Is apartheid South Africa to blame for Big Tech politics?

In contrast, Steve Bannon must know things these other people don't, or else why would he, after having a swipe at Musk, go on to fulminate in a more general direction? 

"He (Musk) should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, (why do) we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?"

It's not every day that white racists are the victims of, well, racism. The mind boggles. But nonetheless, national stereotyping aside, this doesn't sound much like the Steve Bannon we used to know – the Steve Bannon accused of being a 'white supremacist' by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People after he recommended blaming both sides when violence broke out at a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

Soon after that, this same Steve Bannon became 'Sloppy Steve' after Trump overheard people saying he was the brains behind the president. Calling Ivanka Trump 'dumb as a brick' didn't help either. It all ended, literally, in tears. Sloppy Steve's, apparently. But that was eight years ago.

Either the charges against the tech bros prove the adage that it takes one to know one, or Bannon's recent stint in jail for contempt of Congress gave him an opportunity to do a lot of rethinking. Not wishing to sound cynical, but these anti-racist remarks might conceivably represent a bid to regain influence over the president-elect. Eight years is a long stretch in the political wilderness.

So, how true is it that South Africans are intent on dominating American policy, domestic and foreign? To answer that question, it is necessary to go all the way back to the founders of PayPal and the suspiciously large contingent of South Africans included in their number. These were the denizens of Silicon Valley, transformed into millionaires by the sale of PayPal to eBay in 2002 for a cool $1.5bn. They'd only started it up four years previously.

Back then, they seem to have possessed some residual capacity for sending themselves up because, as Alexei Orskovic recalled, Fortune Magazine managed to capture an image of them sitting in San Francisco's famous Tosca bar. Bear in mind, Sopranos was all the rage at the time:

'…the former PayPal employees posed in tracksuits and gold chains – a Hollywood makeover for a group who, as PayPal cofounder Max Levchin explained … were math-loving workaholics who did not "get laid very often." Beneath the schtick was real clout. In the photo's foreground is PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, whose career as a venture capitalist took off with an early bet on Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook … Roelof Botha, now a partner at Sequoia Capital, wears shades, his shirt unbuttoned." 

That surname may sound vaguely familiar: Roelof's grandfather was Roelof Frederik "Pik" Botha, a South African politician who served as the country's last foreign minister under the apartheid government and the first minister of Mineral and Energy Affairs under Nelson Mandela.

David Sacks was also present in the Tosca. He has now been chosen by Trump as his AI and Crypto czar, indicating the importance of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, whose value was $700 on election day in 2016 and has since soared to over $100,000.

The most conspicuous absentee on that fateful day was Elon Musk, who had recently been banished from PayPal for wanting to change the company's name. The coup had taken place while Musk was on his honeymoon in Australia. It was a mean trick, but maybe they had more in common with the real mafia than they were willing to let on.

We may soon find out. Jack Selby, one of PayPal's original employees who runs Thiel's family office, and Sacks, who now runs the venture capital firm Craft Ventures, purchased the film rights this year to one of the books about PayPal, and are in the early stages of planning a production about its mafiosi. Both men have a background in film, with Sacks co-producing Thank You for Smoking and Selby behind titles like Bernie and Silk Road.

One might assume, with such men behind it, the film will not exactly be a searing critique. That seems only fair, as the mafiosi have undergone a barrage of criticism that looks set to intensify now that their political influence is out in the open. Owing to his prominence as 'first buddy', however, it is still Musk who receives the most vehement criticism, much of it aimed at his lifestyle and with the occasional insinuation that he is what he is because, er, he was where he was.

There is a podcast subtly entitled Behind the Bastards, for example, which takes aim at him with evident relish. The format is very simple: a man named Robert Evans – an 'extremism researcher' – reads out his findings regarding various 'bastards', which include the tech bros and their acolytes, among them Curtis Yarvin, whose growing fame recently propelled him into the hallowed liberal pages of The Guardian. Incidentally, Yarvin has been known to heap praise on the ghost of Ian Smith, once the rather less-than-charming prime minister of Rhodesia. For the theorist of dark enlightenment, Smith was a heroic failure in the struggle against democracy.

It may be inadvertent, but Behind the Bastards has a standard of discourse much like that of a certain tech billionaire. Thankfully, you don't have to be rich to be vulgar. Sweary, sarcastic and hyperbolic, it's the same wearisome style that one encounters in Musk and the multitude of people posting on social media platforms. This humourless adolescent drone, once spoken exclusively by geeks, is now the vox populi of the age. I would offer examples, but I am far too much of an elitist snob to do so.

In passing, Evans professes not to find the PayPal mafia interesting, which is odd, given that they were really the origin of the universe he despises. Sadly, this is not an isolated example of Evans overlooking something crucial. Despite relying exclusively on their work, he appears not to have found Musk's biographer interesting either. Evans recounts at some length an encounter between Ashlee Vance and the diabolical Musk, which ends with the bro standing up and demanding, "Do you think I'm insane?"

At this point, the women on the podcast shudder in horror at the creepiness of the question, a clear abuse of masculine power, whereupon Evans piously delivers a homily on how well-known people (like himself, apparently) have no right to take advantage of their position by intimidating women. This would all be fine if it didn't turn out on closer inspection – by which I mean a cursory glance at Wikipedia – that Ashlee Vance is a man. In view of such rigorous fact-checking, "He's not a genius f---ing inventor!" may be taken as definitive proof that Musk is, indeed, an inventive genius.

Our intrepid podcaster also misses another interesting fact: that Vance was originally from South Africa. Eager as Musk might have been to domineer over his biographer, male or female, it is surely informative that he chose a writer from the country of his birth to describe his formative years. Someone, in fact, who might have a clue about the nuances of life in his native land. Under the influence of this starstruck hagiographer, Evans expresses his heartfelt sympathy for the young Musk as he's bullied at school, bullied by his father, and generally suffers the same persecution as bright kids the world over.

In other words, Evans can't even pull off a consistent hatchet job. Which is a pity, because Musk could probably out-bully anyone these days. In the strict sense, he's already a Martian. His genius for pugnacity, belligerence and generally alienating people is beyond dispute. Like the new leader of Britain's Conservative party, he could easily start a fight in an empty room. It's actually an essential personality defect when doing battle on social media.

The result is, as we have seen, a very lucrative profusion of enemies. These can often include his most recent friends. Take the stentorian Nigel Farage, before whom he dangled large sums of money only to decide that our Nigel was 'not the right man' for the job of running his own political party, Reform UK. No pub bore can tolerate competition for long. It appears his fellow pub bore had disappointed Musk by failing to defend the incarcerated hero of the extreme right in Britain, Tommy Robinson.

Now, to call Tommy Robinson 'unsavoury' would be an understatement, the like of which he is so unaccustomed to hearing that he might actually mistake it for a compliment. It's one thing for a geographically remote billionaire to espouse the cause of a notorious recidivist, but Farage is a member of parliament for Clacton these days. As everyone knows, the dog whistle is his preferred musical instrument, inaudible to all but the canine population. Musk is more of a foghorn kind of guy.

It's fair to say that his former PayPal pal, the don himself, isn't so fond of shouting. Peter Thiel does interviews but with thinkers rather than with future presidents or leaders of right-wing German parties. In a recent discussion with John Gray, for instance, he came across as cerebral, if a little restricted in his areas of interest. Max Chafkin, whose book on Thiel was entitled The Contrarian, says he 'stands apart for having retained the intellectual intensity of a bookish undergraduate, a quality that has made him an object of curiosity, admiration and mockery.'

Back in the 90s, Thiel and Sacks co-wrote The Diversity Myth, an attack on the political correctness they encountered at Stanford. They believed that the university discriminated against conservatives like themselves. It's a theme JD Vance has picked up from his erstwhile patron. In 2022, he told Vanity Fair, "We need like a de-Baathification programme, a de-woke-ification programme," adding, "There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we're willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That's the universities."

According to Chafkin, Thiel's goal since 2016 has been far more ambitious, however. It is to turn Trump's ideology into "a disciplined political platform." This doesn't mean his biographer credits Thiel himself with a coherent ideology:

'There's always been a lot of libertarianism in Silicon Valley, but there are aspects of Thiel's politics that aren't libertarian at all; they're closer to authoritarianism. It's super-nationalistic, it's a longing for a sort of more powerful chief executive, or, you know, a dictator, in other words'. 

This would explain the affinity to Curtis Yarvin. There are other, stranger affinities. The mafia don is obsessed with defeating death. In his conversation with Gray, he rounds on a speech in Shakespeare where Hamlet's mother scolds her son for dwelling on his father's death. 'Thou know'st 'tis common', she says, 'all that lives must die.'

Thiel is not convinced: 'The question one must ask is, is that a law of nature? Or is this just a rationalisation for the rottenness that is Denmark? And certainly the early modern conception was that you wanted to transcend this, both in a Christian or a scientific form.'

For Thiel, the universality of death is an evil assumption. He believes the indefinite prolongation of human life was a sacred aim passed on to science by Christianity. This sounds like the alchemists in their quest for the philosopher's stone. The implication is that scientists should never have abandoned that quest. Coming from a man who made his fortune in Silicon Valley, it's extraordinary to witness Thiel dismissing modern technology as a distraction and condemning 'the particular, narrow forms of technological progress that we've had in the last fifty years' which have made us 'oblivious' to the true meaning of life and human history.

Something about this cyber theology makes Steve Bannon's outburst sound spittle-flecked and trivial. It makes attacks in podcasts sound crude and full of resentment. Thiel has no need of overstatement. Besides, he wasn't even born in South Africa. If he wanted, he could simply brandish his birth certificate at Bannon and say "Thus, I refute him!" The people with the real power don't need to shout about it.

As for Musk, Quinn Slobodian, the writer of Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, tells us:

'His aspiration is to be more like the Hari Seldon character from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, which is among Musk's "all-time best" novels. In Asimov's story, the mathematician Seldon predicts humanity's future and intervenes as an enlightened avatar. He is the saviour of … civilisation itself. This level of validation is perhaps the only thing that will satisfy Musk's ego after having achieved all other man-made goals. We have to entertain the idea that, for Musk, state capture is not an end in itself but only a prelude to state exit – starting a new polity either on Earth (trialled by the incorporation of a new company town in Starbase, Texas) or on Mars.'

It all makes the little matter of one's roots in African soil sound distinctly parochial. So, is nostalgia for apartheid anything to do with the support of Big Tech for Trump's agenda? Almost certainly not. The lurch to the right follows from the threat of regulation by the Democrats and Joe Biden's plans to introduce a wealth tax. Even those bros, like Musk, who were there long enough to experience the apartheid system, are more likely to share an ancestral memory of Rissik Street than of the era of white supremacy. Rissik Street, for those who may never have been to Johannesburg, is where the South African Revenue Service is located.