This one might surprise you.
One main takeaway — that Pretoria and Durban during Musk's childhood and adolescence were indeed starkly segregated, with deep racial divides around wealth and human rights — is unsurprising, but it's still interesting to hear Musk's former associates grappling with those realities in retrospect.
"We were really clueless as white South African teenagers," Musk's Bryanston High School classmate Melanie Cheary told the paper, saying that most Black people they interacted with were servants. "Really clueless." A less intuitive takeaway from the story is that rather than simply going with that flow, it sounds as though the young Musk did, in small ways, sometimes oppose the racist norms of his environment. Musk's father Errol told the newspaper that the family's children, including the junior Musk, opposed the apartheid system and took pains to plan outings with nonwhite friends so as not to endanger them by running afoul of laws around segregation. At the same time, Errol himself still sounds a little nostalgic for the days of apartheid, telling the newspaper that South Africa was "mostly better and safer" back in those days. The most striking passage in the story was recounted by Nyadzani Ranwashe, the brother of a childhood friend of Musk named Asher Mashudu, who was Black. One time at lunch, a white student used an anti-Black slur, and Mr. Musk chided the student, but then got bullied for doing so, Mr. Ranwashe said. Mr. Mashudu was killed in a car accident in 1987, and Mr. Ranwashe said he remembered Mr. Musk being one of only a handful of white people who attended the funeral in the family’s rural village.On the one hand, Musk's family clearly benefited from a racist system, and it's probably unlikely that without that advantage Musk would have been able to escape to North America and kickstart his illustrious career at web startups, SpaceX and Tesla.also appear to show a young person who at least occasionally went out of his way to oppose a ubiquitously unjust system, with no personal benefit.pointed out, it's particularly difficult to reconcile this information with the man that Musk has now become. At some points in his career, Musk has presented himself as a milquetoast and somewhat opportunistic centrist,But at other times — and particularly recently — he's also flirted with increasingly far-right fringes of the political spectrum. As he's made moves to buy Twitter, for instance, he's
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