Speaking to the MailOnline, Errol said he’s proud to watch his son “accepting who he is”. He said: "I think for the first time Elon was accepting who he is. Until recently, he’s been a sort of character on a stage.
“When you come from South Africa, Lefties think you’re a Nazi. To succeed, you need to be accepted by them so my sons, [Elon and younger brother Kimbal, a hugely successful restaurateur], started to become these flaming liberals – turning away from South Africa and their roots, which included me. Finally, Elon was embracing his heritage and his destiny.”
In a separate interview, Errol explained how right-wing poltics were at the core of his family’s history. Elon’s maternal grandparents relocated from Canada to South Africa in the early 1900s as they knew the Afrikaner government was a stronghold of support for Nazism outside of Germany.
"They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff. But they didn’t know, I don’t think they knew what the Nazis were doing. But they [the grandparents] were in the German Nazi party but in Canada. And they sympathise with the Germans. "
This sentence is a mess.
The Nazi part wasn’t formed until the 1920s.
South Africa was run by the British in the early 20th century. The Afrikaners were at this point, completely disenfranchised after the Boer War.
It wasn’t until the 1940s under the National party (yes, there were named after the German National party !). that the Afrikaners and English began to share power.
BTW, the apartheid system was designed with the help of an Indian lawyer you may have heard of - Mahatma Ghandi.
The Afrikaners weren’t disenfranchised. The National Party held seats in parliament from shortly after its founding in 1914 and JBM Hertzog was prime minister from 1924-1939. The first prime minister of the Union of South Africa was Louis Botha, who was a Boer veteran.
The United Party was a centre-right party that was an alliance of Anglophone and Afrikaner whites as well as coloureds (n.b. for Americans: not what you’re likely thinking, so click the link). They lost the 1948 election to the far-right National Party, at which point the government of South Africa became dominated for 40 years by far-right Afrikaner grievance politics.
The most notable English-speaking member of parliament during apartheid was Helen Suzman.
Wonder what to make of this report then.
It’s The Mirror reporting on The Daily Mail, so it has been through two rounds of incoherent tabloid garbling. We can’t really know what to make of it unless we can find a better source for Musk’s family history. This particular claim about when and why his grandparents moved to South Africa isn’t in the Mail interview and The Mirror doesn’t name a source for it except “a separate interview.”
However, we can be fairly certain that Elon and his dad are both nasty pieces of work:
Edit: Turns out Musk’s maternal grandparents moved to South Africa in 1950, not the early 1900s:
Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather
Archive: https://archive.is/x3OYY