Our new leaders
A once in a lifetime opportunity
Written on November 4, 2024, the day before the U.S. presidential election that Donald Trump won.
Elon Musk was born about a month before me, in Pretoria, less than a hundred miles away from my native Johannesburg, South Africa. Musk’s fellow Trump supporters, David Sacks and Peter Thiel, are also are “fiftysomething white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa,” as Simon Kuper noted in a recent opinion piece for the Financial Times. Kuper writes that “To whites of a certain mindset,” the extreme inequalities of apartheid era South Africa were not due to apartheid: “They thought it was inscribed in nature. Certain people were equipped to succeed in capitalism, while others weren’t.”
I am not sure if I agree that this was the lesson Musk et al. learned from apartheid South Africa. I think the lesson learned from racial segregation was that there were economic opportunities that resulted from the restriction of black people to cheap and unskilled labor, and that government policies can allow savvy entrepreneurs to make a fortune.
As Donald Trump slurs and slumps his way into a possible second presidency, I find it unlikely that his billionaire backers are unaware of his cognitive decline. If anything, Trump’s incipient senility (and his apparently shaky finances) are a feature, not a bug: he is easier to manipulate.
So when Elon Musk says that a Trump presidency is a “once in a lifetime opportunity for deregulation and reduction in government spending,” I understand that to mean that he sees a Trump presidency as a once in a lifetime opportunity to make sure government spending is going to Musk companies.
*See also Franklin Foer in The Atlantic: What Elon Musk Really Wants.
Update (February 7, 2025): In the light of this week’s events, my essay seems to have greatly underestimated Musk’s ambitions. Foer had it right in the article linked above: Musk is dreaming “of redesigning the world in his own extreme image.”