Source: GIANLUIGI GUERCIA / Getty
Honestly, I don’t imagine many white conservatives truly understand why Black people collectively groan when white people defend themselves against allegations of racism by insisting: “I can’t be racist, I have friends who are Black.”
I mean, white Republicans don’t even see the racism in parading around every conservative Black voice they can find to amplify as if the social and political opinions of the very few among Black people invalidated that of the larger Black majority across America. They claim to abhor “race-based” DEI until it’s time to push for woefully unqualified and “observably stupid” Black conservatives like Herschel Walker to occupy an important legislative position in the U.S. Senate. (Also, they’re just fine with the president appointing woefully underqualified white men to cabinet positions, because the hiring of mediocre white men to essential positions isn’t racist, it’s just one of those things America has always done.)
One would think that after literal decades of Black people telling white people that what their (probably imaginary) Black friends think means nothing to us. Yet, in 2025, Elon Musk’s father, Errol Musk, is out here taking it even further by suggesting to the Washington Post that his son wasn’t political or racist when he was younger and that he and his brother were friends with — *checks notes* — their “Black servants.”
“They were not into political nonsense, and we lived in a very well-run, law-abiding country with virtually no crime at all. Actually no crime. We had several Black servants who were their friends,” Errol told the Post via email.
Talk about saying the apartheid part out loud.
On Thursday, the Post published an exposé focused on Musk’s shifting views on race. Although, I’m not sure I’d even call it a shift in his views as much as it was a shift in the political climate, conveniently making his racist views more socially acceptable to voice.
The Post began by noting that Musk spoke in favor of diversity, equity and inclusion back in 2017, around the time Black people first started filing lawsuits against Tesla for fostering a hostile and racist work environment. In fact, two months after a Black Tesla employee filed a suit alleging that his co-workers frequently called him the N-word and were not disciplined for it, Musk sent out a companywide email titled, “Doing the right thing,” which, in his mind, meant white people apologizing for racism, but, also, he essentially demanded that Black people be “thick-skinned” and accept whatever apologies they are offered.
“Part of not being a huge jerk is considering how someone might feel who is part of an historically less represented group,” Musk wrote. “In fairness, if someone is a jerk to you, but sincerely apologizes, it is important to be thick-skinned and accept that apology.”
So, basically, Musk titled his email, “Doing the right thing,” but a more accurate title would have been: “Doing whatever bare-minimum thing to address anti-Black racism that doesn’t cause white people too much grief.” Musk couldn’t even be bothered with addressing the actual racism, opting to characterize blatant bigotry as “being a huge jerk.”
Source: MANDEL NGAN / Getty
Fast forward several years and Musk is no longer even pretending to hide his contempt for any effort to correct the historic systemic racism against those “historically less represented groups” he wrote about in 2017. Now, he’s an anti-DEI warrior who pretends to be all about “meritocracy” while serving as the head of President Donald Trump’s federal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) despite having zero experience running or even serving in any federal office prior to his appointment.
“Over the next eight years, as he became the richest man in the world, Musk shifted from a Democratic-leaning critic of Donald Trump to a Republican-friendly Trump acolyte,” the Post wrote.
Elon Musk is demonstrably racist, and aligning himself with the orangey-white nationalist president whose inauguration he celebrated by throwing up Nazi salutes is honestly the least of it.
He defended Dilbert creator Scott Adams when Adams called Black people a “hate group” that he wants “nothing to do with” nor should any other white people, who he suggested should “get the hell away from Black people” and stop trying to “help” us.
He called the Oscars a “woke contest” because he thought too many non-white people were winning. Then, when it was pointed out to him that white actors and directors dominated all the major awards, he immediately backpedaled and admitted that he was “wrong.” Suddenly, everything was right in his white world because in his mind, “woke” is the opposite of whiteness not dominating everything.
He cosigned racist pseudo-science that claims Black college students have lower IQs than their white counterparts and insinuated they shouldn’t become pilots. He claimed without evidence that DEI policies in the aviation industries and other industries have made us less safe.
Musk literally believes fewer white people being born coupled with an increase in non-white immigrants will cause a “collapse” in civilization.
From the Post:
He has warned that lower birth rates and immigration are diluting American culture and the cultures of other majority-White and Asian countries. “We should be very cautious about having some sort of global mixing pot,” he said earlier this year. He has called unchecked illegal immigration “civilizational suicide” and “an invasion,” though he himself was working illegally, in violation of his visa, after he deferred his enrollment in a Stanford University graduate program to launch his career in the United States in the 1990s. He also warns that declining birth rates are leading to “population collapse,” and, having fathered over a dozen children, stresses the importance of “smart people” having more kids.
Elon Musk is a white nationalist on two different continents at this point.
In America, he believes white people are discriminated against through DEI policies while ignoring America’s 400-year history of legalized racism, which made diversity efforts necessary in the first place. In his home country of South Africa, he believes white Afrikaners are being oppressed while ignoring the nation’s nearly 50-year apartheid history, which he pretends has nothing to do with white people owning 72% of the private farmland in South Africa while representing only 9% of the country’s population.
But, of course, we should ignore all of this because Elon Musk couldn’t possibly be racist.
He had Black servant friends, after all.
SEE ALSO:
Elon Musk, Donald Trump Out Of Order, Federal Judge Says
Wait, Trump Really Has Us Beefing With Canada?
