How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa
Elon Musk grew up with the privileges of a stratified racial order and Peter Thiel lived in a city that venerated Hitler
by Chris McGreal
The Guardian, January 26, 2025
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They include Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated. Thiel, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021 biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as “economically sound”.
David Sacks, formerly PayPal’s chief operating officer and now a leading fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young. A fourth member of the mafia, Roelof Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha, and former PayPal CFO, has kept a lower political profile but remains close to Musk.
Among them, Musk stands out for his ownership of X, which is increasingly a platform for far-right views, and his proximity to Trump, who has nominated Musk to head a “department of government efficiency” to slash and burn its way through the federal bureaucracy.
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The week before the inauguration, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, described white South Africans as the “most racist people on earth”, questioned their involvement in US politics and said Musk was a malign influence who should go back to the country of his birth.
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The South Africa into which Musk was born in 1971, and to which Thiel moved as a child from Germany, was led by a prime minister, John Vorster, who had been a general in a fascist militia three decades earlier that allied itself with Hitler.
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk-peter-thiel-apartheid-south-africa
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