "There was no real direct awareness of everything that was happening… You just didn’t see Black people around living in the same neighborhood, but you would see Black people working in the garden or helping out in the house."
    — Rudolph Pienaar ([16:44])
• On Apartheid’s Effect on Mindset:
  • "That formative environment must have given him, at least, I argue, a settler colonial mindset that centered on ideas of control, extraction and escape as solutions to the problems of living in society."
    — Will Shoki ([26:57])
• On Musk’s Draft Avoidance:
  • "There was no need to, quote, unquote, flee the country to escape national service. You just didn’t pitch up, as we would say in South African slang. Everyone knew at that point that if you just didn’t even show up, nothing would happen to you."
    — Rudolph Pienaar ([34:55])
• On Musk’s Motivation to Leave:
  • "It was an opportunistic plan. Musk sought adventure. It was time for Elon, the most strong, to claim his place in history."
    — Jacob Silverman ([35:25])

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Timeline of Important Segments (Timestamps in MM:SS)

• 00:45 – Oval Office: Trump confronts Ramaphosa over "white genocide," Musk’s quiet presence is revealed.
• 07:05 – Musk’s right-wing statements and "culture war" initiatives.
• 09:53 – Introduction to Musk’s childhood in Pretoria during the rise of microcomputers.
• 12:06 – Musk as "Elon the Most" in fantasy gaming; behavioral insights.
• 15:09 – Descriptions of material privilege in Pretoria and schooling elite.
• 17:31 – Will Shoki on normalized white privilege under apartheid.
• 20:46 – Apartheid's legislative and societal mechanisms explained.
• 22:41 – The insulating effect of apartheid on Musk and peers.
• 24:55 – Deep divide between Afrikaner and English-speaking whites.
• 26:57 – The "settler colonial mindset" and its impact on Musk.
• 28:40 – Musk’s narrative on avoiding conscription and the reality around it.
• 34:55 – Peers question Musk’s draft-dodger story.
• 36:34 – Musk’s reflections on wanting to move to the US for innovation.

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Takeaways

• Musk’s formative years were deeply embedded in an insulated, privileged apartheid society, which offered material comfort, an elite education, and a sense of natural entitlement.
• His later mythology around draft-dodging and moral distancing from apartheid is challenged by contemporary accounts, which suggest opportunism over activism.
• Musk’s rise and present-day right-wing influence can be read as extensions of early social conditioning—pursuits of dominance, control, and escape.
• Episode sets up future exploration into Musk's family background, ambitions, and the international forces shaping his worldview.

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Conclusion

"Escape from Pretoria" artfully draws the throughline from Musk’s childhood in apartheid South Africa to his current flamboyant, polarizing role on the world stage. It challenges the simplified hero narratives and raises pointed questions about how environments of privilege, control, and segregation shape leaders—especially those as influential as Musk. The episode blends historical storytelling, first-person testimony, and sharp critique to invite reflection on how the past might explain Musk’s most controversial qualities, and where his ongoing quest for control—and escape—may lead next.

Transcript

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[Will Shoki]

AI, this is a CBC podcast.

[Jacob Silverman]

And we'll be discussing that. We'll have a nice conversation. And I really appreciate that you guys came along.

[Narrator]

It's May 2025 in Washington, D.C. the White House.

[Jacob Silverman]

But it is a great honor to have you and I appreciate you called. He called. I don't know where he got my number, but I picked up.

[Narrator]

President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa sits side by side with President Donald Trump in a crowded Oval Office. Relations with the Trump administration have been strained of late, so the stakes for Ramaphosa are high.

[President Cyril Ramaphosa]

You might remember when I spoke to you and we spoke about golf, you said I should start practicing and I've started practicing President, so I'm ready.

[Narrator]

So he has come prepared, a full on charm, offensive gifts, jokes, even bringing along two of South Africa's most celebrated golf golfers, Ernie Ells and Retief Hussen, as part of his delegation. You see, after years of strong relations, Trump recently cut off aid to South Africa, citing an issue that has been gaining traction among the American right.

[Jacob Silverman]

But we have many people that feel they're being persecuted and they're coming to the United States. Generally, they're white farmers and they're fleeing South Africa. And it's a, you know, it's a very sad thing to see.

[Narrator]

White Afrikaner farmers, a minority population in South Africa, are seeking asylum in the US Bringing with them terrible stories of persecution, violent farm attacks, murders that they claim are politically motivated. The word genocide has even been used. How, Trump asks, can Ramaphosa let this happen?

[President Cyril Ramaphosa]

I would say if there was Africana farmer genocide, I can bet you these three gentlemen would not be here, including my minister of agriculture. They would not be with me.

[Narrator]

Ramaphosa points to his racially mixed delegation as evidence against these claims. Violent crime, he admits, is a huge issue in South Africa, but it affects everyone, regardless of race. But Trump isn't having it.

[Jacob Silverman]

But Mr. President, I must say that. No, no, wait.

[Narrator]

Trump directs an aide into action. Something appears to be happening.

[Jacob Silverman]

Turn the lights down and just put this on. It's right behind you.

[Narrator]

Trump points toward a tv. A montage has been prepared. Opposition politicians in South Africa making impassioned speeches and singing songs calling for attacks on white farmers. News reports of murdered white farmers. As the video reaches its crescendo, Trump starts to narrate.

[Jacob Silverman]

Now this is very bad. These are burial sites right here. Burial sites.

[Narrator]

On the screen is an aerial shot of a long, straight road cutting through an expanse of farmland. A line of cars piling up.

[Jacob Silverman]

Each one of those white things you see is a cross. And there's approximately a thousand of them. They're all white farmers. The family of white farmers. And those cars aren't driving. They're stopped there to pay respects to their family member who was killed.

[Narrator]

President Ramaphosa is stunned, confused.

[President Cyril Ramaphosa]

Have they told you where that is, Mr. President? No, I'd like to know where that is, because there's something never seen.

[Jacob Silverman]

I mean, it's in South Africa.

[Narrator]

The honorable President Cyril Ramaphosa has just been zelenskied. He's been ambushed during a public meeting with the most powerful man in the world. His plan to talk about a trade deal and reviving US Foreign aid seems like a distant dream. However, there's something that Ramaphosa didn't know at that moment. Those white crosses in the video, those weren't burial sites at all. This was a fictional conspiracy theory that had somehow traveled from the margins of South African politics to the MAGA base and eventually to the White House, where it would be eagerly embraced by a president not known for his powers of discernment. But how had this right wing rage bait ended up on a big, beautiful TV in the Oval Office?

[Jacob Silverman]

But I have a great feeling for South Africa because I have friends. I have a couple of friends, a few friends here today.

[Narrator]

The answer was standing in the corner of the room, just out of view.

[Jacob Silverman]

Elon is from South Africa. I don't want to get Elon involved. That's all I have to do, get him into another thing.

[Narrator]

But the world's most famous living South African had been there all along. Uncharacteristically quiet.

[Jacob Silverman]

Elon happens to be from South Africa. This is what Elon wanted. He actually came here on a different subject. Sending rockets to Mars. Okay, he likes that better. He likes that subject better.

[Narrator]

Elon Musk, who left his native South Africa as a teenager and spent years distancing himself from the Apartheid regime lurks off camera as conspiracy theories about his homeland get presented to its head of state. Conspiracy theories he's fueled as part of a dramatic turn towards right wing politics that's consumed his life and his companies. Even Musk's AI chatbot Brock, which the tech mogul has promised to make anti woke, has started to pepper unrelated queries with comments about white genocide. By the time Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, Musk had become an omnipresent force in the administration. When he wasn't sleeping at Mar a Lago, he was sitting in on phone calls with foreign heads of state. Despite Trump claiming otherwise, Musk's interests now clearly extended far beyond rocket ships. Besides his support for Trump, Musk was waging a one man culture war on behalf of right wing and populist movements around the world, often to the detriment of his stock prices. Liberal and centrist European leaders denounced him for interfering in their politics. Musk didn't seem to care.

[Elon Musk]

Multiculturalism dilutes everything. We don't want everything to be the same everywhere, where it's just one big sort of soup. What meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives, then we don't live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy. So my son Xavier is dead, killed by the World Mind Virus. Us humans could do something crazy like World War Three. Hopefully not, but it's possible. And then if we only have one planet, then that could be curtains.

[Narrator]

Musk was supposed to be someone who thought on the grandest of scales. Conquering industries, escaping the bonds of gravity to colonize Mars. But here, quietly lurking in an awkward Oval Office meeting, Musk was participating in a petty stunt. Watching the President of the United States willfully misinterpret facts about crime in South Africa to ambush the country's president. Moments like this prompt the question, how did Elon Musk get here? What explains these bizarre twists and turns in his life which now seem to affect us all? The world's richest man shows an insatiable drive for dominance. He's compared himself to Alexander the Great, talks of raising a legion of children to colonize Mars, and displays a trollish disregard for others, from government workers to his own transgender daughter, who he said was killed by the Woke Mind virus. Can Musk's most outlandish ambitions and his most toxic qualities trace back to his youth in apartheid South Africa? And might his past reveal where he's taking us next? I'm your host, Jacob Silverman, and this is understood. The Making of Musk Episode 1 Escape from Pretoria Elon Musk is a citizen of three countries. The US by choice, Canada by heritage, and South Africa by birth. He was born into a racially segregated apartheid South Africa in June 1971 to May and Errol Musk in a wealthy suburb of Pretoria, the country's administrative capital. Just a few months after his birth, a new industrial revolution emerged that would shape baby Elon's life. You're looking at something so astonishing, it.

[Alameen Abdul Mahmoud]

Almost contradicts everyday conceptions of reality.

[Narrator]

It does the work of a room.

[Alameen Abdul Mahmoud]

Full of electrical circuits and is smaller than your fingertip.

[Narrator]

It's called a chip. That year, intel launched the first microprocessor and an engineer named Ray Tomlinson sent the first email through arpanet, the network that preceded the Internet. The digital and tech revolutions underway took a while to reach the sleepy burbs of Pretoria. But by the mid-80s, they had made their way to Elon Musk's doorstep.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

I do remember once in the 80s going to his house and as most of us did, we were in this computer game. It was one of these fantasy role playing text games that were popular at the time. The basic idea is you create a party of characters and you go and explore stuff in this computer fantasy world.

[Narrator]

This is Rudolph Pienaar. And the scene he's describing might be pretty familiar to nerdier types who grew up in the 80s and 90s. Just some friends huddled around a boxy at the time, very expensive computer in a dark room. The halcyon days of pre Internet gaming.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

So you know there's a prompt that flashes and you say go north and it says the next room. You've entered the next room and there is this and there's a treasure chest in the corner and then you say north open chest and they will say there is gold.

[Narrator]

By today's standards, it's all very simple. No music or graphics, pretty much just white text on a black screen. But there is one place you can really let your creativity fly.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

When you create your party of characters, you obviously can choose, you know, whether it's an elf or an ogre, or these different, you know, classical fantasy trope type races. And you also can give them a name. In my case you might choose something from Lord of the Rings or something that has some meaning to you.

[Narrator]

Whatever the case may be, for some kids it was a chance to be someone else. An eight foot tall warrior or an elven thief. A time to let your imagination run wild.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

So I do remember going to Elon's house and he fired up his game. And when he called up his party of characters that he had now created, there would be the ogre or something. And the name of that character was Elon the most Strong. And then there was the mage or the wizard. And that one was called Elon the Most Intelligent. Elon the Most Agile was the Thief character. And Elon the Most Handsome was one of them as well. For every single character, it was some superlative Elon the Most something. So if you were to read the narrative of the text, it would read like a story of Elon did something does something amazing and great.

[Narrator]

Every action, every spell, every victory, it all belonged to Elon. He didn't want to be someone else. He wanted to be the ultimate version of himself.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

I was thinking, oh my God, I've never seen that before. Looking back now, I would say, are you so insecure maybe, dude, that you have to name everything some supportive of yourself?

[Narrator]

Today, Rudolph is a biomedical researcher at Boston's Children's Hospital. He spoke to me from his home on the Massachusetts coast.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

I went to Pretoria Boys High School, and that is where my path began to cross with, with Elon Musk. Back in the day, we were all part of the sort of larger nerdy geek grouping.

[Narrator]

After a brutal bullying incident, Musk transferred to Pretoria Boys High and he ended up in a school where he did not stick out. In fact, to a teenage Rudolph, Elon Musk was unexceptional. Just another guy in his social sphere. Even if he had shown a talent for coding and had managed to create and sell a computer game of his.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

Own, he didn't in my memory especially stand out for any particular thing. Right? He didn't stand out academically, he didn't stand out in sports. He didn't stand out in his ideas. He was kind of there, but also not there.

[Narrator]

Which is perhaps why that Elon the Most moment stands out so clearly. Young Elon seemed to thrive in the virtual world where he could try out different versions of himself. But in the real world, among his peers, there was no Elon the Great, even when it came to the level of material privilege he grew up with.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

So these houses were by American standards, if I compare it to stuff, certainly where I am in Massachusetts, these would be huge. They would be like McMansions.

[Narrator]

Musk's house was a large estate, luxurious by most standards. At one point it was the EU ambassador's residence in South Africa. But as Rudolph points out, in Waterkloof, this was the norm. These were the sort of houses all boys like him lived in. The same goes for their school, Pretoria Boys High.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

For Americans, I would say imagine Hogwarts ish kind of school sitting in the Pretoria highveld.

[Narrator]

To an outsider it looks like the stuff of boarding school fantasy. Grand looking buildings, manicured lawns, garish blazers and straw boater hats. The sort of place with deep rooted traditions like regular practices of their war chant. This school chant, now reserved for sporting rivalries, is rooted in British colonial battles with the Afrikaner. Rudolph assures me in 1980s South Africa, this was all completely normal stuff, although.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

At the time it was considered sort of standard middle upper class school.

[Narrator]

Perhaps it was standard in their world, but most schools I'm familiar with don't look like Harry Potter sets or have war cry practice, even the very nice ones. But what Rudolph seemed to be trying to impress upon me was that in their world, this sort of privilege with its upper crust traditions was taken for granted. The system was designed that way.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

As a very typical white South African, you kind of lived a life of entitled or isolated privilege.

[Narrator]

In their video games, in their elite schools, in their McMansions, boys like Elon and Rudolph were purposefully cloistered from the realities of South Africa.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

There was no real direct awareness of everything that was happening. The structure of society was such that you weren't really confronted by these gross and in your face inequalities. You just didn't see black people around living in the same neighborhood, but you would see black people working in the garden or helping out in the house. You didn't see the inequality face to face.

[Will Shoki]

There's something profoundly ordinary about his upbringing in the sense that it was an upbringing that I want to say almost every white South African accessed during apartheid.

[Narrator]

This is Will Shoki, a South African journalist who has written widely about Musk.

[Will Shoki]

That was what the system was designed to do. It was designed to, on the backs of an exploited class of black South African workers, produce a life of enormous privilege for a very, very tiny minority. And this is the kind of privilege where each family would at least have a four bedroomed house with a swimming pool with two maidservants and a gardener.

[Narrator]

This wasn't wealth accumulated over generations. This was a system deliberately engineered. The bubble where Elon and Rudolph lived was a product of one of the most racially and socially engineered societies ever created. A society that believed only certain people could rule.

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[Alameen Abdul Mahmoud]

All right, it is October. It is officially spooky season, which is great timing because there's a new Canadian thriller series out. It's called Wayward and I think we should be talking about it. My name is Alameen Abdul Mahmoud and I love pop culture and this week on my podcast Commotion, I called up some of my favorite critics to get into the show about a school for troubled students teens and then things start to go wrong. It is just wonderful and it's bringing something new and interesting to the thriller genre. For that episode and a whole lot more. You can find and follow Commotion with El Amin Abdul Mahmoud on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Narrator]

In 1948, South Africa, which had experienced 300 years of European colonial rule, was a racially segregated society where the white colonial minority had more social and political rights than the indigenous black majority. That year, the National Party, controlled by the white Afrikaans minority, won the general election, and it formally introduced apartheid, literally translated as separate or apartness. This is where the South African story diverges from the story of the Jim Crow south or other outposts of colonial Britain. A system of extreme segregation according to the color of a person's skin, was enshrined into South Africa's constitution and its laws. The state was fully empowered to preserve racial hierarchy and white dominance without ambiguity. By the time Elon Musk came of age, apartheid was an entrenched social order, the law of the land for decades.

[Will Shoki]

And what he would have found then was a society structured entirely around white supremacy, spatial segregation, and militarized control.

[Narrator]

When he talks about control, Will is referring to the government's establishment of strict reservations for specific racial groups. They were called the Bantustans. By the time Elon was born, many of these Bantustans had developed into cramped, impoverished shanty towns, with the residents providing labor for nearby cities or commercial zones, a stark contrast to Musk's sprawling childhood home in suburban Waterkloof. But the differences weren't just material it was a question of rights. These people in a shanty town outside Johannesburg are among the millions of urban blacks drawn to the cities by the prospect of employment. Many stay here without work or residency permits they run the risk of being sent to the distant black homeland designated to their particular ethnic group. Starting in the 1950s, the apartheid government forced millions of people to move to these Bantustans, or homelands. Then in 1970, in an Orwellian twist, these Bantustans were to be given independence. According to lawmakers, the residents of Bantustans were no longer South African citizens. They were rendered foreigners in their own country. Cordoned off into these dystopian, militarized, highly regulated zones, the black people of South Africa began to resist and revolt. But the white nationalist government kept a tight grip on the media, controlling the narrative for its white citizens. Cocooned in their bubble as a wealthy.

[Will Shoki]

White English speaking boy, he would have moved through that world, insulated from its violence, but shaped by its foundational assumptions.

[Narrator]

Assumptions about the supremacy of the white ruling elite, the assumption that violence and social control were needed to maintain the system, and the assumption that a hierarchical social order is natural and that people like him deserve to be at the top of it. Musk was not only born at the height of this system, he grew up in its epicenter.

[Historical Narrator]

South Africa. In 1848, the Dutch pioneer leader Pretorius led his followers into the Transvaal. A few years later, a town had sprung up which was named after him. Pretoria. In 1910, the town became the capital of the newly formed Union of South Africa. And today, Pretoria celebrates its centenary.

[Narrator]

Pretoria wasn't just South Africa's political capital, it was the beating heart of Afrikaner culture. Walk around the city today and you'll see monuments and grand buildings celebrating the Voortrekkers, the Dutch pioneers who trekked inland during the 1830s to escape British rule. These settlers fought indigenous peoples, seized the Transvaal region and founded Pretoria as their capital. Over time, they developed their own language, Afrikaans, and started calling themselves Afrikaners, the supposed true white Africans. Unlike those British newcomers, they belonged to this land. This is the group that would eventually control apartheid South Africa. And it's their descendants, South Africa's imperiled white farmers who today capture the attention of some of the most powerful people on the political right, including Elon Musk and Donald Trump. But there's an irony about Musk's role here. He's not one of them. He's an English speaker. And from what I have come to understand, those Afrikaner farmers appealing to Trump would be keenly aware of that.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

One thing to understand about the South African setup back in the day, and it still probably resonates to an extent today, is that it's Not a monolithic culture or obviously not racially, but even culturally, within the different racial groups, there are very distinct cultural identities.

[Narrator]

This is Rudolph again. He's describing something that really hit home for me while reporting this series, this idea that you can't understand South Africa through the same lens as North American racial politics. The demographic complexity is staggering. The black indigenous population includes many different tribes, each with their own languages, cultures, histories. Then there's the so called colored community, descendants of indigenous Khoisan people, enslaved Malays, mixed race families, all caught up in the colonial project. Then there is the large Indian and Asian populations, the Jewish communities, the Muslim communities, and of course the white minority who historically ruled them all. And here's where it gets crucial for Musk's story. Even within that tiny white minority, there's a huge divide. The Afrikaans speaking Afrikaners and the English speaking Whites, like Musk's family and those.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

Cultures, although they were lived side by side and somewhat intertwined, were very distinct and, and unique.

[Narrator]

You might think that these two groups, the ones who benefited most from apartheid, would stick together, but they see their histories and place in South Africa completely differently. And that distinction puts Musk in an even more privileged position than you might imagine. English speakers enjoyed all of the trappings of apartheid with the morally convenient argument that they did not create the system. This lets them selectively distance themselves from the regime when the wheels begin to come off in the 1990s.

[Will Shoki]

Even if Musk later distanced himself from apartheid, that formative environment must have given him, at least, I argue, a settler colonial mindset that centered on ideas of control, extraction and escape as solutions to the problems of living in society.

[Narrator]

Control, extract, escape. I mean, it's hard not to see today's Musk in those terms. The Musk who wasn't happy just being the most famous guy on Twitter. He needed to own it and control it too. Or the Musk who wasn't just content to influence public politics. He had to become practically a shadow president. The man who once resigned from a government advisory council in protest after Trump pulled out of the Paris climate Accords now downplays the threat of climate change while his AI data centers burn ever more fossil fuels. This is someone who, rather than save Earth, seems resigned to its inevitable apocalypse. His solution is to aspire to become the world's first trillionaire and lead his own great pioneering trek to Mars. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We need to go back to teenage Musk and what Will mentioned about him distancing himself from apartheid. This Is undoubtedly true. Here's Musk speaking to actor Rainn Wilson, aka Dwight Schrute from the Office back in 2013. You grew up in South Africa? Yeah. You were in the army there?

[Elon Musk]

No, no, I left at 17. Well, in part in order to avoid.

[Narrator]

Conscription into the South African army.

[Fin AI Representative]

So you left so that you didn't.

[Narrator]

Have to do the army.

[Elon Musk]

You know, spending two years suppressing black people didn't seem to be a great use of time.

[Narrator]

I think that's probably the worst use of any human being's time. Right, so good for you. Right on. Elon Musk, draft dodger. Elon Musk, draft dodger. Was it that straightforward?

[Rudolph Pienaar]

When you finished high school, you had to do two years of national service. It was mandatory conscription for all white males.

[Narrator]

Mandatory military service was introduced in South Africa in 1967. For white schoolboys like Musk and Rudolph, the prospect of conscription loomed over their futures.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

There was the sense that, oh, when I finish high school I have to go to the army, unless I go to university. That was a very real thing. Most people were concerned more about that.

[Narrator]

Than anything else when they were growing up. Going to university deferred your mandatory service till after graduation, but it didn't put it off completely. Joining the military meant that you might be sent to fight in the South African border war. A long running conflict that in which the apartheid government invaded some of its neighbors to smash anti colonial and independence movements. The undeclared border war dragged on for more than 23 years, becoming one of the major proxy wars of the Cold War era.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

There was a sort of undeclared hot zone skirmish war if you will, between South African supported forces in Angola and Cuban Soviet supported forces on the other side. And that was a reality that we all had to prepare ourselves for.

[Narrator]

A heady prospect for any teen. This idea of nations as a bulwark against communism is a familiar one. West Germany, Korea, Vietnam. And in South Africa's mind, it deserved a place on that list and the political kudos that came with it.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

If only the west, the quote unquote west, knew how valuable South Africa was. If it wasn't for us standing against the communists, then Russia would be here and take over.

[Narrator]

Growing up, Rudolph remembers this feeling that South Africa was an unrecognized victim of the Cold War, unappreciated for its contributions to preserving the global order.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

In the late 1980s there was this huge kind of, you know, lager mentality that the entire world is against us. If only they knew what the reality of Africa is, and they don't know because they're not here.

[Narrator]

When Rudolph says logger mentality, he's describing what we'd call a siege mentality, a tendency by the white Afrikaans community to feel like it was them against the world. And they weren't wrong. By the 1980s, the tide was beginning to turn against the apartheid government. During the height of the Cold War, the West might have tolerated or even supported South Africa's racial caste system, but then came anti colonial and civil rights movements that upended political systems from algiers to Washington D.C. as the Cold War thawed, South Africa's argument that it was one of the last lines of defense against the march of communism found few takers. Since the 1950s, the black people of South Africa and some white allies had been organizing against this cruel racist system, forming nonviolent and violent movements against apartheid. This struggle became a global story, with the opposition's jailed leader, Nelson Mandela, becoming an icon of the fight for basic freedoms. By the early 1980s, many Western cities had anti apartheid movements that organized rallies, handed out flyers and held concerts, attracting everyone from radical students to Hollywood celebrities. It was a political movement with pop cultural appeal as kids across the globe danced to the special AKA's incredibly catchy song Free Nelson Mandela. It wasn't until 1986 that the United States finally brought sanctions against South Africa. It was no longer possible to turn a blind eye to apartheid or to defend some of the Cold War's grim moral compromises. The old myths were unraveling. In 1988, with South Africa's townships riven by uprisings, the apartheid government moved Nelson Mandela to an open prison to improve his health and facilitate peace talks. That same year, Rudolph and Elon finished high school. By now, it was clear that the old system was collapsing. This is when Elon finds his exit, escapes from Pretoria and dodges the draft. Or at least that's the story he tells. Did you end up serving in the military there?

[Jacob Silverman]

No.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

No, I didn't. I went to meet at university after. After high school. In those cases, what would have happened was that your national service would have been deferred until you were finished.

[Narrator]

When he graduated high school, Rudolph went to the University of Pretoria. The prospect of military service still loomed, but not for long. By 1989, when Rudolf started university, parts of the apartheid system were already being dismantled.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

There was a sense of change that is going to be happening that was inevitable. By my second year of university, national service was scaled down to one year only. This was 1990. By 1991, the writing was really on the wall. Apartheid was ending, was over, and national service was no longer an issue.

[Narrator]

So this is where for Rudolph, the story that Musk tells, leaving South Africa to dodge the draft doesn't quite land.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

There was no need to, quote, unquote, flee the country to escape national service. You just didn't pitch up, as we would say in South African slang. Everyone knew at that point that if you just didn't even show up, nothing would happen to you. So it wasn't a real concern.

[Will Shoki]

Rather than viewing it as something that required bravery from Musk, I would say that he saw the, the writing on the wall and probably just hopped on a bandwagon that was already in motion.

[Narrator]

This is Will Shoki again. Like Rudolph, Will isn't quite buying the Elon narrative, that it was some kind of noble minded act, that there was some kind of moral reasoning at the heart of his decision. It's fair to ask, how much can a place that Musk lived until he was 17 really tell us about the man he eventually became. South Africa provided a young Elon Musk with many advantages. Material privilege, an elite education, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a desire to plant his flag in the world, or perhaps even on another one. Musk's desire to emigrate lay more in what the world offered than in what his country would deny him. It was an opportunistic plan. Musk sought adventure. It was time for Elon, the most strong, to claim his place in history. Growing up in South Africa, obsessed with technology and computers, a teenage Musk would have had one eye on the source of it all.

[Elon Musk]

Whenever I'd read about cool technology, it would tend to be in the United States. So I kind of wanted to be where the cutting edge of technology was. And of course, within the United States, Silicon Valley is the heart of things, is so. Although at the time I didn't know where Silicon Valley wise it sounded like some mythical place.

[Narrator]

But how would he get there? After high school, Musk also enrolled in the University of pretoria. He was 17. Rudolph remembers seeing him about the campus. This was a calculated decision for Musk. He wasn't much interested in the academics on offer. But being in school deferred the immediate threat of being called up. He didn't plan to stay there long. According to Ashley Vance, Musk's biographer, he was essentially counting down the clock until a vital document arrived. You see, Musk had a golden ticket, a claim to Canadian citizenship. Canada was not California, but it was a hell of a lot closer than Pretoria. He was able to claim Canadian citizenship through his mother, May, and her father, Joshua Haldeman, a man whose incredible life story shaped Musk in untold ways. Coming up on this season of Understood the Making of Musk Here's a guy.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

Who fought elections against two Canadian prime ministers. I think where this movement becomes alarming is when it bleeds into authoritarianism and oligarchy.

[Narrator]

This kid's got a kind of reality.

[Rudolph Pienaar]

Distortion field that goes around him.

[Will Shoki]

He feels he has unfettered executive power that cannot be challenged and cannot be questioned.

[Narrator]

We contacted Elon Musk through his family office. He did not respond to our request for comment. Understood the Making of Musk is a chalk and blade production for cbc. It is written and produced by Jason Phipps, M. Walley, Eva Krisiak and me, Jacob Silverman. In this episode you heard clips from cbc, BBC, CNBC Television, Pretoria, Boys High, Associated Press, British Pathe, Soul, pancake, the specials, NBC, SpaceX, Jordan Peterson, the Independent, and the Computer History Museum. Matthew Blackman is our South Africa and story consultant Fabiola Carletti is our coordinating producer. Mixing and sound design by Julian Uzieli. Our story editor is Derek John. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe. Locos. Thanks as well to Thula Simpson, Associate professor of History at the University of Pretoria, for sharing his insights with us in the background research for this episode. You can follow Understood on whatever app you're using to listen to me now and check out my previous season, the Naked A Deep Dive into Fallen Crypto King Sam Bankman Fried. For more CBC Podcasts, go to CBC CA Podcasts.