At Elon Musk, he is a tutelary figure, that of his maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman (1902-1974). He lived an adventurous life in South Africa, traveling from Algiers to Cape Town by car or exploring an improbable city lost in the Kalahari Desert. In the 1930s, the grandfather lived in Canada and had been a member of Technocray, a movement on the far right of the far right dubbed “the soviet of technicians” – banned in 1940 – which wanted to replace elected officials and capitalist owners with scientists. and engineers. In 1949, Joshua Haldeman left Canada, judging his country too “socialist” for South Africa.
Elon Musk, who emigrated from his native South Africa to North America in 1989, is in the same vein: this genius engineer with libertarian convictions finds that the United States is becoming too democratic. But instead of leaving the country that allowed him to become the richest man in the world at 50, Elon Musk is leading the fight, on increasingly political ground. The last is the attempt to take over the social network Twitter, accused of no longer respecting freedom of expression, but it is part of a lasting and libertarian challenge to the established order, especially when it is a Democrat.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Elon Musk defied San Francisco Bay authorities, who wanted to prevent him from reopening his Tesla factory for health reasons, when his Detroit competitors had the right to do so. “Give people back their damn freedom”, had railed Elon Musk at the end of April 2020, supported by the American president, Donald Trump. Exasperated with a high-tax California, tired of a region dominated by Democratic political monoculture, he packed up in 2021, like many conservatives, for Texas, stronghold of the Republicans, whose local income tax is equal to zero.
Brutal response to reproaches
It is in this state, of which he is now a tax resident, that Elon Musk set up his new Tesla factory in Austin, and it is on the banks of the Rio Grande river, in Boca Chica, that space launchers are tested. from SpaceX. And, for a year, Elon Musk has become one of the main opponents of the Democratic President of the United States, Joe Biden: the latter has, it is true, engaged in hostilities by not inviting the boss of Telsa to meetings on the electric car, on the pretext that its factories are not unionized and attributing to General Motors (GM) the paternity of the electric car.
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