The billionaire white South African fascists in the palm of your hand

To the President of South Africa, the Prime Minister the United Kingdom, my local London Labour Member of Parliament, my publishers, vice chancellors and academics in English and African literature departments in my almae matres, Shukri scholars and research students, the Goethe Institut and other cultural and literary organisations, associates, colleagues, family and friends.

If you are still under the illusion that 1994 was a miracle year that made white South African racism, economic exploitation, gender apartheid and right-wing extremism unacceptable, focus your attention on the three billionaire tech bros surrounding US President-elect, Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks. Also known as the PayPal Mafia, they are the right-wing white South African misogynists about to take over the White House. In his farewell address delivered on 15 January 2025, outgoing President Joe Biden warned about “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America.” The only African immigrants in Trump’s administration, these three men epitomise Biden’s warning. While much has been written about them individually in relation to tech and Trump, their links to apartheid South Africa warrant longer, more specific scrutiny. Whether you stay or whether you leave, no South African is untouched by the country’s racist history. Apartheid continues to be South Africa’s greatest influencer. Now, it’s about to become America’s, too. Step aside, KKK. It took three billionaire South African racists less than 30 years to achieve what you could not in 160—control of the White House. And they’re not stopping there.

German federal elections are scheduled for 23 February 2025. One of the leading candidates in the race is the far-right politician, Alice Weidel, representing Germany’s second-largest opposition party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD). To the AfD, the horrors of Nazi Germany are a “cult of guilt.” That is shocking, but not surprising; Weidel’s grandfather was Hans Weidel, a Nazi judge directly appointed by Adolf Hitler. This would concern most, but not the close advisor to Trump, Elon Musk. Despite his visit to Auschwitz death camp in January 2024, he has endorsed the AfD as Germany’s “last spark of hope.” Plot points of the sequence of events leading up to this endorsement are important.

In 2024, a study conducted at Queensland University of Technology into potential algorithmic bias on Musk’s social media platform, X, suggested that Musk may have tweaked the platform’s algorithms to artificially amplify his posts. On 9 June 2024, a 24-year-old German influencer, Naomi Seibt, posted on X that she had voted for the AfD. That post received 830.9K views. On 19 December 2024, Seibt posted that the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Friedrich Merz, “staunchly rejects a pro-freedom approach and refuses any discussion with the AfD.” That post received 36.5M views. The following day, on 20 December 2024, Musk responded to Seibt’s post. True to form, Musk’s post was brief: “Only the AfD can save Germany”. It received 52M views. On 10 January 2025, Musk went even further, hosting a 74-minute live chat with Weidel on X. Opinion polls suggest an AfD surge, with the party currently holding a vote share of 21%. It is worth remembering these dates. They mark the beginning of a new world order, the confluence of ultra wealth, borderless high-tech influence, and fascism. It is also worth recalling the Nazi’s rapid four-year progress to election victory: in 1928, they held 12% of the vote. That increased to 18% in 1930, and 38% in the German federal election of 1932, making them the largest party in the Reichstag.

Musk was born in South Africa’s administrative capital, Pretoria, in 1971. His abusive father, Errol Musk, was a one time member of the Progressive Federal Party and supporter of the divisive Tricameral Parliament, a three-tiered racially defined parliamentary system, which excluded black South Africans. But “progressive” at the height of apartheid was a relative term. He also traded emeralds from a mine in one of the world’s most emerald-rich countries, Zambia. Telling is his continued use of the old colonial name “Rhodesia” as he narrates the story; the country officially became Zimbabwe in 1980. In his authorised biography, Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson quotes a line from an email Errol sent to Elon. It captures the enduring culture precisely: “With no whites here, the blacks will go back to the trees.” The email was written in 2022.

Tech billionaire, Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook and cofounder of PayPal, Palantir and Founders Fund, was born in West Germany in 1967. In 1968, the family emigrated to the USA. Then, during the height of apartheid in the 1970s, they moved to South Africa and its neighbouring former German colony, South West Africa, now Namibia. What could possibly have been their motive? Namibia is a country with one of the largest uranium deposits in the world. At the time, it was under South African control, and Thiel’s father, Klaus Thiel, was involved in the extraction of uranium for use in South Africa’s apartheid-era nuclear development programme. This is the context of Thiel’s childhood and early education in whites only schools. In his biography of Thiel, The Contrarian, Max Chafkin references conversations at Stanford University in which Thiel is reported to have said that apartheid “works” and is “economically sound.” According to Chafkin, Thiel’s economic and political philosophy borders on fascism. “He is hostile to the idea of democracy.” On 10 January 2025, the Financial Times inexplicably published an incoherent opinion piece by Thiel. Like his essay, The Straussian Moment, it is characterised by pompous, incomprehensible pseudo-intellectual posturing, providing an informative glimpse into the workings of a delusional mind. Referencing pre-revolutionary France, Jeffrey Epstein, John F Kennedy, Anthony Fauci and Covid-19, Thiel’s central premise is that: “Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis of the ancien regime’s secrets. The new administration’s revelations need not justify vengeance—reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth.” I specifically reference this piece because Thiel’s chosen title is telling: A time for truth and reconciliation. By conflating Trump’s second term with South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Thiel demonstrates a catastrophic misunderstanding of both.

Tech venture capitalist, David Sacks, the former Chief Operating Officer of PayPal, is Trump’s appointment as White House A.I. & Crypto Czar. Born in Cape Town in 1972, the family emigrated to the US when he was five. In 1996, while they were students at Stanford, Sacks and Thiel co-authored The Case Against Affirmative Action and The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus. The book argued that politically correct multiculturalism on campuses was debilitating. In it, Sacks and Thiel also offer their views on date rape: “seductions that are later regretted.” In 2016, Thiel apologised for the comments on sexual assault contained in the book, but I question his sincerity. A telling sign of his hubris is the title of his June 2023 address at The New Criterion event honouring him for services to culture and society, The diversity myth: On multiculturalism and misdirection. In his speech, he insists: I still think that almost every point we made was right. There’s very little that’s wrong. He repeated the address at the Roger Scruton Memorial Lectures in October 2023.

Like cliquish immigrants, Musk, Thiel and Sacks have orbited one another their whole careers, apartheid South Africa their common origin story. They embody a new time, the collision of past, present and future. With them, the future has kicked down the front door, while the past is breaking in through the back. Now we're mediating all three cantankerous eras at once, like feuding family members under the same roof. What do you imagine these men are going to do in the White House? Be naïve, but at your own expense. From past behaviour, we can predict future action. See their ravenous quests for more, insatiable appetites only satiated with superlatives. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is not a final destination for them, but a stepping stone, a propeller to their dystopian view of the world. We once speculated that they might use tech to build a better world. Clearly not. They simply used it to reinvent and escalate the world of their fathers, a heartbreaking contemporary illustration of that timeless line from Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence: “Yet when we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake it in the likeness of the former world they knew.”

Wherever you are in the world, you would be mistaken to see these three horsemen of dystopia as distant and removed. They’re a lot closer than you might think. In fact, they’re already in your healthcare, in your driveway, in your house, on your desk, in the palm of your hand. Question: What are you going to do about it? Think carefully, dig deeply, because red poppies come November won’t suffice.

Whatever the tech bros say, truth will always prevail, no matter how long it takes. Facts matter. So does fiction. Given the context, one novel stands out: Philip Roth’s, The Plot Against America. I first read it in a Palestinian refugee camp during a long stay in the West Bank from 2006 to 2007. At the Israeli controlled border crossing from Jordan into the occupied West Bank, soldiers searching my luggage repeatedly set aside the novel, and instead quizzed me about the battery in my laptop, my charger, the refills for my fountain pen, holding each up in turn and asking: What’s this? I thought they were joking. They were not. Nobody asked about the book.

In the speculative novel, Roth writes an alternative history in which a Nazi sympathiser, Charles Lindbergh, defeats Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, leading the USA to become an ally of Nazi Germany. This is why I read fiction; why I write it. Fiction is the finest form of fact. One of the most famous quotes from the novel anticipates the advent of the unforeseen: “Anything can happen to anyone, but it usually doesn’t. Except when it does.” Now the unforeseen has come to pass, and we’re all terrified. Maybe now we can talk about the book, before it really is too late.

Ishtiyaq Shukri
London
18 January 2025