Elon Musk, Apartheid, and America’s New Boycott Movement
If you think mass protests can’t combat evil, remember what we did in the 1980s.
Clara Jeffery
In the fall of 1984, when I was a senior in high school in Washington, DC, the protests at the South African Embassy began. Civil rights leaders met with the ambassador of South Africa on Thanksgiving Eve. Timed for maximum press coverage, that meeting became a sit-in, and that sit-in launched a movement. Soon, there were protests at consulates across the country. College students held rallies, built “shantytowns,” and pushed their schools to divest.
Area high school kids like me got in on protesting the embassy too. And we had a soundtrack. “Free Nelson Mandela” had been released by the Specials in March. The leader of that British ska band, Jerry Dammers, later admitted he didn’t know much about Mandela before he went to an anti-apartheid concert in the UK, where a long-simmering boycott movement was rolling into a boil. The DC music scene was pretty wild then—a bouillabaisse of go-go, R&B, punk, New Wave; there was breakdancing in the hallways during lunch hour—and for some of us, ska was sort of a unified field theory. Musically but also culturally. (If you have a racist friend / now is the time, now is the time for your friendship to end.)
But it wasn’t just kids who cosplayed in checked socks or porkpie hats. In 1985, a month after I started college, Artists Against Apartheid recorded Steven Van Zandt’s “(I Ain’t Going to Play) Sun City”—essentially the music world launching its own boycott on South Africa. The song was not (like, at all) great, but the wild cross-genre supergroup—DJ Kool Herc, Lou Reed, Bonnie Raitt, Gil Scott-Heron, Pat Benatar, Bono, and Miles Davis to name but a very, very few—guaranteed continual rotation on a relatively new cultural phenomenon: MTV.
We were getting a collective education: Because South Africa was so dependent on Black labor and exports, if industrialized nations withheld trade and investments, we could backstop Black South Africans who’d been directly resisting the Afrikaner regime for decades. So, suddenly, amazingly, we did. By 1986, Congress had imposed sanctions on South Africa and banned direct flights to it, Coca-Cola became the first major company to pull out of South Africa. Sports teams joined the musicians in refusing to play there. Divestment battles raged on campuses and boardrooms for the rest of the ’80s. And they worked. South Africa’s economy ground to a near halt. Mandela was freed in 1990, and negotiations to wind down apartheid began. By 1994, free elections were held and Mandela became president.
I found myself reconstructing this history recently, as the protests and boycotts against Tesla began. Do you need a reminder as to why? Okay: Tesla CEO Elon Musk—the world’s richest man, and Trump’s biggest campaign donor; an unelected, ketamine-happy, video game cheating, transphobic, subsidy–guzzling, deadbeat dad—is leading a bunch of scythe-wielding mini-me shitposters through innards of the federal government, harvesting and compromising the most essential data of every taxpayer, government contractor, and NGO in America. Oh, and he’s also supporting fascists, using apparent Nazi salutes, and blasting antisemitic and racist theories to his millions of followers.
Anyway, the dude is bad news. And he’s threatening to use his hundreds of billions—again, money he would not have without US subsidies—to take out any politician, foreign or domestic, who opposes his and Trump’s agenda, which is a mix of toxic masculinity, grift, and a seeming desire to return to a gauzy form of racial apartheid.
Words like “apartheid” and “Nazi” shouldn’t be tossed around lightly. Musk has denied he’s a Nazi, and that his salute was a Nazi salute. But clear-eyed commentators aren’t buying it, and white nationalists like Nick Fuentes are downright jubilant: “That was a straight up, like, Sieg Heil, like loving Hitler energy.” And then there’s Musk’s history. His maternal grandparents were, according to Musk’s own father, members of the Canadian neo-Nazi party who decamped to South Africa because they were fans of racial oppression. Musk has been pretty mum about what it was like to grow up in South Africa and the influence that had on him. (Today he holds US, Canadian, and South African citizenship.) But the fact is that many white South Africans who left at that time did so because their position of privilege was coming to an end.
In any case, once in the States, Musk joined forces with fellow South Africans Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Roelof Botha—grandson of former South African leader Pik Botha; now the head of venture capital giant Sequoia Capital—to form PayPal. And they revealed themselves to be racial reactionaries. Thiel (who, according to his biographer, once called critiques of apartheid “overblown”) and Sacks wrote “The Case Against Affirmative Action” for Stanford Magazine in 1996. They’ve led concerted, organized attacks on DEI. Musk, who was under federal investigation for racial discrimination in his Tesla factories—that is, until Trump took over—is supporting extremist movements across the world, using Holocaust Remembrance Day to tell Germans they should no longer feel “guilt” over it, and echoing South Africans who claim they’re victims of “white genocide.”
So yes, some people are too quick to label people they don’t like as Nazis. But also, people who don’t want to be called Nazis should avoid giving Nazi salutes.
Now I want to talk about something else that was happening in the mid-’80s. Something else that gathered up musical supergroups and was big on MTV.
It was famine. In Ethiopia, between 1983 and 1985, maybe a million people died. The nightly news was full of images of dying skeleton children, all the time. The causes were complex, but the immediate answer was simple: food. Again, it was musicians who rallied the world to the cause, with huge concerts like Live Aid, famous for Freddie Mercury’s last transcendent performance, and cross-genre protest song collaborations. The Brits, led by Bob Geldof (who also produced Live Aid), went first with “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” And then Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Quincy Jones, and Harry Belafonte gathered up a who’s-who of American singers for “We Are the World.” And yes, some of that plays as very cringe these days—Ethiopians are mostly Christian, for starters. And weren’t totally blind to it back then either, as someone who played Cyndi Lauper in a high school send-up of “We Are the World” can attest.
But when you’re trying to rally the world to the cause of dying children, corny works. All these efforts did raise millions for food relief, and, more importantly, focused the world’s attention. In 1985, the United States Agency for International Development created the Famine Early Warning Systems Network so the world would never be caught so flat-footed about famine again.
Until now. Musk has gutted USAID, and its early famine warning system specifically, even as starvation stalks the people of Sudan. Thanks to his DOGE bros, almost 80 percent of emergency food kitchens in Sudan have been closed, and “people are screaming from hunger in the streets,” reports the BBC.
What does the world’s richest man have against the agency that helps the world’s poorest people? Well, it was investigating his satellite company Starlink’s contracts in Ukraine. But also, in their quest to cut trillions from the federal budget to finance tax cuts for billionaires like themselves, Musk and Trump have to believe they can get that money from things other than Social Security and Medicaid. So they’re tapping into of American’s collective misbelief that we spend about a quarter of the budget on foreign aid—in actuality, it is about 1 percent—to claim they can square that math. And they’re flooding the zone with disinformation with claims of USAID “waste and abuse,” because this is their playbook. Never mind that they clearly don’t know what USAID does, or that gutting it is also having devastating impacts on US farmers, who grow a lot of the food we provide as relief.
Who benefits from eviscerating USAID? Basically foreign dictators like Vladimir Putin, who hates that this “soft power” was part of America’s Ukrainian relief effort, or Xi Jinping, who sees our food aid to African countries as a plot to undermine China’s “belt and road” program of development. We don’t just lose moral stature when we renounce foreign aid, we lose our competitive advantage in global relations too. So when Trump states in an executive order that USAID efforts “destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries,” please realize that this is echoing the talking points of Putin and Xi.
But no matter, Musk and Trump wanted to start with what they saw as the weakest, wokest government agency, to slaughter it and hang it on a pike as a warning not to disobey the king. Slashing USAID scratches a racist itch central to the MAGA cause. Let’s not forget how Trump slurred “shithole countries.” Trump, who says Hitler did some “great things,” and says he wants generals like Hitler had. Trump, who believes he has “good genes.” Trump, you know the list: housing discrimination, Central Park Five, birtherism, Mexican “rapists,” “very fine people,” “go back” where they “came” from, “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.”
In the ’80s, the American public had a much more rudimentary understanding of colonialism’s dependence on racism than it does today. But even kids in high school knew that apartheid was wrong, and famine was wrong, and that these two things happening in Africa were somehow connected, and connected to America’s dark racial history, and to the music we listened to and the future we hoped we represented. Our parents didn’t have childhood friendships across races and sexes—that would have been mostly impossible. But we did. We were naive (the white kids far more than the Black kids, it must be said) but not wrong in feeling that, even as we eye-rolled and camped it up when we sang along, that we are the children…we’re saving our own lives / It’s true we’ll make a better day, just you and me.
On Valentine’s Day, Sheryl Crow put her Tesla on a flatbed and donated the sale’s proceeds to NPR. The following day, I went to the local Tesla dealership to witness the first in what has become an ongoing series of protests in San Francisco and across the country. The “Tesla Takedown” movement is, as such movements usually are, organized by an oddball coalition of folks, including documentary filmmaker Alex Winter (also “Bill” of Bill & Ted fame) and disinformation scholar Joan Donovan, who alleges that a donation from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative prompted Harvard to cancel her research on Meta’s role in online extremism. The goal is to get people to protest at dealerships, sell their cars, divest from any stock. Indivisible has joined the effort, organizing “Musk or Us” protests.
There’s a real strategy here: essentially that Tesla’s stock is wildly overpriced—it’s both an automaker and a memestock, as John Herman notes—and were it to approach a more reality-based level, Musk, who’s super leveraged, could see his fortune decline precipitously. That could push a shareholder revolt and also weaken his threat to use his vast fortune to fund a primary against anybody who opposes Trump. And in any case, people need a place to locate their anger and fear.
There are signs this is working. Tesla sales in Europe are catastrophically down—50 percent lower in January than from a year earlier, even as EV sales overall rose 34 percent. January sales were 12 percent down in California, too, and that’s before DOGE started playing havoc with the country. Tesla’s stock price has fallen 37 percent since its peak in December, knocking tens of billion off of Musk’s wealth; 23 percent of that is in the last few weeks. And people are taking their rage out on individual Teslas, stickering and even vandalizing “swasticars,” especially cybertrucks, which were already performing horribly, in terms of sales and just…performance.
Talking to protestors at the San Francisco dealership, I was struck by how many of them had never been to any kind of protest before. Some of them were Tesla owners. One guy told me he wasn’t able to sell his car right now, but he was posting to Tesla owner forums to tell people to turn off features so as to deny the company revenue, or to be an activist shareholder if they were one.
In less than two weeks, such protests have spread all over the country. The news is full of tales of Tesla owners with buyer’s remorse. Etsy shops are selling bumper stickers that say things like: “I bought this before I knew Elon was crazy.” On a walk through my neighborhood last weekend, I saw a woman purposefully lead her dog over to pee on a cybertruck, and a Tesla sedan with a handwritten sign that said: “Hi! I also think Elon sucks. I bought this car 5 years ago. Please stop keying my car for your protest. I agree with you [heart].” Less than half a block later I came across another Tesla sedan, freshly keyed. “We hate him too,” read a sign hung from the offices above the Tesla dealership showroom.
We are in early days. Trump has been in office just over a month. “Big Balls” and the rest of the DOGE marauders have only been at it a few weeks. Tesla protests are even newer. It’s possible that even if a boycott were to wipe out some of Musk’s wealth, sketchy government contracts for things like $400 million in armored Teslas, or a $2 billion FAA deal for Starlink, will more than make up for it. Mass movements require mass awareness, and we’re not collectively tuning into the same newscasts or music videos, and Musk meanwhile owns a disinformation factory. Boycotts rarely have the kind of impact activists hope for, they tend to be too diffuse or too hotly contested.
But opposition movements always seem hopeless until they’re not. Apartheid existed for decades and then came crashing down rapidly. We didn’t know that its heirs would be wreaking havoc on this country four decades later, but history isn’t an unbroken line that goes up and to the right. Some of the bad stuff comes back and has to be fought again.
The South Africa apartheid regime was defeated. Maybe one South African can be too.
