PROOF EXCLUSIVE: Prospective Trump Co-President Elon Musk Got Rich Off the Backs of Exploited Black Laborers in Africa

As the Trump-Musk axis woos Black voters, this new exploration of the dark history of the Musk Family reveals that Musk—already steeped in the outrage of apartheid—was enriched by racial exploitation.

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Introduction

The world’s richest man is now trying to buy the world’s most valuable commodity—democracy—and wrench it toward his own ends, with the economic fates of hundreds of millions of Americans who would likely suffer under Elon Musk’s dystopian vision of America hanging in the balance.

That’s the conclusion of a sudden avalanche of stunning, frankly harrowing reports from The New York Times (link), The Arizona Republic (link), Le Monde (link), Wired (link), countless other media outlets around the world and—not for nothing—a massive tide of new research from Proof, encapsulated in articles here, here, here, here, and here.

If it seems impossible that American voters—particularly women, nonwhites, and any voter who identifies with the middle or working classes in America—would again fall for the questionable charms of a venal far-right billionaire whose history is littered with sex discrimination and harassment claims, compelling allegations of racism and anti-semitism, civil lawsuits alleging fraud and corruption, contempt for living under the same rule of law as the rest of us, and an apparent sociopathy incompatible with leadership, think again. Elon Musk appears to be banking on the political premise that lately birthed Donald Trump: many, many Americans are suckers for a rich man.

That Elon Musk was born rich and subsequently conned his way into maintaining his status is clear from the reports linked to above—but it’s only one of the ways in which he mirrors Trump. Still, a review of his several well-known companies is worthwhile:

• The Boring Company has failed. It doesn’t do what it claims, like build tunnels.

• Neuralink is beset by massive, crippling federal investigations into vile conduct.

• PayPal fired Elon Musk because he was destroying the company from the inside.

• Zip2 is a company founded on an idea Elon Musk appears to have stolen.

• Twitter has lost 80% of its value since Elon bought it.

• SpaceX only exists because Elon Musk’s friends saved it from bankruptcy, and its success (reckless deadlines, horrifying environmental impact, and ignored federal regulations notwithstanding) required Musk working behind the scenes to try to destroy NASA and also destroying companies that have the same ambitions to aid mankind that he claims he does. It’s also unclear whether the primary long-range focus of SpaceX—colonizing Mars—is at all feasible or sensible. It appears to be much smarter for humankind to use most of the taxpayer funds going to SpaceX to advance promising Earth-defense technology like the DART program, instead.

• Tesla has lost a staggering $700 billion in value in just the last 36 months.

• xAI is such a latecomer to the AI field that it has been framed as “pointless.”

• Musk’s Optimus “robot” launched as (I kid you not) simply “a man in a bodysuit,” and has been said to be no more advanced as a matter of robotics than products scientists were capable of creating forty years ago. Many of its supposed abilities have faced accusations of outright fraud and its designs are apparently stolen (as a good deal of Musk’s work product seems to be) from antiquated cultural setpieces.

Put aside that all of these companies have faced some combination of lawsuits and credible allegations regarding union-busting, dangerous work conditions, sexual and/or racial discrimination, questionable policies regarding immigrant workers, dangerously reckless deadlines, contempt for federal regulations, and worse.

Put aside that Musk has admitted to regularly using ketamine in ways inconsistent with medical recommendations, offered a woman a horse for a handjob, was credibly accused by the mother of one of his children of illegally absconding with that child, was disowned by another child, inseminates his employees (sometimes creepily failing in those efforts), and is infamous for his anti-semitism (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Let’s even ignore, for a moment, that Musk’s spiritual guru is one of the worst humans alive—a man who has actively campaigned for the genocide of every person on Earth he deems less “productive” than men like himself and Musk. Here’s a New Republic report on the genuine monstrosity that is failed-coder-cum-philosophical lightweight Curtis Yarvin:

(To be quite clear, imprisoning the entire population of Earth—except Yarvin, Musk, and a few other middling rich white men—in a virtual reality forever blocked off from the real world is genocide.)

When Musk convened a cabal of far-right billionaires in California to plot purchasing the 2024 U.S. presidential election for Trump outright—using possibly illegal means—he invited not only Rupert Murdoch, who’s been called “the most dangerous man in the world” by the sitting and historically widely admired President of the United States, but also aforementioned Curtis Yarvin disciple and far-right cult leader Thiel.

Thiel and Musk thereafter handpicked Vance, another Yarvin disciple, to be Trump’s running mate. The apparently genocide-curious Thiel had been grooming Vance for power for years.

All of which begs a question: what in any of this would appeal to any American voter?

And it begs another question, too: what in any of this qualifies Elon Musk to be put in charge—as Donald Trump has promised to do if elected—of sacking 75% of the entire workforce of the federal government (which Elon’s adviser-dad Errol says he will do) as part of Trump’s Project 2025? The federal government, whether you like everything it does or not, is far and away the largest single employer in the United States, and it manages so many services that make daily life in the U.S. palatable that it’s impossible to properly catalogue them all (feel free to start with the interstate highway system).

Anyone who understands America knows that what Mssrs. Trump and Musk are really promising is to collapse the American economy and birth a Second Great Depression.

Which brings us back to the question of what qualifies Musk, a South African born into apartheid and an ideologue whose own father admits has secretly held far-right views his entire life, to bring Americans to their knees in this way? And the answer, already intimated above, appears to be simply this: Elon Musk is very, very, very rich.

That’s it. He’s rich—so he must also be good, competent, wise, just, and deserving, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

But what if, in fact, Elon Musk’s wealth is every bit the façade Trump’s is? As we all know by now, Trump inherited a minimum of $413 million from his bigoted father Fred Trump, and would in fact be far richer than he is today had he simply invested it.

That’s right, every economic decision Trump has made for the last 40 years has in fact been worse than simply retiring at age 30 and exclusively playing golf. He is provably one of the worst businessmen in American history. But surely Elon Musk is a different story?

While Musk may have stolen the idea—Zip2—that made him his first $317 million (in 2024 dollars), according to credible allegations to that effect; while he may have been fired from PayPal due to both his incompetence and his extremely erratic behavior, getting well over $200 million (in 2024 dollars) to simply go away; while he may benefit from billions and billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks and special allowances at both Tesla and SpaceX that many Americans justifiably feel are unwarranted, for all this no one doubts that Musk is currently rich.

But his father Errol has made clear that all that wealth flowed from him as its first font—and that much of his eldest son’s financial success is therefore uniquely attributable to a contemptible Zambian emerald mine.

And American voters cannot understand the dangers posed by a prospective 2025 Elon Musk co-presidency without understanding the truth about how Musk got his money.

Errol Musk Forecasts His Son’s Co-Presidency

As recently revealed here at Proof, Errol Musk just gave an hour and a half interview with Rob Moore of Disruptors that must change everything about how we see his son.

What that earlier report didn’t cover is a forecast Errol Musk has given us of how his son would govern if he becomes Donald Trump’s effective co-president—and what this dystopian vision of an Elon Musk with significant political as well as financial power tells us about the emerald mine that made the Musk Family rich.

Here is Errol discussing his eldest son’s hard-right political views, as opposed to the moderate ones he pretended to have after emigrating to America and needing money from leftist, center-left, and moderate Silicon Valley angel investors to get his start:

[When Elon and his brother Kimbal were] kids, we discussed [political] things at length. I often listened to them when they were teenagers [about] what their thoughts were on things. They were then thinking much like they do now [in 2024].

It was the fact that they went over to the States that they sort of changed and said, “Let's try to disassociate [ourselves] from South Africa.”

...

They learned [their right-wing political philosophies] from me. But when they went overseas, I saw them changing [their tune].

As the latest Proof report on the Musk Family confirms, it really was only the Musk boys’ public-facing political stances that changed. Secretly they were still hard right, just like their father.

Errol, the font of the two Musk brothers’ formerly crypto- (and now open) MAGAism, is thrilled that Elon has turned his attention to becoming as powerful in politics as he already is in business (emphasis supplied):

I didn’t think Elon would do as well in politics [as he has]....[and] I’m now looking at whether they [Elon and Kimbal] will do as well in the political [as the business] realm, especially Elon.

It’s still [an] active [question]. The situation is somewhat active.

As I explained to [Elon], when you get into this world they don’t just try to deprive you of your money or your shares, they actually try to deprive you of your life. They kill you in this field [politics]....so you enter into a situation in which you have to have a lot of bodyguards.

Elon is [now] very, very powerful. For example, recently [Russian president Vladimir] Putin said the American government is going to have to reckon with Elon. Going to have to meet [negotiate with] Elon.

Elon can decide whether or not your internet [is capable of] starting.

He can do anything.

He can do anything he likes.

He can launch a rocket and he can land it anywhere he wants....and Benjamin Netanyahu says Elon is the de facto President of the United States. And then he also has an enormous following. Elon’s following is in the hundreds of millions.

But it’s when Errol starts discussing the threats facing Elon’s political rise that things get legitimately scary—for democracy-lovers, at least. Errol is clear on the idea that his son will have to take extraordinary steps, as he becomes a major political power-broker in the United States and on the world stage, to neutralize all the “bad people” who might oppose him.

It’s how Errol Musk discusses those bad people that’s so harrowing—along with the many lies he tells to seemingly justify taking radical, preemptive steps against them.

For instance, in discussing left-leaning Labour politician Keir Starmer, the current prime minister of the United Kingdom, Errol Musk goes much, much, much farther than simply falsely implying—as Donald Trump currently does to his own enemies—that Starmer is a Communist: he actually insists (entirely falsely, of course) that the prime minister of the United Kingdom was a spy for the Soviet Union for many years.

Given that Elon learned his politics from his father and that his father has explained at length that he remains an adviser to his son, we must now ask, is this the sort of lie his son will be whispering into a possible future President Trump’s ear, knowing that Trump is a paranoiac who will believe whatever conspiracy theory he’s most recently heard if it involves a leftist who opposes his agenda? What happens when Elon Musk has high-level national security clearances and the ability to wage a clandestine war on a man his dad (and possibly he) either believes to be a Communist spy—presumably now working for the Chinese, as Russia is no longer a Communist superpower—or else is merely willing to say he believes is a Communist spy in order the sow discord between America and the nation with whom the United States now has its closest diplomatic ties? Remember here that Elon has lately been credibly accused of trying to foment a civil war in England, with some even implying he could be arrested there.

And we must consider, too, the larger view Errol offers of Elon’s perceived pantheon of political enemies.

Per Errol, one such enemy is the Venezuelan government (which is now functionally Communist) and another is the Brazilian government (framed as Communist by Elon).

Per Errol, Keir Starmer’s base of operations when he was a Soviet spy was “Eastern Europe”—which would seem to be Errol’s way of implying that governments in that part of the world would have intelligence documents confirming Starmer as a crypto-Communist. And which Eastern European country has a government that is both wildly pro-Trump and the European nation with the closest ties to the former KGB (which was headquartered there for its European operations in the 1980s)? Hungary.

Yes, the same Hungary whose extremely dangerous autocratic leader, Viktor Orbán, has violated diplomatic protocol in every election Trump has run in since the 2010s by public endorsing him. The same Orbán who is deemed Vladimir Putin’s closest ally in Europe, just as Trump is seen as such in North America and Elon is seen as such in the world of Big Tech (Musk has had several secret phone calls with Putin of the likes no other Big Tech entrepreneur is known to have had). And Putin, of course, is a former KGB agent who needs to seal Russia’s growing popularity with “MAGA” by finding more and more melodramatic ways to distinguish his kleptocracy from his country’s former Communism; he could easily do that by spreading worldwide the lie—a Musk Family-advanced lie—that the current leader of America’s biggest European ally is in fact a Communist spy (keeping in mind here that in the world of espionage, there’s no such thing as an ex-spy, so Starmer wouldn’t have that “defense” available).

Can you see where this is going? Given that Errol believes Elon will be in charge of deciding which 25% ofU.S. government workers keep their jobs under Project 2025, and which 75% lose them?

To put it bluntly, we may be about to see a massive purge of supposed “Communists” from the federal government—with “Communist,” as ever, merely a code used by hard-right Republicans for anyone with Democratic Party leanings—under the guise of a Musk-led downsizing. We must now take every false allegation from Elon Musk that someone or something is “far left” or Communist (his latest target on this score was the world’s leading search engine, Google, which can be taken as a sign that he wants Twitter to replace Google rather than representing any actual intel about anything Google has done) as an indication that that person or entity has been marked for a public attack under the McCarthyism Elon Musk’s political rise appears to presage.

But it might yet be even worse than this.

As Errol contrasts what Elon wants and believes with what is happening in England, he falsely accuses Starmer of simply jailing anyone in England who complains about immigration—which Errol, whitewashing the fantastically violent far-right riots that have plagued England of late, says is merely British people chanting the equivalent of MAGAs’ favorite, and most ominously crypto-racist, slogan: “We want our country back!” (When white people are calling nonwhite immigrants invaders, as is happening now in both England and America, it’s clear who the “we” is in that political slogan.)

Errol says that he can’t believe armed government officials are standing behind Starmer in his purportedly—actually made-up—mass jailing of far-right white protesters, and implies that there should be some sort of coup against the prime minister’s authority, led by far-right elements within law enforcement and perhaps (though he doesn’t say this outright) the military. There could be no better summary of what a January 6-style insurrection would look like in England than this. That Errol is romanticizing it in the context of discussing his son Elon’s political intentions in America is truly terrifying.

Certainly, the vision the Musks—father and eldest son both—seem to have of Western democracies under the leadership of anyone left-leaning would bear out the idea that we’re in for dark times indeed. As Elon stokes civil war in England over immigration policies opposed by neo-Nazi groups there—because those policies allow new non-whites into a majority-white country—Errol Musk tells Disruptors of a recent visit he made to England in which he found himself an “ethnic spot” in London that was (he says) “crazy” and “not very attractive” only because it was filled with “Indians” using “carts ands horses and donkeys” rather than cars, and “People [were] cooking on the roads and [in] stalls and everything.” Once upon a time, such a cartoonish rendering of an ethnically diverse neighborhood—they’re called “street vendors,” Errol, and they can be found in every large human habitation on Earth—could be dismissed as the sad nostalgia of an aged South African racist, but now we can see how it is mirrored in the ideology of the man who may be about to become America’s co-president: Elon Musk.

{Note: Tellingly, Errol makes clear that he was deliberately and offensively juxtaposing Indians and Pakistanis—the latter being one of the most discriminated-against immigrant groups in England—by contending that whereas an English enclave in “Karachi” (in Pakistan) would be “lovely” and filled with “gardens,” he finds the reverse, i.e. a non-white enclave inside England, distinctly “[unpalatable] to me.” His message here is clear: Anglo-Saxon culture in England and South Africa is distinctive and pleasant and admirable, whereas non-white cultures bring only ugliness, savagery, and chaos. This is the very “colonialist” mentality that led England to subjugate people around the world. It’s also apparently the politics that suffused Elon’s youth.}

So let’s turn, then, to Elon Musk’s youth in South Africa in the midst of apartheid.

The Truth About Elon Musk’s Wealth

Is Elon Musk a self-made man whose success in lifting himself up justifies a future role in deciding who stays and who goes in America’s federal government?

Absolutely not. In fact, Elon was born rich. Very rich. He became even richer through acts of deceit and low cunning, not wisdom or insight.

According to Errol, Elon grew up “in one of the finer homes you could ever imagine,” indeed one of the finest homes in all of South Africa—a home so fine that, not long after the Musks abandoned it for still greener pastures, it came to be used as one of the most important and revered United Nations properties in the whole of South Africa.

According to Errol, Elon Musk grew up on “yachts” and in adorable “[second-home] cottages in the bush [for holidays].” The family had “forty planes”—not a typo—and a fleet of “Mercedes and Rolls Royces.” The Musks even “raised horses.” Errol, who had Elon when he was 25 years old, summarizes how we should understand the world Elon grew up in by saying, simply, that by 1976—when Elon was just five, and probably had just begun forming his first lasting memories—his family “had everything you could ever have….everything you could ever have.”

But trouble was coming for the Musks, and it was coming in the form of Black people demanding their liberty.

Within less than fifteen years of Elon and his family having “everything you could ever have,” the hideously racist white-supremacist superstructure that made that wealth possible—apartheid—would be gone from South Africa, and, with it, Elon himself. Errol seems to have sent Elon to North America just as the white power structure the Musk Family was on top of and relied upon in part for its wealth was utterly collapsing. Elon emigrated in great haste in 1989, months before apartheid ended and the racial politics of South Africa were turned on their head in a way that suddenly greatly disadvantaged families the Musks (by Errol’s own rueful admission).

Errol’s description of the 1990s is telling in this regard. Indeed, he won’t even go so far as to acknowledge that Nelson Mandela’s 1994-formed government post-apartheid government was democratically elected—which denial is a common refrain among older unrepentant South African racists. Referencing the year 1995, Errol says, “We [in South Africa] had just gone over to a so-called democratic government. And there was no business. Everyone was leaving the country. Everything was on hold. Nobody wanted to do anything. To buy anything. Develop anything. Many [rich white] people were moving to trailer parks because they couldn’t pay [for] their houses anymore.”

This description of affairs will be no surprise to anyone who’s read this publication’s first major report on Errol Musk. He quite simply doesn’t believe Black people can lead nations, a view he shares with Donald Trump and a version of which (it seems) he shares with Elon, who has made clear that Black woman Kamala Harris—easily one of the most competent and accomplished women in the United States—could not possibly be anything but a puppet for white male overseers (a group Elon Musk has at other times framed as foreign Jews, notably aged Holocaust survivor George Soros).

In Errol’s view, the end of apartheid destroyed what was nice about South Africa (shades of his trip to an “ethnic spot” in London); caused all economic prosperity to collapse (shades of his eldest son falsely linking U.S. immigration policies to entirely unrelated economic indicators); and his sending Elon away to America as apartheid ended saved Elon from having to be in a failing nation run by Black people (except for when Errol would regularly fly Elon back to South Africa for holidays, trans-Atlantic trips Elon likes to elide from his autobiographies because they underscore the vast wealth of the Musk Family even before Elon hit it big by profiting off of others’ ideas).

Errol explains how, in 1995, he funded Elon and Kimbal’s first business venture with family money, and did it in a way that Kimbal later told him was the exclusive reason Zip2 lasted long enough to get investors (investors Kimbal admits he and Elon had deliberately misled about their immigration status; they were illegal immigrants in the mid-1990s). Those investors didn’t come until 1996, and wouldn’t have come at all had Errol Musk not ensured—with the family’s riches—that his boys wouldn’t have to come home to South Africa in defeat and/or fleeing immigration officers. Indeed, when Elon and Kimbal finally got “$4 million” from investors in 1996, Errol says he told them to put 10% of the money in a South Africa bank in case they had to “flee” America—as both men were (again) in the country illegally, a fact those who gave them millions didn’t know, and could’ve said was the basis for their being defrauded.

{Note: Perhaps this will go without saying, but venture capitalists do not generally invest in companies that are headed by illegal immigrants. Why? Because the company CEO could be permanently deported at any time, possibly causing the firm to collapse, and also because the notion of an illegal immigrant trying to get millions of dollars to do business in a country he’s in illegally raises significant questions about the moral character of that prospective CEO.}

The Musk boys now implicitly acknowledge that they owe everything to their father by—as Errol makes clear is the case—simply giving him, now, any money he requires.

Indeed, Errol says “he” owns 27% to 30% of Tesla because his son’s shares effectively function as his own personal wealth, with everything from his international travel to his medical bills being instantly covered by a fabulously well-provisioned family trust that he refers to as the family “company.” Apparently the only major break in this close relationship between Errol and his sons came immediately after Errol publicly revealed that they were crypto-MAGAs back in 2016; shortly thereafter, Errol says, his sons literally tried to put him in an assisted-living facility (which the incredibly active, alert, and hale man in no way required). This appears from the outside looking in, though we cannot know this to a certainty, as the avaricious Musk boys seeking a way to convince their friends in California that their dad’s public statements about MAGA at a celebrity-studded event in Cape Town were the words of someone with dementia.

But as his Disruptors interview more than confirms, even in 2024, eight years later, Errol Musk is sharp as a tack. He may enjoy hyperbole as much as his eldest son and Donald Trump do—he tells Rob Moore that “one of every three cars” in America is a Tesla; he says that Elon’s education at University of Pennsylvania would have cost almost $600,000 a year (in 2024 dollars) had Elon not gotten a scholarship; he claims that the New York Times begged Elon to help get the newspaper onto the internet and eventually paid him $47 million to do so—but he also repeatedly reveals things about Elon that have since been confirmed as true elsewhere.

For instance, just two days ago Kara Swisher confirmed on CNN that Elon’s turn to supporting anyone who could defeat Joe Biden in 2024 was largely spurred by Biden not inviting Elon to a conference on tailpipe emissions (Teslas don’t have tailpipes or emissions and the carmakers President Biden invited to the event make cars do, so to anyone not wildly over-sensitive the non-invite was more or less a self-explanatory non-issue). To Elon Musk, who sees himself as one of the most important men alive—perhaps because he’s daily told he is by his fans—this was in fact a slight that could never be forgiven, one somehow infinitely worse than his previous patron (Trump) pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords.

That’s right, a non-invite to an event with very little to do with Tesla bothered Elon much more than America collapsing an international climate agreement—a fact that should tell you everything about Musk’s actual values when it comes to humankind.

But weeks and weeks before Swisher told CNN that the White House non-invite had deranged Elon beyond all recognition, his father had told Rob Moore the same thing:

Up until two years ago I used to ask him, “What do you think about what’s happening [in American politics]?” [He was always] non-committal.

[But then two years ago], Joe Biden invited all the electric carmakers of America to the White House but didn’t invite Tesla.

And at this White House four-day event, this prick Biden introduced General Motors as the leading electric carmaker in America.

This shook Elon. This shook him. It really shook him. He couldn’t understand this.

{NB: Biden was convening an event for conventional—non-electric—carmakers making the leap into electric-only fleets, the sort of fleet Tesla had had, and exclusively, from its founding. Biden didn’t call General Motors the leading electric carmaker in America, because that would have been ridiculous. He did indicate, rightly, that GM was leading the charge among conventional carmakers striving to go entirely electric. Elon surely perfectly understood this, but the White House event was an opportunity for him to lord over every other carmaker his accomplishments at Tesla, and he resented missing that opportunity.}

And [after the White House event] Elon starting making political statements, in that early January or February period [in 2022] leading up to [his] taking over [Twitter].

And I said to him, “Elon, you do realize you’re making political statements? These are not statements [that cause people] to rush and buy shares [in Tesla] or something, or sell shares? You are making political statements. You’re going to have to have security. How are your guards and everything?” And not only that, I said to him, “Who are the people who appointed your guards? And who are the people who appointed the people who appointed the people who appointed your guards?”

So Elon took notice of all that.

Errol’s implication, in the context of the entire interview in which the above excerpt appears, is clear: in South Africa, rich white men faced violence once the leftists took over, and the same thing is now happening in America, so (in Errol’s view) his eldest son not only needed a massive armed force behind him—per Errol, Elon currently has a small army of 30 armed men—but you also need to have some control over who gets to be around you. So in the same way that federal officials are often surrounded by people who, like them, were appointed by a President of the United States (or people who were themselves appointed by a President of the United States) from the same political party as they are, and in the same way that a federal official could expect to have some armed security around them that they can only trust if the powerbroker then atop the federal government shares that federal official’s politics, Errol Musk’s comments above can be seen as warning his son Elon that he needs to get a far-right POTUS in office if he’s going to be a far-right federal contractor making controversial decisions about the direction of America. And Errol believes that Elon will need such protection because Elon is a far-right figure who will be—as Errol sees it—constantly targeted by leftists, Communists, and, Errol’s entire discourse implicitly suggests, non-whites and women and poor or working-class people who don’t quite share the values of rich white South African men.

But Errol also frames his son, with whom he’s in regular contact, as deeply “worried” about the fact that—despite his public intimations to the contrary—Tesla “full self-driving” (FSD) is not “done” yet. Errol also says Elon is “worried” because he has so far failed to land “anything” on Mars, which per the Musk Family scion Elon blames on “legislation.”

Fortunately for Elon, he might be in a position to change that legislation soon, though doing so would require some of the worst and most corrupt self-dealing in the history of American governance.

And still, even taking all of this into account, a significant question persists.

Elon is rich now and was rich as a child. Errol Musk had everything he needed in life, he says, by the middle of the 1970s, and by the mid-1990s was in a position to not just maintain his own lavish lifestyle but be a major investor in his son’s fortunes in the same way Fred Trump propped up his own middling son for many years. So how did this happen? What is the secret link between Point A (Elon as pampered rich kid) and Point B (Elon as possible future co-POTUS of a nation he was in illegally for years)?

The answer to this question lies deep in the Earth, in a contemptible network of illicit emerald mines the Musks profited wildly from in the years just before apartheid ended.

Understand these vile mines—and the lies Elon Musk has long told about them—and you can understand the man himself.

Into the Musk Family Emerald Mines…

Elon and Kimbal founded their first company at the ages of 24 and 23, respectively, when they were illegal immigrants in America with no independent source of income.

If Elon’s father Errol seems surprisingly quick—see above—to wildly overestimate the cost of a University of Pennsylvania education in the early 1990s as a way of explicitly and concurrently (a) celebrating the fact that Elon got a scholarship to cover all his costs at Penn (which scholarship Elon now implies did not exist) and (b) explaining why a rich man like himself would be so relieved at not having to pay for his eldest son’s education, it’s actually entirely understandable. As Proof details here, Elon has been quite clear about his contempt for education, which as much as anything may simply be a psychological coping mechanism related to the fact that he was never that good at school. He washed out of his South African university (University of Pretoria) pre-graduation, then washed out of his Canadian university (Queen’s University) pre-graduation, then washed out at his American university (University of Pennsylvania) pre-graduation, then didn’t even make it to matriculation—the very first day of school—at Stanford. This alone seems to suggest that Elon Musk didn’t value and now has great resentment toward higher education. And why not? Having grown up a wildly pampered child, needing an education to earn wealth must have seemed superfluous.

But all this also underscores that Errol didn’t send his son to North America for an education per se, but rather to find a way to get even richer as an already rich white man at a time that Errol believed doing so would have been impossible for his son in South Africa. Elon himself has admitted he was mainly in school to (a) party, and (b) network, and indeed he abandoned the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania altogether (for all that he now lies about having lived there for three years as a full-time resident) just over a year after showing up there because he saw that the money he craved was in California instead.

{Note: This part of Elon Musk’s biography has been ruthlessly slashed and axed as he tries to appeal to Pennsylvania voters on Donald Trump’s behalf in the run-up to the 2024 election.}

The point being, there was no reason for Errol Musk to want to expend much money on an education he new Elon didn’t care about, which explains why he didn’t pay for Elon’s brief stint at Penn. To date we don’t know how it was paid for, as Elon’s math about post-graduation debt precludes him being on scholarship, and his father denies paying for it, and that leaves either loans or Elon illicitly selling his father’s smuggled jewels in cities across the United States—as we know he did at least once during his teenage years. But Errol did pony up money as his sons were begging for millions from investors under false color of being in the United States legally and (as has been alleged) under false color of having come up with the idea they were selling themselves.

All of which does explain why Errol warned his sons that they should secretly squirrel away 10% of their first massive investment overseas, in the event that they had to flee the United States. Would they be fleeing deportation? A federal felony investigation for smuggling jewels? The defrauding of investors? The IP theft that does appear (if multiple accounts—including, oddly, Elon’s own—are to believed) to be a big part of the story of Zip2’s creation?

All of that was a distinct possibility.

What we know for sure is that Elon and Kimbal were being kept afloat, in 1995, by almost $57,000 (in 2024 dollars) from Errol, an amount that underscores how much wealth Errol had to spare at the time. Keep in mind that that $57,000 wasn’t gifted to the Musk boys to last them years or a decade, but simply a matter of months. It was cash intended to tide them over until such time as they could find angel investors who didn’t know they were illegal immigrants to give them millions to effectuate an idea they had actually apparently gotten from someone else (and possibly even two people).

So if Errol was a little cash-poor—or at least cash shy—when his eldest wanted to go from Canada to Philadelphia in the early 1990s, but was flush by 1995, there is more than one possible explanation for this. Elon’s indifference toward (and at) Penn is one possibility, but another one forces us to consider a second timeline almost as fraught as Elon’s much-lied-about educational history. Here’s the relevant timeline data:

1. Mid-1980s: Errol buys a 50% share in multiple illegal Zambian emerald mines that underpay their workers and do not pay any taxes to any government.

2. 1989: Apartheid begins its final, violent collapse, and Errol—a far-right racist who is terrified of the coming Black-run government and (per his Disruptors interview) has killed at least “three men” and might be worried about a delayed repercussion for these homicides—rushes Elon out of the country to Canada.

3. 1990: A new Black South African-run government that Errol despises and even deems illegitimate takes power.

4. 1991-1993: As apartheid is fully dismantled over a period of three years, Errol claims that the economic situation for rich whites like him deteriorates rapidly and he sells his emerald mine stakes. It is during this period—that is, a period of supposed economic decline in South Africa, but also before Errol sold his mine shares—that Errol says he’s deeply thankful that he didn’t have to pay for Elon’s largely pretextual (and in fact unfinished, until years later) Ivy League education.

5. 1995: Having sold his emerald mine stake, Errol has enough money to support his sons’ middling—at worst stolen, at best borrowed—tech ideas in America. Elon leaves Penn and becomes an illegal immigrant for years.

6. 1996: Angel investors give Elon and Kimbal millions of dollars, falsely believing them to be in the U.S. legally and be shopping an idea they came up with.

7. 1997: Elon gets his degree at Penn, though possibly through string-pulling by his angel investors rather than schoolwork.

8. 1997 or 1998: Elon uses his newfound wealth to apply for a visa to be in the U.S. legally, again likely aided by angel investors terrified that if Elon were deported they would lose their investment.

9. 2002: Seven years after he left Penn—his only basis for being in America legally—Elon becomes a U.S. citizen.

We see, from this timeline, that in 1995 Errol Musk had $60,000 to fritter away on a business with no obvious future in significant part due to the several illegal emerald mines he’d bought into in the mid-1980s, at a time it wasn’t clear that apartheid was going to collapse. That illicit Zambian venture was presumably harmed significantly by the end of apartheid at the beginning of the 1990s, but Errol’s 50% stake in these dodgy mines clearly were making the family richer than it had been before—until, that is, Black South Africans began successfully demanding their basic human rights.¹

We first learn about these Zambian emerald mines not via Errol, as you might expect, but from Elon himself—who has since changed his tune to deny their very existence.

But in fact it was Elon who disclosed in 2009 that these mines very much do exist, doing so in an interview with The New Yorker and then again, gleefully, in a 2014 interview with Forbes. As if to bring the point home, Elon went and acknowledged the mines again in a second 2014 interview, this one with AskMen. At the time he was either unaware of, or unconcerned about, the idea that the existence of these illegal mines would open up new questions about how the Richest Man on Earth got rich.²

The reason The Independent (UK) now reports that these illegally mined emeralds were key to “how Elon Musk made his money” is because there’s no evidence that—at 24—Elon, who had immigrated to Canada at 17 (with, to hear him and his mother Maye, who joined him in Canada when he was 19, tell it) little money, would have had the cash to start a business only a matter of a few years removed from living in a “one-bedroom apartment.” with his mom.³ Substantial aid from his extremely rich father was required.

As Errol has since explained in interviews with Western media, his investment in the Zambian mine, coupled with unspecified other activities, had made him, his ex-model wife Maye, and his sons Elon and Kimbal so rich by the time the latter were in high school in the late 1980s—shortly before the fall of apartheid—that “We were [all] very wealthy. We had so much money [that] at times we couldn’t even close our safe. And [even when we could], then there’d still be all these notes [currency] sticking out and we’d sort of pull them out and put them in our pockets.”⁴

Per Errol, on at least one occasion a teenage Elon helped the family sell its ill-gotten gems personally, doing so without telling his father. On a day the teenage Elon was, Errol says, “walk[ing] the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket”, he and his brother Kimbal sold two of the valuable smuggled commodities for around $2,000.

Per The Independent, the four core members of the Musk Family noted above “profited handsomely” from the illegal emerald mine for at least six years—from the mid-1980s through the beginning of the 1990s—which, as noted above, places the end of this big windfall during the several-year period that (1) Maye, Elon, and Kimbal emigrated to Canada, (2) Elon washed out of his Canadian university and transferred directly into Penn (by pulling what strings is unclear, given his undistinguished prior schooling), and (3) apartheid finished its collapse in the family’s ancestral home of South Africa.

This timeline confirms Errol’s claim that some of the funding for Elon and Kimbal’s first venture—and perhaps even some portion of the funding of Elon’s brief American education that neither he nor his father like to talk about—likewise came from the aforementioned mine.⁵ From this now-elided component of Musk’s biography, The Independent concludes that Musk’s “journey to…unimaginable wealth started from a position of financial privilege,” with Errol Musk stating outright and unambiguously that “his son’s whole career was funded by that [illegal] emerald mine.”⁶

…and Still Deeper Into the Mines…

It was in the mid-1980s that an unnamed man asked Errol if he wanted to invest a truly staggering sum—approximately $143,000 in 2024 dollars—in an illegal mining operation in Zambia, a country then run by a socialist-leaning non-white government.

Sometime between when Errol bought the mine—when his son Elon was thirteen or fourteen—and when Elon left for Canada at seventeen, the elder of Errol’s two sons would accompany him to the mine in Zambia on a remarkable four-day excursion that Elon now falsely says never happened, almost certainly to further erase his family’s contemptible multigeneration history of racial and religious bigotry and exploitation.

Given that Elon himself was the first to disclose the mine’s existence to international media, and indeed did so multiple times; given that his first company, upon whose sale to Compaq his eventual fortune was predicated, could not have been started without it; given that he had directly sold some of the emeralds from this illegal Zambian mine in the United States to the tune of thousands of dollars in off-the-books profit; given that his father has unambiguously declared that “Elon saw [the Zambian emeralds] at our house [in South Africa], he knew I was selling them”; and given that Elon made clear in voluntarily disclosing the existence of the mine to the world that—while he admitted news of it could “sound crazy” to journalists—he had no doubts himself about its existence, it might seem surprising that the current owner of Twitter took to his social media platform in 2023 to declare that not only was the mine story “fake” but that he would give “a million Dogecoin” to anyone who could prove otherwise.⁷

His 2023 complaint that “the fake emerald mine thing is so annoying” came despite him having been the first person to disclose the mine’s existence to the international press.⁸

By comparison, his father’s version of events is consistent with Elon’s own for the first nearly half-century of Elon’s life (through 2019). As Errol has unambiguously declared, “Elon knows [about the mine]. All the kids know about it.”⁹

But even this unambiguous declaration deserves expansion, as in fact we do not need to take the idiosyncratic Errol Musk’s word for any of this. Why? Because in 2014 Elon didn’t just talk about the mine but admitted he’d visited it personally just as his dad said.

As The Sun reports,

According to fact-checking website Snopes, Elon said in a since-deleted interview with Forbes in July 2014, “This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia. I was 15 and really wanted to go with him [to the mine] but didn’t realize how dangerous it was. I couldn’t find my passport, so I ended up grabbing my brother’s—which turned out to be six months overdue. So, we had this planeload of contraband and an overdue passport from another person. There were AK-47s all over the place and I’m thinking, ‘Man, this could really go bad.’”¹⁰

Elon’s description of visiting the emerald mine—a visit his father confirms, adding details like how odd Elon found the trip’s cuisine—is striking because in it the now-tech mogul admits that (1) he knew the emeralds were contraband, meaning that they had been taken out of Zambia illegally (a theft) due to the mine being unregistered, (2) his family’s enterprise in Zambia was fraught with “danger” and the potential for real violence (as represented by the presence, throughout the operation, of those AK-47s “all over the place”), and (3) the proper sequence of events with respect to his own involvement in his family’s mining operations—combining citations and data both supra and infra in this report—was (a) visiting the mine at 15; (b) selling smuggled gems in New York City at 16; (c) trying to convince his father to come with him to America—presumably with more emeralds in tow—at 17; (d) failing to execute this plan to import his father’s gem-smuggling activities to North America but even so spending a year, i.e. until he was 18, involved in unknown pursuits in America that he’s since elided from his autobiography in place of picking up his narrative when he was living in Canada at 19 with his mom and brother, allegedly financially struggling, and allegedly on the outs with his father. And yet none of that appears to be accurate.

Indeed, all of it contradicts what he told The New Yorker back in 2019: “He immigrated to Canada on his own, at seventeen” (emphasis added).¹¹

Still Deeper…

It is important, given all the foregoing narratives—some internally contradictory—to understand the basics of the Musk family’s mine in Zambia.

1. It was actually three mines.¹²

2. Errol Musk’s co-ownership of the three mines was never registered, leaving no paper trail.¹³

3. Errol Musk imported raw emeralds from his three illicit Zambian mines to South Africa; had the emeralds cut in South Africa; and then sold the emeralds illegally during trips to around the world, particularly during trips to the United States.¹⁴

4. Stories vary about whether Errol Musk traded his Cessna for the co-ownership of the mines or paid in cash, and whether the man he paid for the stake was Italian or Panamanian-Italian.¹⁵

5. What’s certain, and consistent, is his self-admitted reasoning for keeping the paper trail establishing his ownership rights invisible: as Business Insider reports, “The mine was reportedly not registered because the postcolonial ‘black’ government did not have a functional bureaucracy….‘If you registered [the mine], you would wind up with nothing, because the blacks would take everything from you’ Errol is quoted as saying [in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk], before adding that he is not racist. ‘I don’t have anything against the blacks, but they are just different from what I am.’”¹⁶

6. As Futurism reports, paraphrasing Errol Musk’s response to Elon’s claims about the mine, in which Elon uses sly semantics to try to deny knowledge of a criminal operation he was actually well aware of, “‘What Elon is saying [to Americans in publicly denying that the mine ever existed] is that there was no formal mine. It was a rock formation protruding from the ground in the middle of nowhere,’ Errol [said], noting that he kept his involvement with the operation ‘under the table.’ ‘There was no mining company. There are no signed agreements or financial statements. No one owned anything. The deal was done on a handshake with the Italian man at a time when Zambia was a free for all.’”¹⁷

7. The Musk family would not have survived as a financial unit without these illicit mines. As Errol Musk confesses, “The emeralds helped us through a very trying time in South Africa, when people were fleeing the country in droves, including his mother’s whole family, and earning opportunities were at an all-time low.”¹⁸

There does appear to be a lack of clarity as to whether the sale of a co-ownership in these three Zambian mines was an impulse barter—a Cessna traded away for future emeralds—or an agreed-upon cash sale. As The Independent reports,

“We went to this guy’s prefab and he opened his safe and there was just stacks of money and [for the Cessna] he paid me out £80,000 [nearly $400,000 in 2024 dollars], it was a huge amount of money”, Errol Musk said, according to Business Insider.

Errol Musk was then made another offer: to spend £40,000 [nearly $200,000 in 2024 dollars] on an emerald mine. “I said, ‘Oh, all right’. So I became a half-owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years.”

{Note: Recall that Errol Musk claims to have “forty” planes, so trading one would have meant almost nothing to him financially.}

Readers may well wonder whether Errol Musk was actually offered a $200,000 stake in three emerald mines on a whim, or whether—in fact—the elder Musk had traveled to this location to see this particular man and receive this particular offer, having given it plenty of consideration in advance. But just as Errol has never disclosed the name of the man and has slightly shifted his ethnicity over time—thereby making it far harder to trace who the man could be—and has offered different versions of the terms of the transaction over time, there appears to be one through-line in all these accounts: that the transaction was illegal, and thus some deliberate vagaries would need to be called for.

As to the last item in the list above, note what Errol refers to: the end of apartheid.

When he says that the mid- to late 1980s a “very trying time” in South Africa and that people were “fleeing the country in droves”—when he says “earning opportunities [in South Africa] at an all-time low”—he means for rich whites like the Musks. And he means that he hustled Elon off the Canada exactly as rich whites across the nation were “fleeing the country in droves.” Elon left for Canada to avoid the consequences of apartheid collapsing, in other words, which is simply another way of underscoring how much his family had long benefited from apartheid. Its loss was theirs, as well.

Additional confirmation for all the foregoing comes from both Errol Musk’s precise words above (“his mother’s whole family”; Maye Musk’s family were notorious bigots) and Musk biographer Walter Isaacson’s description of the radical political ideologies embraced by Elon Musk’s grandparents on both sides of his family. To put it plainly, the Musk Family scion is here referring to pro-apartheid white supremacists who fled South Africa en masse in the months right before the negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa began in 1990 (culminating in the election of Nelson Mandela as South African president in 1994). Musk’s family was able to see the writing on the wall—as were most white South Africans in the late 1980s—which may well be one of several reasons Errol threw his eldest son off what he saw as a sinking ship-of-state in 1989.

According to Errol Musk, Elon’s kin—with their profoundly bigoted far-right political views—survived the collapse of apartheid (keeping in mind that his muddled timeline notwithstanding, Errol still had a veritable mountain of emerald money to give to his son Elon in 1995) by extracting hard labor from Black Zambians and doing so illegally.

That is, as apartheid was collapsing, the Musks were getting rich—and doing so in perhaps the most offensive way possible given the geopolitics of the time. By failing to register his ownership in three Zambian mines; by not refining his emeralds in a Black-run nation but, by his own admission, smuggling them to late-stage-apartheid South Africa in the form of “stolen parcels”; by refusing to pay taxes to Black leftists even though he knew those taxes were owed; and by arming his entire operation to presumably fight off—among others—prospective legal actions that might be taken by a Black Zambian government, Errol Musk is making clear exactly what share of Elon Musk’s future fortunes depended on the three illicit emerald mines: namely, all of it.¹⁹

Yet for all this, in denying, many years later—as he began contemplating a turn into American politics—the existence of his family’s illegal and apartheid-era emerald mine in a poor, pseudo-socialist, Black-run African nation, Elon knew he had a key advantage. He could make his shockingly tardy about-face on the subject of the mine stick by exploiting the means of the mine’s operation in its relatively brief existence.

In short, illegal mines are much, much easier to lie about than legal ones.

And illegal mines in a Black government-run country then in turmoil are easier to lie about than, say, a new internet company in 1996 that’s based in America but run by two illegal immigrants whose IP was taken wholesale from a phone book salesman.

As Futurism reports, the unnamed Italian national from whom Errol bought the 50% stake of the mine “apparently told Errol that he paid Zambian locals to dig for the gems,” which suggests that Errol may not—at least at the time of his first investment—have known where the mine was, and that even his business partner might not have spent much time on-site.²⁰ Indeed, Errol explains his son’s caginess on the subject of the mine by noting that “What Elon is saying is that there was no formal mine. It was a rock formation protruding from the ground in the middle of nowhere” (emphasis supplied).²¹ An expert in clandestine, unregistered Zambian mining firms who spoke to the Daily Beast confirmed that, as paraphrased by the major-media outlet, “Errol’s anecdotes are consistent with the situation on the ground [in Zambia] at the time.”²²

At the Bottom of the Musk Family Mines Lie Not Just Jewels But An Avalanche of Carefully Calibrated Lies

Sometimes it seems the timeline of Elon Musk’s early life is deliberately very hazy.

He moved in with his father at 11, and departed for Canada by the age of 17.²³

As noted above, his father bought his 50% stake in the family’s several illicit Zambian emerald mines in the “mid-1980s”, in other words not long at all after Elon moved in with his father in about 1982.

Given that the family owned the stake for “six years”—as noted in the citations above—and that Elon left his father’s home for Canada around 1988 or 1989, it would seem that most of the period of his father’s illegal procuring and sale of emeralds occurred during the brief window that Elon was living with him, with the exception of the last 12 to 24 months Errol was selling the emeralds illegally in countries around the world, including the United States.

And this is where the timeline of Elon’s early years gets not only extremely confusing but extremely intriguing.

According to The New Yorker, when Elon moved to North America at the age of 17, per Elon “He hoped that his father would move with him to America, where he’d once taken him on a visit.”²⁴ And what do we know about this visit to America that had impressed itself upon Elon so much that he wanted not only to repeat it but to do so with his father? That during that very visit to America, Elon personally—and illegally—sold his father’s ill-gotten emeralds, alongside his brother Kimbal, in what amounted to a four-figure sale.²⁵ At most, Elon was sixteen and his brother fifteen when this sale occurred, though based on the timeline from various members of the Musk family Elon could have been as young as fourteen and his brother thirteen—in either case, far younger than one would imagine anyone getting into in international jewel smuggling.

Which may explain why, somewhat dubiously, Business Insider reports that the teenage Musk engaged in this sale of contraband “while his dad was sleeping.”²⁶ While it is not for this account to gauge the veracity of the foregoing statement, as doing so at such a remove of time would be impossible, it is worth at least imagining either of two versions of the above scenario Business Insider describes: (1) a teenaged Musk, between fourteen and sixteen years of age, stealing valuable gems that his father had procured illegally and managing to sell them, despite his tender age, to one of the most well-known jewelers in the world (a scene that surely would be worthy of a Home Alone-like film treatment); or (2) Errol Musk bringing his teenaged sons with him as he illegally sold gems to Tiffany & Co., only to thereafter tell his sons that if anyone asked about the transaction they should say they stole the jewels from him as he slept in order to sell them and did so at a time his own somnambulance made him none the wiser and they were juveniles (and therefore unlikely to be held to account for their misdeeds).

But it hardly matters which version of events is the accurate one, as not only do both confirm Elon and his brother’s intimate awareness of their father’s emerald-selling activities but, more importantly, Elon’s subsequent 2009 interview with the New Yorker confirms it was this very trip to New York that made him want to return there—and not by himself, either, but with his dad, who he has since repeatedly framed as abusive.

Is it possible that Elon believed that he and his father could get rich illegally selling diamonds in New York City, on the basis of Elon himself having personally made thousands of dollars (again, as just a teenager) doing so? Certainly the prospect of such a bounty would have seemed enticing to most teenagers, let alone a gregarious budding entrepreneur like Elon Musk who did not want to have to go to university to enrich himself; if he had his dad’s jewel-smuggling money, he wouldn’t have to stay in school, and could use the proceeds from that illegal venture to finance a new startup. No dissembling to investors about his immigration status would have been necessary.

The question is whether we have evidence that Musk is especially sensitive about the financial state in which he moved to North America at the age of seventeen. And we sure do. To hear Elon’s version, as relayed to The New Yorker in 2009, when he moved to Canada around 1988 “he floated among his mother’s cousins’ houses, often living on a dollar a day and buying hot dogs and oranges in bulk.”²⁷ So he claims that he was unhoused and virtually penniless, living off the charity of relatives he had never met before who were only distantly connected to him by blood and couldn’t find him a regular place to sleep (thus him having to “float” among “houses” rather than staying in just one).

But Errol tells a very different story. According to Elon’s father, who appears to have made many millions (in 2024 dollars) off his six-or-more years of co-owning Zambian emerald mines, far from Elon being forced to live on “a dollar a day”, “emerald money paid for his son’s move to the United States.”²⁸

So why would Elon Musk lie about whether he had personally sold illegal emeralds, or lie about his financial state when he came to North America in the late 1980s? That he knew the source of his funds was illicit would certainly be a likely explanation for this.

As Errol insists, “Many people came to me [in the mid- to late 1980s] with stolen parcels [containing emeralds]. On trips overseas I would sell emeralds to jewelers. It was a cloak-and-dagger thing, because none of it was legal.”²⁹ So what better way for Errol to absolve himself of what would otherwise have been subsequent confessions to illegal gem sales than by saying he had had his children make certain sales for him?

But it’s a further statement by Errol to Business Insider that bears even more scrutiny: “his emerald business eventually caved in during the 1980s, and he subsequently lost his earnings from it” (emphasis supplied).³⁰

Whereas Errol has elsewhere said that he had the mines from the mid-1980s up to the early 1990s, which could mean that he would owe significant taxes—and perhaps be open to prosecution—by a Black South African political class that first came into its own in 1990, by instead putting the six years of his co-ownership of three illegal mines in Zambia at either 1982 to 1988, from the year Elon moved in with him to the year that Elon moved to North America (or else from 1983 to 1989, which would be shortly after Elon arrived at Errol’s house until shortly after he emigrated from South Africa), he’s at once (1) framing his scheme as falling entirely within the period of apartheid, which could be helpful to him, but also (2) throwing his eldest son Elon under the bus in doing so by making it clear the mines would have been perhaps the central feature of his father’s money-making capabilities while he lived with him, and establishing that the collapse of that income stream helped explain Elon being sent abroad with little cash as apartheid collapsed. In the latter instance, we can only begin to imagine how angry over the end of apartheid both Errol Musk and Elon Musk would have been.

What we know for certain is that Errol made fabulous money by selling his emeralds overseas; that Elon at least once (allegedly) helped him do so; that Elon, by his own admission, wanted to move with his father to New York City in 1988 because of his enjoyment of his first trip there (the one during which he allegedly made thousands selling illegal contraband); and that despite his being funded by dirty emerald money in emigrating to Canada—while pretending he was destitute at the time he left South Africa in subsequent self-histories—his father’s emerald-selling operation somehow came to fail at precisely the moment that Elon showed up in Canada without his dad.

All of this raises many more questions than it answers about how Elon Musk expected to survive financially as he arrived in North America without Errol; why he showed up without his father when he had wanted the two of them to emigrate together; why his father’s North American emerald-selling operation faltered just as a son who had sold emeralds for him before showed up there; and, above all, how Errol still had $57,000 in 2024 dollars—all from emerald sales, per Elon’s father—to give to his son in 1995 if in fact his North American emerald-selling operations actually ended “during the 1980s.”

If this seems confusing, don’t worry—it’s not you. It is confusing. None of it adds up.

The tales being told by Errol and Elon seem strewn with lies, half-truths, and internal contradictions, all of them focused on where the two men were getting their money from between 1988 and 1995—the very period during which the eldest Musk son suddenly found himself with $57,000 to launch a highly dubious American business and tells all sorts of stories about his whereabouts and education and funding and immigration status and lodgings in an apparent effort to hide his revenue streams.

These days, of course, Elon Musk denies that his father ever gave him any money at all:

Yet besides being an RAship and TAship at various points, Elon’s few Penn friends don’t detail him “working his way through college.” In fact, they describe Elon’s as a dorm room that looked curiously unlived-in: “[it was] incredibly sparse, populated only with a computer that he liked to ‘fiddle with’ and a chess set. Besides essentials such as clothes, [a close friend interviewed for this report] did not recall any posters, memorabilia, or personal items in Musk’s room.” And of course this was only Elon’s first dorm room; he quickly moved into a veritable mansion just off-campus (see here), where no one could track his movements in-state or out-of-state (or even abroad) at all.

Is it true that Elon Musk managed to, in the 1990s, sell for $307 million a company that “couldn’t even afford a second personal computer”? That’s his story, but it’s not at all matched by the accounts of others, including Errol—who reports having eventually given hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to his sons (in 2024 terms) during the period of time Elon says he couldn’t afford a second PC and was falling into massive student loan debt (which Elon has pegged at six figures, despite sometimes claiming he was on a full-ride scholarship at the time).

Moreover, other accounts suggest that this state of affairs—Elon and Kimbal sleeping in their first office, for instance—lasted only six months, until Zip2 got a $4 million (or $3 million; sources differ) infusion of venture capital in early 1996. (But even this timeline of the supposed Musk-boys’ poverty would position the $57,000 their father gave them in emerald-mine cash as the only thing that let them make it through that half-year period of chaos in 1995.)

This six-month period in 1995—if there was one—in which Errol was throwing large amounts of emerald-mine money at his children certainly wasn’t a time during which they were acting admirably or doing anything to earn their father Errol’s trust. Then again, neither were the early months of Zip2 in 1996 and 1997. Indeed, Business Insider, quoting Walter Isaacson’s Musk biography (one Musk cooperated with) offers us this:

Kimbal Musk once “tore off a hunk of flesh” from Elon Musk’s hand while the brothers wrestled on the floor in Zip2’s office.

…

Kimbal Musk bit his brother because he thought Elon Musk was about to punch him in the face, the book said. Elon Musk had to go to the emergency room to get stitches and a tetanus jab as a result, the book says.

The brothers often had “rolling-on-the-office-floor fights” while they worked together at Zip2, their company that provided city guides to newspapers. Because Zip2 didn’t have private offices, other staff had to watch the two fight.

If these sound like two wildly spoiled, pampered, illegally-present-in-America, poorly educated, dubiously positioned with respect to IP South African twenty-somethings who had fled a devoutly racist country because that country was not likely to continue putting up with people like them and ensuring them the riches their whole family had previously enjoyed, you’re not alone in thinking that. Many people hearing these new reports would surely come to that same conclusion, and find in this information new reason to doubt Elon becoming co-President of the United States starting in 2025.

Lies Breed More Lies

Elon has framed his decision to leave South Africa as a heroic one born solely from a politically progressive conscience. As the Encyclopedia Brittanica reports, relying not on a third-party source but Musk’s own Rocketeers, “Musk left South Africa because he was unwilling to support apartheid through compulsory military service and because he sought the greater economic opportunities available in the United States.”³¹

As Rocketeers contends, Musk’s view was that “I don’t have an issue with serving in the military per se, but serving in the South African army suppressing black people just didn’t seem like a really good way to spend time.”³²

This would be commendable—if also a bit awkwardly and mechanically stated—if true.

But New York Times reporting casts doubt on whether Elon was particularly focused on avoiding “suppressing black people.” The Times reports that Elon in fact “[had his] upbringing in elite, segregated white communities that were littered with anti-Black government propaganda, and detached from the atrocities that white political leaders inflicted on the Black majority.”³³

Per the Times, “[Elon’s three successive] suburban communities were largely shrouded in misinformation. Newspapers sometimes arrived on doorsteps with whole sections blacked out, and nightly news bulletins ended with the national anthem and an image of the national flag flapping as the names of white young men who were killed fighting for the government scrolled on the screen.”³⁴ It certainly sounds as though Elon fled South Africa to avoid the consequences of apartheid’s end, not because he didn’t want any part in perpetuating it. Indeed, by the time he left his home country apartheid was literally in its final months, so how could he have been concerned about “suppressing black people” being a core function of a South African soldier?

This sounds, in fact, rather more like Donald Trump dodging the Vietnam draft because he decided he was too rich for it and had better things to do with his time.

A classmate of Musk’s in his suburban Johannesburg school—which school would have put Elon in closest proximity, geographically speaking, to black South Africans—says of her school population, including Elon, that “we were really clueless [about Black suffering] as white South African teenagers. Really clueless.”³⁵

The Times adds to this that in the community in question, “Black people were rarely seen other than in service of white families living in palatial homes.”³⁶

All this seems to cast even more doubt on Musk’s claim he did—or even could—have the plight of black countrymen top of mind as he decided to go to America, where (per his father) the Musk Family just so happened to have been illegally selling emeralds at an absurd profit for years in a way it was likely about to lose the ability to do in South Africa due to the end of apartheid.

Nor does Elon’s claim of a sudden attack of pacifism and progressive conscience at all explain why, despite now claiming he wanted to get away from his father in his late teen years, Elon told The New Yorker in 2009 that he had wanted his father to come with him to America—perhaps remembering the significant score he’d allegedly made while selling valuable transnational contraband with his father’s aid during a prior NYC trip.

When the Times asked Elon for a comment about his early years in North America, he refused to respond to the magazine at all.³⁷

Oddly, what comments we do have from the Musks about why Elon left South Africa in 1988 show Elon and Errol on the same side of this issue, at least, even as everyone outside the family is oddly of a different view. According to “Classmates at two high schools [Elon] attended”, he was “a loner with no close friends”; these classmates have no recollection of anything that “[Elon] said or did that revealed his views on the [apartheid] politics [of South Africa] of the time.”³⁸ Meanwhile, Errol—who, it hardly need be noted, has an impetus to frame his son’s emigration as having nothing to do with him, whether emerald-wise, parenting-wise, or bigotry-wise—insists that

Elon, his brother and sister were aware from a young age that there was something wrong with the apartheid system. Errol, who was elected to the Pretoria City Council in 1972, said they would ask him about the laws prohibiting Black people from patronizing restaurants, movie theaters and beaches. They had to make calculations when they were going out with nonwhite friends about what they could safely do, he said.

“As far as being sheltered from it, that’s nonsense. They were confronted by it every day”, recalled Errol, who said he belonged to the anti-apartheid Progressive Party. He added, “They didn’t like it.”³⁹

Support for Errol’s convenient narrative—which bolsters the self-mythologizing of a son he’s now financially dependent upon if he wants to continue living the high life—is sparse, but by no means non-existent. The Times does report, albeit generically and with no additional information, that Elon’s “Black schoolmates recall that he spent time with Black friends.”⁴⁰ Was this time enough, or significant enough, to convince Elon to leave his homeland to avoid compulsory military service? That’s quite unclear, especially as (see above) other classmates say he had few to no friends at all, Black or otherwise. Indeed, at most of his schools it’s not clear Elon even had Black classmates.

What we know—and what we might draw some less-favorable inferences from—is the fact that in discussing Elon’s purported concern for black South Africans, Errol noted that his children “got along well with Black people, pointing to his children’s good relationship with their domestic staff.” (emphasis supplied). It seems unlikely that Errol would focus on Elon’s maids and/or butlers, if in fact Elon had had actual Black peers.

Errol also implies that his view—one possibly one imparted to his children—is that “life in South Africa during apartheid was mostly better and safer than it is now.”⁴¹

That’s a line worth reading more than once, with an emphasis on the word “better.”

Were this view one consistently communicated to Elon by his notoriously gregarious father, it certainly wouldn’t have contributed to Elon feeling that military service under apartheid was unpalatable, and indeed we must return to Errol’s discussion of the period in which Elon fled South Africa as one in which “[white] people were fleeing the country in droves, including his mother’s whole family.”⁴² This clearly suggests that Elon’s departure from South Africa, if it had anything at all to do with military service, was inspired by not wanting to fight under the supervision of a Black-run government. (Recall, here, Errol saying that when you are in politics in any way you are instantly in mortal danger, and must have total confidence in all those who “appointed” the people around you who help keep you safe; would Errol or Elon have held such confidence if the latter was serving in a military run by Nelson Mandela?)

In sum, it appears that Elon Musk fled South Africa at a time when he was living in a racially segregated enclave; was largely if not comprehensively shielded from thinking about the consequences of apartheid; and was hearing exponentially more from those around him about the danger Black South Africans posed to whites than the reverse.

Elon Today Is Every Bit the Child of a Racist Emerald Mine

As Proof has detailed now for well over a year, one of Musk’s current preoccupations on Twitter is hard data that he implies confirms that Blacks are naturally more violent and dangerous than whites—the reverse of the belief that he for years has said was his primary reason for shirking the compulsory military service his homeland demanded.

Certainly, Times reporting establishes that the general tenor of the conversations in the young Elon Musk’s classes with respect to compulsory South African military service was roughly in keeping with everything Musk is now saying on Twitter—not the racial progressivism he unconvincingly professes compelled him to leave his home.

Terence Beney, who is white and graduated with Mr. Musk from Pretoria Boys High School in 1988….recalled a debate in one of his classes at Pretoria Boys in the mid-1980s over the government’s requirement that they serve in the military, squashing efforts by Black South Africans to defeat an oppressive regime.

A slight few [of Musk’s classmates] said they would refuse to kill on behalf of an unjust political system. But others said that while apartheid had its injustices, the country was in an all-out war. Some insisted that the fight was to protect against communists. Others justified the battle by arguing that Black people were susceptible to evil ideas.

Another common trope among students back then, Beney said, was that Black people could not be trusted with the right to vote because they had no tradition of democracy.⁴³

While we cannot know what Musk thought of all this because he now refuses to say, we know what he was hearing at home, which is the same sort of thing he is now saying implicitly and his father has already stated explicitly: “I don’t have anything against the blacks, but they are just different from what I am” (emphasis added).⁴⁴

Not some are different—all of them are, per Errol.

Is Elon like his father in such beliefs? The evidence is mixed. First, we have this bit from the Times:

Stanley Netshituka, who became the first Black student at Pretoria Boys in 1981, [says]….“I would say the majority [of students there] were blissfully ignorant and happy to be blissfully ignorant.”

…

In the same breath, classmates would call Black freedom fighters “terrorists” {NB: Errol Musk tellingly revealed to Rob Moore that he spent years during apartheid corralling by force people he called “terrorists”} but tell him [Netshituka] that, “Not all Black people are necessarily bad because I can see you’re not so bad”, he recalled.

Musk became friends with a cousin of Netshituka’s, Asher Mashudu, according to Mashudu’s brother, Nyadzani Ranwashe. One time at lunch, a white student used an anti-Black slur, and Musk chided the student, but then got bullied for doing so, Ranwashe said.

Mashudu was killed in a car accident in 1987, and Ranwashe said he remembered Musk being one of only a handful of white people who attended the funeral in the family’s rural village.

“It was unheard of during that time”, he said.

That’s heartening—if sparse. And yet in the same New York Times article, we find this:

[Errol Musk has previously] said he believed that apartheid had taught his son not to discriminate. But Elon’s electric car company, Tesla, has faced serious accusations of racism. The State of California is investigating accusations that it allowed racial discrimination against Black employees to flourish in its factory in the San Francisco area.

Tesla was also ordered to pay $15 million to a Black employee after a jury found last year that the company had failed to address the racism he faced at work.

And as for whether Elon Musk’s claim that his apprehension of having to employ racist violence in the South African military is in large part what forced him from the country for good, we get this revelation, again from the same Times report:

Like many other schools of that era, there was a cadet program that groomed the boys for military service. They would wear brown uniforms and do marching drills. There was a Scottish pipe band.

…

Some who knew Musk from his young days in South Africa said people should not discount the evolution he could have gone through once he left apartheid and South Africa behind.

Andrew Panzera, who was in German class with Musk at Bryanston High, recalled his own transformation. As a white student coming up in the placid Johannesburg suburbs, he never saw the suffering of his Black counterparts. That changed, though, when he did his government-mandated military service.

“People, at some point, realize that they’ve been fed a whole lot of crap”, he said. “At some point you go, ‘Jeepers, we really were indoctrinated to a large extent.’”

What this latter excerpt underscores is that at a time Musk says he was rebelliously self-conscious of white-on-Black violence, his classmates claim that, in fact, he, like they, were being “groomed for military service,” and that that grooming included very successful “indoctrination” that Musk would’ve been able to shirk only after leaving South Africa—the reverse of the hero narrative Musk is spinning on scant evidence.

Certainly, Elon’s tale of his own moral heroism is a far cry from the racist rhetoric he was almost certainly hearing near-daily from the sole parent he resided with at the time. As USA Today notes, “Errol Musk made racist comments about Black leaders in South Africa in 2022, according to the [Isaacson] biography [of Elon Musk]: ‘With no Whites here [in South Africa], the Blacks will go back to the trees’, he wrote.”⁴⁵

Nor does Elon’s implicitly pacifistic justification for leaving South Africa square with his own description of who he was at the time he made a fateful decision to emigrate.

As Business Insider reports,

“Growing up in South Africa, fighting was normal”, Elon Musk told [biographer Walter] Isaacson. “It was part of the culture.”

The book describes how Elon Musk was taken to a wilderness survival camp, which he dubbed a “paramilitary Lord of the Flies”, when he was twelve, where children were encouraged to fight each other for rations of food and water. He was beaten up twice and lost ten pounds, Isaacson wrote.

When Elon Musk returned to the camp just before turning 16 [a year from leaving South Africa allegedly because he didn’t want to engage in the violence of military service], he’d learned that if people bullied him, “I could punch them very hard in the nose, and then they wouldn’t bully me again.”⁴⁶

That hardly sounds like a boy who believed serving his nation’s military would force him to commit acts of violence he could not stomach.

Back to the Mines

Few question that Errol Musk was and is a mercurial man. Indeed, he admits as much.

Still, it must be noted that, per Business Insider, after declining to accompany his son to North America as Elon requested—and despite knowing that his son was traveling to the place the Musk Family sold their illicit jewels—Errol let Elon, in Elon’s telling of events, to (a) live on “$1 a day” and amass “$100,000” in student loan debt, even as he also (b) immediately, indeed apparently without hesitation, gave Elon $57,000 (in 2024 dollars) for a highly risky business venture at the height of the 1990s internet bubble.⁴⁷

The consensus on Errol Musk being mercurial is matched in intensity by a consensus that Errol Musk is highly intelligent. Can we readily believe that Errol Musk forced his eldest son—at or near the site of his most lucrative past gem sales, no less—to live in poverty, essentially unhoused, in six figures of debt, despite Errol’s status as both mercurial and intelligent, only to lavish him with investment money on hearing Elon’s first seemingly harebrained get-rich-quick scheme? (Errol told Disruptors that when his sons told him the idea for Zip2, “I couldn’t understand what they were on about.”)

Something doesn’t seem to be adding up here—especially when we consider how free Errol had been with his wealth the last time Elon was in North America (at that time, with his brother Kimbal present): “They just walked into Tiffany’s and said, ‘Do you want to buy some emeralds?’ And they sold two emeralds, one was for $800 and I think the other one was for $1,200.”⁴⁸

So in his mid-teens Elon was lavished with access to massive emeralds by his father, but once he turned seventeen he had to live on $1 a day, sleep on couches, and receive no aid from his father (who Elon concedes had a “private plane” at the time, and who, per Errol himself, had “forty” planes) for his college studies?⁴⁹ It’s difficult to square such divergent narratives, and there’s no evidence that Musk’s leading biographer, Walter Isaacson, even deigned to try—perhaps because Elon was as cooperative with him as far as going into more detail on the subject as he had been with the New York Times.

Which is to say, not at all.

So why has Elon Musk exhibited such consternation over an emerald mine he himself sought to tell the world about? According to Business Insider, the reason is a clear and stark one: because of Musk’s ownership of Twitter. As the media outlet reports, it was only “after Musk took over Twitter” that significant “criticisms resurfaced about a longstanding rumour about his family's connection to emerald operations.” In just a matter of months—by January 2023—Musk had begun privately and then also publicly complaining about the supposed “rumor,” which of course was not a rumor at all but a piece of family history he himself had recounted to the media on multiple occasions.

Was Musk worried that the then-avalanche of advertiser departures from Twitter—or the growing chorus of critics calling him a white supremacist—would expand greatly if he were understood to have built his fortune atop an apartheid-era emerald mine?

That’s possible.

Certainly, we see evidence of Musk having an interest not just in self-mythologizing but aggressively editing and re-editing others’ imaginations. If Rocketeers positioned Musk as leaving South Africa because of an apparently unwitnessed-by-anyone-else obsession with racial injustice, by 2009 Elon, now nearing forty, was willing to present his decision to leave South Africa to the New Yorker as born of two other things: (1) the “failure” of the “plan” he had had that involved his father moving to America with him—specifically, it seems, to New York City, the site of their recent emerald-sale score—and (2) his feeling that, as paraphrased by his New Yorker interviewer, “America was comics, movies, technology—freedom.”⁵⁰ There was no mention of anti-apartheidist sentiments on Elon’s part.

In short, end-of-apartheid South Africa was a mess, and North America—the then- seventeen-year-old Elon saw—wasn’t. America was a place one could get rich under the auspices of rich white GOP patricians like Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Zip2

All the foregoing acts as a potentially problematic backdrop to the financials of Elon’s first business venture, the one he ran with his brother Kimbal starting in 1995: Zip2.

In Elongelical mythology, Zip2—not any South African emerald mines—was the font from which all Elon’s later wealth sprung, and it all happened without any financial assistance from his bigoted father.

To Elongelicals, Zip2 is the one component of Elon’s biography that must remain clean.

But in reality, it may be dirtier than anything else.

Per The Independent and The New Yorker, not only did Elon’s father invest $57,000 in 2024 dollars into his sons’ first-ever attempt at starting a business—a staggering sum that Errol (to repeat) insists was “emerald money” (which means Errol was getting such money for far longer than he’s admitted, as he couldn’t be giving Elon “emerald money” in 1995 if the three emerald mines he bought shares in in the “mid-1980s” only gave him a profit for “six years”)—but chose to do so immediately after his eldest son had dropped out of a doctoral program at Stanford University without matriculating.

That’s not the sort of responsible decision you’d think would elicit a large investment from a parent who (per Elon) had until then made his son live in cartoonish poverty.⁵¹

The reality of the situation could range from Errol in fact having lavishly supported his son from the moment he came to North America, contra Elon’s repeated claims, to Errol insisting that Elon live off a fraction of the proceeds of any illicit emerald sales he conducted in America at his father’s direction; from Errol investing in Zip2 after stiffing his son financially for years at a time he was fabulously flush only because Elon promised him a huge chunk of the new company to Elon having an inkling in 1995 that venture-capitalist investments would be available to him early on in 1996, leading Errol to voluntarily open a purse that had theretofore been resolutely closed.

We simply don’t know.

What we do know is that when Zip2 was sold just four years later for $307 million—a price quite possibly artificially inflated by the fact that the “dot.com boom” was then in full swing—Musk only received $22 million.⁵² While $22 million may sound like a lot (and it is), it represents, as The Independent confirms, Elon Musk having only had a “7%” share in his own startup. How does the co-founder of a company end up having so little equity in it?

What we know via The Encyclopedia Britannica is that in addition to Kimbal Musk, Zip2 had a third founding partner, Gregory Kouri; that just months after its founding Elon, Kimbal, and their friend Gregory lost majority ownership of their company—with Mohr Davidow Ventures investing around $3 million for majority ownership—and that in relatively short order Elon was replaced by Richard Sorkin as CEO (which may have led to Sorkin also getting some shares in the company).⁵³

While the foregoing doesn’t reveal whether Errol Musk’s seed money earned Errol Zip2 shares—or whether Elon, Kimbal, and Gregory would have been able to keep Zip2 going long enough, without Errol Musk’s $57,000 in 2024 dollars, to get to the point of Mohr Davidow Ventures wanting a majority stake in the enterprise (Kimbal assured Errol they would not have)—what it does do is confirm three things:

1. Despite how it has been recorded by posterity, Zip2 was never “Elon’s” company, as it had three co-owners at its launch and at least one major investor (Errol) who almost certainly had significant shares in the venture, perhaps more than Elon;

2. Elon was only a significant co-owner of Zip2 for a matter of months, after which he was not just a minority owner but apparently one with a share that had either immediately or eventually dwindled to just 7%;

3. Elon’s bid to be Zip2’s CEO quickly ended in his removal from the company altogether, a development that would come to be a trend in the entrepreneur’s checkered business career (as PayPal also fired him, and over the same issue); and

4. given that the few Zip2 ownership percentages we know of certainly leave room for Errol Musk to have had a stake in the business, there is a very good chance that that stake was earned by pumping dirty emerald-mine proceeds into Zip2.

But we also know something else about Zip2 that might help us disentangle the four different narratives for Elon Musk’s early years in North America presented above: that his father Errol has unambiguously insisted that Elon is lying about every bit of it.

According to the elder Musk in a recent interview with The Sun, Errol explains that

it was his [Errol’s] emerald venture which helped pave the way for Elon to become a wildly successful captain of industry in the United States.

….

Describing how he used the proceeds from the emeralds to set Elon and his brother Kimbal on a new path, Errol said, “In the late 1980s, Elon was doing a business degree at the University of Pretoria. But he was very unhappy there. The last straw for him was when someone stole his expensive bicycle I had bought him. One day, I found him in bed looking depressed. It was heartbreaking to see him like that. I said to him, ‘You’re not very happy, Elon, are you?’ He said, ‘No.’ And suddenly, it came to me out of the blue to ask him, ‘Would you like to go and study in the United States?’ He looked up at me, his face beaming and exclaimed, ‘Yes!’ Ten days later, Elon left South Africa with a return ticket for a year for America with emerald money in his pocket.”

This would explain the year-long gap in Musk’s autobiography—between the time he left South Africa in 1988 to the time he was suddenly in Canada working at a bank in 1989. Putting aside that his bank job surely paid him more than the “$1 a day” he says he was living on at the time, Elon spending the year prior to moving to Canada in the country where he and his father had had success selling emeralds—the United States—could help explain, though it remains an unconfirmed thesis, the “lost year” Elon appears to have spent in America that somehow ended with him having more than enough money to survive in Canada.

Or none of that is true, as Errol has offered us yet another promising alternative: that his eldest son actually had more than enough cash to live on from the very beginning:

“[In 1990 and for years thereafter], I managed to send money I’d made from emerald sales to Elon and Kimbal for living expenses.”

But when the bottom dropped out of the emerald business due to the emergence of a cheaper lab-made version of the gemstone, Errol had to sell assets to keep cash flowing to his sons. He unsuccessfully tried to cash in on his share in a game farm, so was forced to [sell] his ocean-going yacht for…around $29,000 [just over $60,000 in 2024 dollars], a quarter of its value. Errol says he then had to send the cash via an Israeli broker because of strict exchange control regulations.

He explained, “I took a hell of a chance [sending Elon and Kimbal money] because people I knew were sent to jail for doing a similar thing. I managed to send them…around $115,000 [around $240,000 in 2024 dollars] in total. It helped them with rent and food. Kimbal told me that they could never have survived without the money.”⁵⁴

{Note: Synthetic emeralds became available in the 1930s, and grew significantly in popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, so it’s unclear what Russian breakthrough Errol is referring to here. However, Errol has said on Facebook, here, that his emerald business began to falter in 1989 due to events in Russia. The most troubling implication of the above two excerpts is that Errol is here blaming on Black South African freedom fighters an economic circumstance that was actually the fault of the Russian oligarch class he and his son Elon now so admire. Another fraught implication is the possibility Elon angrily left South Africa after being the victim of a crime he and his father likely would have attributed to a Black South African—given what the two men have often said about Black people and crime—and then concocted a cockamamie story about fearing becoming a racial oppressor to justify leaving South Africa for exactly the opposite reason.}

So according to Errol Musk, he didn’t merely invest almost $60,000 in his sons’ startup venture in 1995, but also sent them $240,000 (again, in 2024 dollars) as he wound down his emerald business and Elon was—as The Sun reports, following Errol’s timeline—“enrolled on a scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, one of the top business schools in the world.”⁵⁵ That’s at least $300,000 in illegal gem-smuggling proceeds that made possible the success of Elon’s first venture.

Indeed, according to Errol, though his son was on a scholarship at Penn—a claim that calls into question Elon’s insistence that he amassed over $100,000 in debt during his brief time at Penn (less than two years)—he nevertheless sent Elon and his brother Kimbal what would now be well over a quarter of a million dollars for “living expenses,” which money Errol unambiguously admits was “money I’d made from emerald sales.”

This would simultaneously explain how Zip2 survived; explain how it was that Elon managed to live in two separate mansions during his brief stop at Penn; and confirm the below tweet to be a knowing lie in every single one of its several components:

On Facebook, Errol Musk has made clear that his “business transaction[s] in Zambia in the 1980s….[were not] beneficial to Elon’s success in the United States starting in about 1999” (emphasis supplied). In other words, Errol admits that, from the time that Elon sold Zip2 in 1999 onward, he—that is, Errol—takes no credit for Elon’s financial success or well-begin. The problem is that Zip2 wouldn’t have made it to 1999 without Errol and his emerald mines—and Elon left the twentieth century behind with tens of millions of dollars in hand precisely because he had a rich dad and a family emerald mine bankrolling him.

The elder Musk thus confirms that, far from letting Elon fend for himself beginning at age seventeen in 1988, he was sending proceeds from his “business” in “Zambia” to his eldest son for the entirety of the 1990s, and in fact only ceased to do so after Elon became a multimillionaire in 1999 (at which point it’s quite possible that it was Elon who owed his father money, based on the money his father had given him in 1995, 1996, 1997, and 1998). So why wouldn’t Elon want to talk much about 1996, 1997, and 1998? Because, in addition to being partly dependant on his father during that period, he was an illegal immigrant who was subject to immediate deportation and a ten-year preclusion from the United States if his knowing violations of federal law were caught.

Conclusion

In view of all the foregoing, we can understand Elon Musk’s denial of the centrality of the Musk Family emerald mines to his financial success as a means of maintaining an image as a self-made man. Unfortunately, that image is a farcical one; Elon was clearly receiving income from his South African family’s wildly lucrative, racially exploitative criminal enterprise up through the age of 28. He was a pampered and coddled rich kid who was also a pampered, coddled adult. He only became independent around age 30.

While Elon may not have gotten and then lied about getting $413 million from his dad as his new political patron Donald Trump did, it’s clear he got hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars from his rich, bigoted father in order to make his first score of $22 million. And that score came from a mere 7% stake in a company that removed him as CEO and that he had perhaps had never owned a majority stake in. And we are putting aside, here, that the idea for the venture was almost certainly not his to begin with.

While the size of Elon’s Zip2 haul can’t be denied, it also came less than a year before the consensus peak of the dot-com bubble in March 2000, meaning that it was a level of success in selling a middling digital product that could not have been replicated at any other point in American or indeed world history. And Elon would not have made it to the peak of that bubble without several Zambian emerald mines that we now know paid their impoverished Black workers peanuts.

{Note: The inevitable “dot-com crash” has been found, by subsequent studies, to have been the result of an average over-valuation of dot-com companies like Elon Musk’s of 40%. At least one other study notes that many dot-coms were in fact infinitely overvalued, as they had never produced a year of profit but were valued at billions and billions of dollars—creating an over-valuation crisis that can’t even be represented through conventional mathematical equations.}

So why does Proof use the term “peanuts” here? Because it’s the truth.

That is, if the question is whether the Musk Family’s three Zambian emerald mines were exploitative of their Black workers, it certainly appears that the answer is yes—and that this answer comes directly from the horse’s mouth. In this case, Errol Musk.

Per his interview with The Sun, Errol admits his unnamed business partner “employed [Black] locals to dig out emeralds deep in the Zambian bush….The workers would bring [the emerald] in for shipment [abroad] to Errol [in South Africa] in what the retired electromechanical engineer described as an ‘under the table’ operation. [His] Italian business partner would then pay the local [Zambians] around $2 a load...”⁵⁶

Yes, you read that correctly: two dollars for each “load” of raw emeralds.

Recall, here, that the average sale price for the cut emeralds Elon and Kimbal allegedly sold in New York City at Tiffany’s was $1,000—five hundred times what the Musk Family was paying impoverished Black Zambians for each load of such precious gems.

And Errol Musk is clear on these emeralds being literally everywhere while Elon and Kimbal were living with him. “Elon saw [the emeralds] at our house. He knew I was selling them.”⁵⁷ Errol provided pictures of emeralds from his mine to The Sun; said that his daughter had “three or four pendants” made from emeralds from the mine; and told The Sun that the mine was “in the Lake Tanganyika region of Zambia.”⁵⁸

No imaginary, notional mine, this—his daughter wore its proceeds as ornaments; his sons had those proceeds in their pockets; and all concerned knew where the mine was.

Moreover, Errol now says that the only reason “Elon is so sure no one can prove [the mine’s] existence” is because “it was far from being a conventional mining setup….[Zambia] was like the Wild West then].” Per The Sun, Errol knows “for sure that the deposit was about 40 miles from where he had landed his Cessna in Kasaba Bay, which is now a tourist hub.”⁵⁹

So how exploitative was it for the Musks, with their fabulous wealth and history of ardent white supremacy, to be paying profoundly impoverished Black Zambians $2 per “load” of raw emeralds? Consider the following from Business Insider (emphasis supplied; this is a telling expansion of a previous quote already provided to readers):

A teenage Elon Musk once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket.

His father, Errol Musk, had a casual attitude towards the family’s considerable wealth, including the stones that came from the Zambian emerald mine in which Errol owned a half share.

Elon, by his father’s recollection then probably sixteen years old, and his brother Kimbal, decided to sell emeralds to Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue in New York—one of the world's most famous jewelers—as his father lay sleeping.

“They just walked into Tiffany’s and said, ‘Do you want to buy some emeralds?’” Errol recalled in an interview with Business Insider South Africa. “And they sold two emeralds, one was for $800 and I think the other one was for $1,200.”

A few days later the family returned to the store to find that Tiffany was selling the $800 emerald, now set in a ring, for $24,000—a markup of 30 times the price Elon had received for the gem. Errol has used the story as on object lesson in how retail works ever since. He was surprised but not concerned by the incident, Errol says, because money was plentiful.

“We were very wealthy,” says Errol.

….

Errol said his children grew up watching him sell emeralds all over the world, after he had them cut in Johannesburg. However, he always stuck to the rules of the trade: contact the potential buyer, meet in a neutral public place (“for obvious reasons”), and be subtle about exchanging money for gems.

“It was kind of weird for them walk into Tiffany’s”, he says. “They’d seen I was sleeping in one morning, and they said, ‘Oh let’s just try, let’s go.’”

Business Insider reached out to Elon for confirmation of the tale, but he did not respond.

What’s telling about the above isn’t just Errol Musk’s reason for not being concerned by Elon’s behavior—that Elon had seen his father sell Zambian emeralds, from a mine Elon admits he had by then personally visited, so many times that the process seemed routine to all concerned—but also Errol’s implicit confirmation that Elon and Kimbal felt no need to hide from their father what they’d done. In fact, they must have told him about it the same day, given that the three returned to Tiffany’s the following day and knew to look for the mark-up on the two emeralds Elon and Kimbal had just sold.

Errol’s telling of the tale even raises the prospect that Elon and Kimbal actually went to the store alone only because their father chose to sleep in—and that in fact the plan had been for the three to go into the store together, making it just another instance of the very rich Elon watching his very rich father sell fabulously valuable but illegally gotten jewels that couldn’t have been taken out of Zambia at all without AK-47s being involved—and exploiting both Zambia’s Black government and its Black peasant class.

This is the true history of Elon Musk, and it contextualizes the sort of co-president he would be—especially to vulnerable American minorities—if Trump wins in November.

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