A Death in Cryptoland Introduces: The Making of Musk

October 15, 2025·40 min·3 clips

How did Elon Musk go from a tech visionary to a right-wing shadow president lurking in the Oval Office?

The podcast opens with a scene from a May 2025 Oval Office meeting where South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was ambushed by Donald Trump presenting a video montage of South African politicians singing anti-white-farmer songs and what Trump described as aerial shots of mass graves — claims Silverman says were a fictional conspiracy theory originating in South African fringe politics. Elon Musk was present but silent in the corner; Silverman notes Musk had been amplifying these narratives through his X platform and through Grok, his AI chatbot that began inserting white genocide talking points into unrelated queries. Silverman frames the episode's central question: how did a man once known for ambitious engineering projects become an Oval Office political operative pushing fringe conspiracy theories? Musk was born in June 1971 in Waterkloof, a wealthy suburb of Pretoria, and grew up at the height of apartheid. His schoolmate Rudolf Pienaar, now a biomedical researcher in Boston, describes an unremarkable classmate whose most memorable act was naming every character in his fantasy RPG after a superlative version of himself. Pienaar describes their school, Pretoria Boys High, as an elite institution with colonial war cries and traditions more reminiscent of British boarding schools, set within a social bubble deliberately engineered to shield white children from the realities of apartheid. South African journalist Will Shokey explains that apartheid was not merely tolerated inequality but a state-designed system to produce material privilege — swimming pools, domestic servants, large houses — for every white family on the backs of exploited Black labor. Shokey argues this produced foundational assumptions about hierarchy and control. The episode then examines the demographic complexity within South Africa's white minority: the culturally distinct Afrikaner (Dutch-descended) community and English-speaking whites like the Musks, who benefited from apartheid while maintaining a convenient moral distance from having created it. Silverman argues this gave Musk what Shokey calls a 'settler colonial mindset' of control, extraction, and escape. The episode traces the history of apartheid from the 1948 National Party election win through the Bantustan homeland system to the global anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. For white teenage boys like Musk and Pienaar, mandatory military conscription loomed, with the risk of being sent to fight in the South African border war against Cuban and Soviet-backed forces in Angola. Musk later claimed he left South Africa at 17 to avoid conscription, telling actor Rainn Wilson that spending two years suppressing Black people 'didn't seem like a great use of time.' But Pienaar and Shokey both dispute this heroic framing, noting that by 1989-1990 when Musk finished school, apartheid was visibly collapsing, national service was already being scaled back to one year, and anyone who simply didn't show up faced no consequences. Silverman suggests Musk left opportunistically for Silicon Valley, lured by the promise of technology and using a claim to Canadian citizenship through his mother May's Canadian father. The episode ends with a preview of later instalments covering his grandfather Joshua Haldeman and Musk's rise.

As heard by us

An origin story about privilege, power, and the making of Musk.

A Death in Cryptoland folds into The Making of Musk, a four-part series that asks what, if anything, explains Elon Musk and whether his ambition and uglier habits can be traced back to youth in apartheid South Africa.

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If Musk's origin story interests you more than headlines, start here.

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