The billionaire has described his grandfather as a risk-taking adventurer. A closer read of history reveals something much darker.
By Joshua Benton

In Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, a mere page and a half is devoted to introducing Musk’s grandfather, a Canadian chiropractor named Joshua N. Haldeman. Isaacson describes him as a source of Musk’s great affection for danger—“a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions” and “quirky conservative populist views” who did rope tricks at rodeos and rode freight trains like a hobo. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” Isaacson quotes Musk as having said. “Risk energized him.”
But in 1950, Haldeman’s “quirky” politics led him to make an unusual and dramatic choice: to leave Canada for South Africa. Haldeman had built a comfortable life for himself in Regina, Saskatchewan’s capital. His chiropractic practice was one of Canada’s largest and allowed him to possess his own airplane and a 20-room home he shared with his wife and four young children. He’d been active in politics, running for both the provincial and national parliaments and even becoming the national chairman of a minor political party. Meanwhile, he’d never even been to South Africa.

What would make a man undertake such a radical change? Isaacson writes that Haldeman had come “to believe that the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft.” One of Haldeman’s sons has written that it may have simply been “his adventurous spirit and the desire for a more pleasant climate in which to raise his family.” But another factor was at play: his strong support for the brand-new apartheid regime.
An examination of Joshua Haldeman’s writings reveals a radical conspiracy theorist who expressed racist, anti-Semitic, and antidemocratic views repeatedly, and over the course of decades—a record I studied across hundreds of documents from the time, including newspaper clips, self-published manuscripts, university archives, and private correspondence. Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead “White Christian Civilization” in its fight against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the “hordes of Coloured people” they controlled. (Gee his grandson grew up to say something very similar SNIPPED the following for reference)- When Musk tweets that George Soros “appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization”—in response to a tweet blaming Soros for an “invasion” of African migrants into Europe—he is not the first in his family to insinuate that a wealthy Jewish financier was manipulating thousands of Africans to advance nefarious goals.)

“Instead of the Government’s attitude keeping me out of South Africa, it had precisely the opposite effect—it encouraged me to come and settle here,” he told a reporter for the South African newspaper Die Transvaler shortly after his arrival. The far-right Afrikaner newspaper treated Haldeman’s arrival as a PR victory for apartheid. (“PRAISES ACTION OF NATIONALIST PARTY REGIME: Canadian Politician Settles in South Africa,” the headline read.)
Musk’s grandfather spelled out his beliefs most clearly in a 1960 self-published book with the weighty title The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa. (Its existence was first reported by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker.) Library databases indicate that there is only one copy in the Western Hemisphere, at Michigan State University, which is where I obtained it. In it, Haldeman wrote that there was
a strong possibility that South Africa will become the leader of White Christian Civilization as she is becoming more and more the focal point, the bulwark, and the subject of attack by anti-Christian, anti-White forces throughout the world.
She will fulfill this destiny if the White Christian people get together; if they realize the forces that are behind these world-wide attacks; if the people will make a study of who are their real enemies and what their methods are; if she will seriously combat the evils of Internationalism that are already taking cancerous roots in our society.

These views were on display before he set out for South Africa. The minor political party that Haldeman had led in Canada was notorious for anti-Semitism. In 1946, when one of the party’s newspapers printed the fraudulent The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—arguably the most consequential conspiracy text in the modern world—he defended the decision, arguing “that the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation.” A local rabbi described Haldeman’s political speeches to the local newspaper as “shot through with anti-Semitic talk.”
Before that, he’d been a leader in a fringe political movement that called itself Technocracy Incorporated, which advocated an end to democracy and rule by a small tech-savvy elite. During World War II, the Canadian government banned the group, declaring it a risk to national security. Haldeman’s involvement with Technocracy continued, though, and he was arrested and convicted of three charges relating to it.
Once he got to South Africa, he added Black Africans to his list of rhetorical targets. “The natives are very primitive and must not be taken seriously,” he wrote back to his hometown Canadian newspaper in 1951. “Some are quite clever in a routine job, but the best of them cannot assume responsibility and will abuse authority. The present government of South Africa knows how to handle the native question.”