South West Africa had been a German colony until the end
of the first world war and Thiel lived for a time in the
city of Swakopmund, where he attended a German-language
school while his father worked at a nearby uranium mine.
(...) “I was there in the 1980s and you could walk into a
curio shop and buy mugs with Nazi swastikas on them. If
you’re German and you’re in Swakopmund in the 1970s, which
is when Thiel was there, you’re part of that community,”
he said.
"Thiel, who moved to the US when he was 10"
Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, moved from Canada to South Africa in 1950 because he liked the newly elected apartheid government.
In the 1930s, Haldeman was the Canadian leader of a fringe political movement originating in the US, Technocracy Incorporated, that advocated abolishing democracy in favor of government by elite technicians but which took on overtones of fascism with its uniforms and salutes.
The Canadian government banned Technocracy Incorporated during the second world war as a threat to the country’s security in part for its opposition to fighting Hitler. Haldeman was charged with publishing documents opposing the war and sent to prison for two months.
After the war, Haldeman led a separate political party that among other things promoted the antisemitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When that went nowhere, he moved to South Africa because he said he liked the core National party philosophy of Christian nationalism that Vorster likened to Nazism.
Of course, many say, Elon Musk shrugged all that off ... and then he started boosting neo nazi commentators and tele-attending AfD rallies to tell them to not carry any guilt about their grandparents and the holocaust.
Can't really blame that on the casual racism of his upbringing though, can we?: https://youtu.be/CIGnIvL18_4?t=31