Elon Musk Is a Mouthpiece for South Africa’s White Far Right
Elon Musk’s claim that South Africa’s land expropriation laws are part of a broader attack on the country’s white minority is divorced from reality. But it represents South African elites’ inability to understand the class tensions that define their nation.
Elon Musk during Donald Trump's presidential inauguration at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025. (Kevin Lamarque / Reuters / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Elon Musk is reconnecting with his country of birth. In recent weeks, he has rustled up a global right-wing panic over South Africa’s land ownership laws and affirmative action policies, culminating in Donald Trump issuing an executive order ending the United States’ financial assistance to South Africa and welcoming ethnic Afrikaners, who are supposedly “victims of unjust racial discrimination,” to resettle in America. Musk’s claims have found traction with right-wing Afrikaner nationalist groups at home, who have spent years stoking paranoia that white South Africans are an embattled minority facing persecution.
This whole debacle is absurd and divorced from reality. First, the impugned law — the Expropriation Act — signed by South African president Cyril Ramaphosa in late January, does not give the state carte blanche to seize property without compensation. It only allows for the possibility of “nil compensation” in specific and limited circumstances, particularly when land is expropriated in the public interest. This may apply to unused land, properties without development plans or profit, or properties posing a community risk.
The Expropriation Act aims to rectify historical injustices in South Africa’s land ownership by replacing outdated apartheid-era laws with a framework that prioritizes public interest over private privilege. Rooted in constitutional principles, it moves away from the “willing seller, willing buyer” model, which historically protected white landowners, and instead ensures expropriation occurs with just and equitable compensation (rather than market-driven valuations). Contrary to claims that it allows land seizures without payment, the act follows a long-standing global legal tradition permitting states to expropriate property for public benefit.
To be sure, there are reasons to be skeptical of the policy. Bureaucratic inefficiencies, corruption, and political capture have hindered South Africa’s land reform policies, making them slow, mismanaged, and largely ineffective. The government’s inability to process claims efficiently, coupled with widespread mismanagement and graft, has led to delays, disputes, and land deals that often benefit politically connected elites rather than the landless poor. Even when land is redistributed, a lack of post-settlement support — such as financial assistance, infrastructure, and technical training — has left many new black landowners unable to sustain agricultural production. As a result, land reform has failed to meaningfully redress historical dispossession, instead serving as a vehicle for elite enrichment while the majority of black South Africans remain landless and economically marginalized.
Advocates of expropriation without compensation often frame it as a working-class struggle, but in reality, its discourse has been driven by middle-class and elite voices, particularly within the African National Congress (ANC) and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), rather than serving the landless poor. Although two-thirds of the South African population broadly support land reform in principle, it is a national priority for fewer than 5 percent of South African adults, while access to formal jobs and basic services dominate concerns.
The EFF, a radical populist party founded in 2013 by Julius Malema, has been one of the loudest voices pushing for land expropriation, using fiery rhetoric about “taking back the land” to mobilize downwardly mobile youth, unemployed South Africans, and the disillusioned black middle class. While the EFF frames itself as a movement for the dispossessed, its leadership — which it is increasingly losing to rival political parties — consists of former ANC Youth League members and black professionals who operate within South Africa’s political mainstreams. Its ideological commitments are often contradictory — prioritizing racial antagonism over class struggle, lacking deep engagement with working-class movements (most glaringly with organized labor), and operating within a highly centralized leadership structure that limits internal democracy.
The power of “the land question” comes not from any serious plan to support small-scale farmers or provide well-located urban housing and secure land tenure, but from its historical resonance as the ultimate marker of dispossession. The ANC, feeling electoral pressure from the EFF, adopted expropriation without compensation into its own platform not because they felt that doing so made sense as well-thought-out policy, but as a political concession to a growing nationalist sentiment. Meanwhile, the real issues — how to democratize land ownership and prevent elite capture, ensure urban land reform, and provide infrastructure for land recipients — remain overshadowed by political spectacle. In the end, expropriation without compensation has functioned less as a tool for redistribution and more as a symbolic project for reclaiming black sovereignty within a post-apartheid state that still feels to many South Africans to be constrained by white economic dominance.
Yet this is not why the Right is up in arms. Instead, the global right — and Musk in particular — have seized on land reform as a vehicle for their broader ideological agenda: stoking fears of white victimhood, discrediting post-apartheid South Africa as a failed state, and reinforcing the narrative that diversity policies inevitably lead to chaos and decline. Their outcry has little to do with the real challenges of land reform and everything to do with advancing a political project that portrays any attempt at redress as an attack on white property rights.
This same reactionary impulse is evident in the contrived histrionics over Malema’s singing of “Kill the Boer.” The chant, which dates back to the anti-apartheid struggle, has been a subject of legal battles and political controversy. Yet, there is no evidence linking it to orchestrated violence against white farmers (meanwhile, South African courts have repeatedly ruled that the chant, while provocative, is not literal incitement to violence). But for Musk and his allies — supposed free speech absolutists — the song serves as a useful prop in their narrative of white persecution. Some have even gone as far as alleging “white genocide,” which, even for the Anti-Defamation League, is a step too far.
Musk and his affiliates’ outrage is less about the song’s lyrics, history, or context, and more about reinforcing the idea that black political power in South Africa is inherently threatening. Ironically, this only plays into Malema’s hands — his politics thrive on provocation, and every pearl-clutching reaction from the global right bolsters his image as an uncompromising opponent of white capital. The more the global right froths at the mouth, the more Malema is able to present himself as the figure who unsettles the right people, keeping his populist credentials intact. It is a mutually reinforcing spectacle — one that ultimately does little to advance the material interests of landless South Africans.
Right-Wing Hysteria vs. White Melancholia
The hysteria surrounding South Africa’s land reform policies is, in part, fueled by the specter of “Zimbabwefication.” The global right has long used Zimbabwe’s land seizures of the early 2000s as a cautionary tale of what happens when black-majority governments challenge white property ownership. The narrative goes that Zimbabwe’s economic collapse was a direct result of land expropriation rather than a combination of mismanagement, corruption, and structural economic constraints. This crude analogy ignores fundamental differences: unlike Zimbabwe’s forced land seizures, South Africa’s Expropriation Act remains bound by constitutional provisions ensuring fairness and public interest. More importantly, the comparison assumes that black-led governments cannot administer land reform responsibly, reinforcing a racist paternalism that undergirds much of the Right’s critique.
The same ideological project is at work in the outcry over South Africa’s affirmative action policies. While it is true that employment and shareholding equity laws have been inconsistently applied and, at times, weaponized for cronyism, the broader claim that white South Africans are being systematically excluded from the economy is baseless. White South Africans continue to occupy the most lucrative positions in business, control the majority of private wealth, and benefit from generational economic advantages that decades of slow-moving transformation have failed to undo. Affirmative action, far from dismantling this entrenched inequality, has mainly served to cultivate a small black elite while leaving the structural dynamics of racialized wealth accumulation intact. But this is not what inflames Musk and his allies. Their real concern is not fairness or economic justice — it is the preservation of white economic dominance.
The irony is that some white South Africans, particularly those who reject the reactionary preoccupations of the Right, remain trapped in self-defeating melancholia. Many claim to support “nonracialism” in principle but have not fully reconciled with the reality that true nonracialism requires dismantling the economic privileges they still enjoy. The Democratic Alliance (DA), for example, which governs precariously in a coalition with the ANC, opposes “race-based” policies but stops short of advocating for more precise markers of disadvantage.
Instead, the DA has mastered the art of triangulation — publicly distancing itself from the global right while occasionally pandering to its anxieties. It sees itself as a liberal, meritocratic center, defending individual opportunity against both the ANC’s corruption and the EFF’s racial populism. Yet its version of meritocracy remains blind to structural inequalities, treating racial redress as a form of “racial nationalism” rather than a necessary response to historical dispossession. The party selectively engages with right-wing grievances — criticizing affirmative action, land reform, and the de-commodification of health care in ways that subtly affirm white fears — while simultaneously rejecting the overt racial nationalism of Musk’s panic or the Afrikaner lobby groups. But this strategy of appeasement and evasion only deepens its crisis, leaving it caught between a core electorate uneasy with change and a broader public that sees it as lacking a meaningful vision for redistribution.
Genuine progress demands more than nostalgia for a mythical, depoliticized “rainbow nation” consensus — it requires an acknowledgment that economic justice is not a zero-sum game. The challenge for progressives, then, is to frame redistribution not as a punitive project targeting white South Africans, but as a universalist one that benefits the working class across racial lines (including those racially classified as “Coloured” and “Indian”).
Even among those white South Africans who claim to see themselves as victims, few are actually willing to emigrate (for their part, the most prominent Afrikaner lobby group in South Africa, AfriForum, has said that the price of leaving would be “too high” and has walked back some of its earlier claims about the extent of land seizures). The Trump administration’s offer of “resettlement” for ethnic Afrikaners is pure political theater — South Africans, even those disillusioned with the country’s direction, are unlikely to trade in their relatively comfortable lives for an uncertain future in the United States.
The imagined exodus of white South Africans fleeing “oppression” to build a new life abroad is an old fantasy, one that has circulated since the end of apartheid, but remains largely unrealized. The simple reason is that, despite the challenges, South Africa still offers a higher quality of life for many white citizens than the precarious existence they would face as economic migrants in the United States or Europe. Their sense of victimhood, then, is not rooted in material dispossession but in a psychological discomfort with a country in which their hegemony is no longer unchallenged.
The Real Class War
At the heart of the Right’s panic is an unspoken truth: South Africa is a black country. This is obvious in its political leadership, its cultural life, and its everyday social reality. The state, the media, and the arts are overwhelmingly shaped by black South Africans, even as economic power remains disproportionately white. That economic imbalance, however, is not static. It is changing, and over time, it will inevitably transform.
A society where the vast majority of people — 81 percent of the population, and 91 percent if we count Coloreds and Indians — are black cannot remain indefinitely structured by the economic privileges of a small white minority (already, it is intraracial, rather than interracial, inequality that contributes more to total inequality). Whether by gradual reform or sudden rupture, economic power will shift. White South Africans must accept this (or frankly, take Trump’s offer up). But so too must black South Africans, many of whom still define their political outlook in relation to whiteness, as though the country’s trajectory will always be determined by racial contestation rather than by internal class and ideological divisions.
The reality is that South Africa’s future will be shaped less by struggles between black and white than by the conflicts and contradictions within the black majority itself. As black South Africans continue to ascend in business, finance, and industry, the divisions between them — between the working class and the elite, the urban and the rural, and the different political and ethnocultural constituencies — will become more decisive than racial cleavages. In some ways, this is already happening: the ANC’s internal fractures, the EFF’s tensions with its own base, and the rise of the MK Party — a Zulu-nationalist bloc led by former president Jacob Zuma — all point to a shifting political terrain where black South Africans are increasingly divided by class interests and political ideology rather than simply by a shared history of racial oppression.
This is not to say that race is irrelevant — far from it. The structures of apartheid-era dispossession still loom large over South African life. But the fundamental question of the next decades will not be whether black South Africans can claim political and economic power (they will), but how that power is distributed, who benefits from it, and whether it will be deployed in the interests of the majority or captured by a new elite. This is the conversation that must take center stage, rather than the tired distractions of white grievance politics or racial theatrics from political actors who thrive on polarization.
Musk’s intervention, then, is not just a distortion of South Africa’s realities — it is a symptom of a broader political malaise. His claims about land reform and affirmative action do not emerge in isolation but are part of an international right-wing strategy to undermine racial justice efforts, delegitimize postcolonial states, and recast white populations as besieged minorities. That this narrative has gained traction among reactionary movements worldwide speaks less to the actual state of South Africa than to the broader anxieties of a global elite struggling to maintain its privilege in an era of political and economic instability.
Yet, if Musk and his allies are eager to use South Africa as a battleground in their culture wars, it is also because they sense an opportunity: a government that has failed to deliver meaningful economic transformation, an opposition too fragmented and opportunistic to challenge the status quo, and a political discourse still ensnared in identity-driven polarization rather than substantive debates about economic justice.
If there is a way forward, it cannot be through reactive defensiveness or liberal appeals to a bygone era of rainbow nationalism. Nor can it be through the kind of cynical racial scapegoating that has turned economic policy into a spectacle of symbolic posturing. The challenge is to articulate a vision of justice that is rooted not in elite capture or racial grievance, but in genuine material transformation — one that reclaims land reform and economic redistribution as projects of mass uplift rather than elite consolidation.
This means reviving a class-based politics that does not allow figures like Musk to set the terms of debate. It means recognizing that economic justice in South Africa will not be achieved through nationalist posturing but through concrete policies that benefit everyone. And it means refusing the false binaries that define so much of the current discourse — between race and class, between redress and economic growth, between historical justice and a viable future.
Musk’s opportunistic intervention will come to nothing, just as Trump’s latest political stunt will fade from the news cycle. The deeper challenge is whether South Africa’s left can rise to the occasion, reject the distractions, and build an economic program that speaks to the majority. Because until then, the country will remain vulnerable to those who see it not as a place to be transformed, but as a stage for their own ideological battles.