Explaining Elon Musk via his childhood in apartheid SA is in principle a bad idea. It has produced some of the most facile American journalism I have read in recent years. To speculate about the psychology of a person you do not know, who grew up in country to which you’ve never been, is a terrible foundation for an essay. 

But Musk’s recent foray into Europe’s right-wing politics offers a genuinely interesting connection between the SA in which he grew up and the world he lives in now. It does not require any faux psychological analysis or guesswork about his interior life. It requires only to draw some simple connections. ..

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