AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring into this conversation Chris McGreal. He was the Johannesburg correspondent for The Guardian during the last years of apartheid until 2002. His new piece for The Guardian is titled “What does Elon Musk believe?” and “How the roots of the 'PayPal mafia' extend to apartheid South Africa.”

This is really illuminating, Chris. Who are the PayPal mafia, and how are they linked to apartheid-era South Africa?

CHRIS McGREAL: Well, they’re a group of men who were at the top, the founding of PayPal, all of whom, in some way or other, grew up in South Africa as children. You’ve got Musk himself, who was born in South Africa and lived there, went to high school there ’til he was 18, and then moves to Canada.

You’ve got Peter Thiel, who was a co-founder with Musk of PayPal. Thiel was born in Germany but brought to South Africa as a young child. His father was a mining engineer, lived in Johannesburg and then moved to South West Africa, which was then a South African colony, is now Namibia. And he went to school in Swakopmund, which was notorious as probably the last place on the planet where people still openly greeted each other with “Heil Hitler” and celebrated Hitler’s birthday. He went to a German school there before moving to the United States when he was 10 or 11.

You’ve got David Sacks, who was born in Cape Town. He was big in PayPal and is now Trump’s AI and crypto czar. He moved to Tennessee as a relatively young child but grew up in the white South African diaspora there.

And you’ve got Roelof Botha, who is the son of Pik Botha — sorry, the grandson of Pik Botha, the last foreign minister of apartheid South Africa. He was the acceptable face of apartheid. You will remember, he used to run around the United States trying to put a gloss on how they were reforming things and that everything was getting better, which apparently it wasn’t.

But, so, you see those four key people at the top of PayPal, and they all have this very intimate connection to South Africa.

AMY GOODMAN: So, we just played Errol Musk. That’s Elon Musk’s father. Talk about the significance of what he said and also how he gained his wealth in South Africa and when these men left South Africa.

CHRIS McGREAL: So, well, Errol Musk still lives in South Africa — 

AMY GOODMAN: Yeah, their kids.

CHRIS McGREAL: — which is why, of course, he’s — yes, the — Errol Musk made his money in lots of different ways, but the main way was he had investments in emerald mines in Zambia, and he became extremely wealthy. Now, the conditions on those mines were notoriously bad, as they were on mines throughout sort of southern, central Africa. He made a lot of money from that, so much so that when Musk’s mother divorces him, there’s listed a jet, a yacht, several houses in the divorce settlement. So he was extremely, extremely rich.

Musk himself, he stayed in South Africa ’til he was 18. He goes to school first in Johannesburg and ends up at Pretoria Boys High, which is a largely racially exclusive white — all-white school near Pretoria, which is the capital. There was a quirk of it in which there were some Black students. I think the first Black student in the school was the son of a foreign diplomat, but the diplomat came from one of the Black homelands that only South Africa recognized as independent, part of the apartheid structures.

Musk has a Canadian passport through his mother, because Musk’s mother’s father was — or, mother’s parents were Canadian. And there’s a whole story there. I mean, Errol Musk regarded himself as an anti-apartheid liberal. He joined the Progressive Federal Party, which was ostensibly against apartheid, but he leaves it when it starts supporting one person, one vote. He actually doesn’t believe in that. Musk’s grandfather, Canadian grandfather, had been the head of the Canadian branch of a political movement in the 1930s called Technocracy Incorporated, which, in essence, wanted to scrap democracy in the United States and Canada and have technocrats rule the country, which might sound familiar. That becomes a de facto fascist party, is banned during the Second World War. And then the grandfather moves to apartheid South Africa, having had no connection to the place, in 1950 because he likes the sound of apartheid. And even Errol Musk says of the grandfather, he was an open neo-Nazi.

AMY GOODMAN: This is [Elon] Musk’s father, Errol, on Podcast and Chill with MacG, discussing Elon Musk’s mother’s father, Joshua Haldeman, alleging he supported Nazis and South Africa’s apartheid.

ERROL MUSK: Her parents, by the way, were very fanatical in favor of apartheid. This is quite interesting. Her parents came to South Africa from Canada because they sympathized with the Afrikaner government. They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff. But they didn’t know, obviously — I don’t think they knew what the Germans were — Nazis were doing. But they — in Canada, they were in the Nazi — they were in the German party in Canada, and they sympathized with the Germans.

MACG: Yeah.

ERROL MUSK: So, when the Afrikaners government came into power here in 1948, then Maye’s father, who was quite an interesting guy — he was a very good pilot — he said he wants to be with the Afrikaners because he agrees with apartheid.

AMY GOODMAN: So, again, that’s Errol Musk, Elon Musk’s father. As we begin to wrap up this discussion, if you can talk about what has just happened, the power of the PayPal mafia now in determining perhaps that the U.S. would cut off all aid to South Africa and accept Afrikaners as refugees to the United States?

CHRIS McGREAL: Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty astonishing. It really is. But it’s really rooted in something that goes back a few years, which was a campaign by white Afrikaner farmers, through an organization called AfriForum, which were very active here during the first Trump term. They came in 2018, met John Bolton and others, and they were very much pushing the idea of a white genocide in South Africa. And really, it’s a continuation of that campaign. AfriForum has been at the forefront of the idea that Afrikaners are the victims of the end of apartheid, that Afrikaners are the people who have really suffered in South Africa. And it’s now come to this point where, absurdly, it’s been proposed that they have refugee status.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, were you surprised by Elon Musk’s Nazi-like or Nazi salute when he was addressing people at a Trump rally?

CHRIS McGREAL: Well, given that it was instantly recognized for what it was, yes, I — even by, you know, Musk’s standards, I thought, “Wow!” I wasn’t surprised that he then tries to pretend it wasn’t what it was, and he comes up with all kinds of other explanations. But I think almost everybody that watched that instantly went, “Oh, we know what that is,” and assumed that Elon knew what it was, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris McGreal, longtime Johannesburg correspondent for The Guardian. We’ll link to his piece, “How the roots of the 'PayPal mafia' extend to apartheid South Africa.” And we’ll do Part 2 of this conversation and post it online at democracynow.org.

Next up, as Trump doubles down on plans to own Gaza, we go to the occupied West Bank, where Israel has intensified its military assault. Back in 20 seconds.