If ever the phrase “watching a trainwreck in slow motion” was apt, and painfully so, this is it. SA-born Elon Musk driving the Trump Train through the US federal government is a disaster in the making. Except it is happening in anything but slow motion.
The halting of US foreign aid for three months alone is an unspeakable travesty, let alone the shuttering of USAID, one of the greatest and most benevolent organisations on Earth.
Millions of Africans will die because of Trump’s catastrophic assault on decency and dignity. And the man driving that trainwreck is Musk who was, until these last few years, someone South Africans were proud to call our most famous son. Although he is now the world’s richest person, he is by no means its nicest. He has demonstrated callousness and bullying on a scale seldom seen before.
He berated and bullied Twitter’s hard-working staff to leave, culling 80% of its staff, and shutting server farms down manually to save costs. The end result is that Twitter – now rebranded X – is a pale shadow of itself. One quote rightly described the “digital town square” as a now hate-filled, troll-friendly marketplace for discredited ideas, blatant disinformation and rapid right-wing trolling. It isn’t a nice place to be anymore.
And it’s bankrupt. After Musk condoned many anti-Semitic posts by people he unbanned, including Kanye West and various right-wing trolls, many advertisers fled the platform. When anti-hate groups pointed out the rampant anti-Semitism, Musk sued them and accused them of causing advertisers to flee. That it lacks logic is particularly poignant for a man who prides himself on his love of science and rationality.
But there was nobody to blame when Musk told the New York Times investor in 2023, in a direct comment to advertisers: “Don’t advertise. If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself.”
He added: “Go. Fuck. Yourself. Is that clear?”
That is never a good strategy, for any CEO in any business, not least one that makes its money (literally) from advertising.
But in the context of Musk’s closeness to Trump, his otherwise abortive takeover of Twitter for an overpriced $44 billion in October 2023 takes on a whole other complexion, doesn’t it? Musk’s wealth surged after Trump’s victory – helped in no small part by Musk taking over the president’s “ground game” and spending $250 million of his own money sending pollsters door to door in swing states.
Respected entrepreneur and NYU Stern professor Scott Galloway called Musk the “first-lady elect” because of his closeness to Trump, who has reportedly rented a cottage at Mar-a-Largo after the election to be close to the president-elect and has since been given an office in the White House.
And this was all before the frankly weird controversy over the Expropriations Act, which Trump and Musk weighed in on. Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi has brilliantly debunked the hype around this bill, over which Trump has warned he is “cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!”
This is misinformation at its ultimate nadir. Trump’s post on his ironically named Truth Social that “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY” and a “massive Human Rights VIOLATION, at a minimum, is happening for all to see” is of course accurate if you’re talking about Apartheid a few decades ago. The irony is, sadly, lost on all the protagonists.
Meanwhile, the wholesale assault on human dignity continues through the capture of USAID. “Trump scoffed that USAID was ‘run by radical lunatics’,” wrote Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times opinion columnist. “Is it radical lunacy to try to save children’s lives? To promote literacy for girls? To fight blindness?”
“The world’s richest man is boasting about destroying the United States Agency for International Development, which saves the lives of the world’s poorest children, saying he shoved it ‘into the wood chipper’,” writes Kristof in a piece correctly titled “the world’s richest men take on the world’s poorest children.”
He calculates Musk’s net worth is “greater than that of the poorest billion people on Earth” and has “grown by far more than the entire annual budget” of USAID, which is below 1% of the US federal budget.
“It’s callous for gleeful billionaires like Musk and President Trump to cut children off from medicine, but, as President John F Kennedy pointed out when he proposed the creation of the agency in 1961, it’s also myopic. Cutting aid, Kennedy noted, ‘would be disastrous and, in the long run, more expensive.’ He added: ‘Our own security would be endangered and our prosperity imperilled.'”
That it is being driven by a man who was born in Pretoria is all the more ironic and tragic. If growing up in Africa, with all the poverty and the indignity it fosters on people, hasn’t conscientised you, nothing will.
A close friend of mine lived on the Greek Island of Lesbos during the height of the influx of poor immigrants on European shores a few years ago. What struck her, a former business journalist and now author, was how the Europeans reacted to the destitute refugees. They had never seen people so poor that the only thing they possessed were the clothes they wore, she told me. They just couldn’t comprehend it, she said.
There is a lot of commentary that the current crop of US Congress people and Senators haven’t lived through a war is part of the reason for America’s lacklustre response to supporting Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Joe Biden is old enough to have lived through the effects of the Second World War and the Vietnam War. But the former US president is an exception to the relative youngsters who have lived in an age of American might since the end of the Cold War.
Humanity seems destined to repeat the mistakes we’ve already made. So much for the mistaken belief that smart people, or independently wealthy businesspeople, can make a difference in the world – and politics.
Despite being the world’s wealthiest person and a bona fide genius, Elon Musk is no better than the bullies who harassed him at school, or the National Party racists who created Apartheid. Where they wrecked millions of African lives, Musk is now devastating hundreds of millions of poor people’s lives. It’s truly sad.
This article first appeared in Business Day
