Title pretty much. I vaguely remember a post and in the article Grandpa Musk said he was proud to finally embrace Nazism safely or something.
I tried searching for it but it’s kind of hard to search with the Nazi salute taking up most of the results.
Just wondered if anybody knew the post/article I was looking for and if they could find it?
Thanks for taking the time to read this post in advance!
There is nothing wrong with having family ties to Nazis. You can’t choose your family.
There is everything wrong with doing Nazi things, regardless of who you are related to.
Quick search surfaces a couple articles, both paywalled.
From The Atlantic: Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather
From The New Yorker: The World According to Elon Musk’s Grandfather
A quick skim of both basically points to how his grandfather was a racist actively involved with fascistic, anti-semitic political organizations and publications. Quote from The New Yorker article below:
In the nineteen-thirties, he joined the quasi-fascistic Technocracy movement, whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule. He became a leader of the movement in Canada, and, when it was briefly outlawed, he was jailed, after which he became the national chairman of what was then a notoriously antisemitic party called Social Credit. In the nineteen-forties, he ran for office under its banner, and lost. In 1950, two years after South Africa instituted apartheid, he moved his family to Pretoria, where he became an impassioned defender of the regime.
However they also both note that Musk’s grandfather died when he was two or three years old, and The Atlantic article notes that Musk’s father didn’t seem to follow too closely in his father’s footsteps. Quote from The Atlantic article with original links included below:
And Haldeman’s politics were not universal in the family; Elon’s father, Errol Musk, for example, was a member of the Progressive Federal Party, the primary political parliamentary opposition to apartheid.
Lol at Errol Musk supposedly not being a piece of shit because he was a member of a progressive party at one point, undoubtedly to serve his own financial interests and reputation, and not because he suddenly decided that exploiting oppressed people in his emerald mine (and other businesses) was bad.
He also married his stepdaughter, who he
raisedgroomed from when she was 4.He also apparently supported trump before musk jr. ever did - https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-father-errol-debunks-controversial-claims_n_67475372e4b08e4755035f4e (if anyone wants to actually watch the full interview where he apparently “discussed his family’s ties to the South African apartheid regime” among other things, and report back, you’re more than welcome, but I ain’t doing it lol)
They both have zero redeeming qualities.
Yup. From what I’ve read of Musk’s core family (himself & parents & now grandfather), it seems like they’re all uniquely awful people.
You could try asking LLMs. The ones that don’t actively search the web for answers are capped with knowledge up to when they were trained and won’t know about it. But verify whatever they tell you in case they make it up.