Pretoria, apartheid and the emerald mine

Elon Reeve Musk was born on 28 June 1971 in Pretoria. His mother, Maye, was a Canadian-born model and dietitian; his father, Errol, was a South African engineer. He has a younger brother, Kimbal, and a younger sister, Tosca. His parents divorced when he was young. [1]

In a 2013 oral history for the Computer History Museum he described teaching himself to program on a Commodore VIC-20 and selling a simple video game he wrote. He talked about reading constantly, including The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. These are his own recollections. [2]

Classmates and relatives have described a bookish boy who was badly bullied; he finished at Pretoria Boys High School. Guardian reporting in 2025 on his schooling placed it in the context of apartheid-era education, which was segregated by law. [3][4]

Apartheid was a legal system of racial segregation and white-minority rule. It ended through negotiations between 1990 and the 1994 election, after Musk had left. A white child in Pretoria had access to schools, neighborhoods and opportunities denied to the Black majority by law. That is context, not proof of any view he held as a child. [5]

The story was in print by 2012, when Esquire’s profile, built on family interviews, described Errol’s claimed interest in a Zambian emerald mine. In 2018 Errol gave Business Insider South Africa a fuller account of how he said the family came to own part of a mine. [1][2]

In April 2023, Musk publicly challenged anyone to prove his family co-owned an emerald mine. News24’s retrospective that month laid out the earlier accounts, including a 2014 magazine reference, alongside his denial. [3]

What the sources do not show is a money trail. Musk arrived in Canada as a teenager and made his first large sum when Compaq bought Zip2 in 1999. EBSCO puts his share at about $22 million, which he put into X.com. His roughly $172 million from the 2002 sale of PayPal was the stake he used for SpaceX and Tesla. [4][5]

Zambia is also not South Africa. The phrase “apartheid emerald mine” adds a location and a mechanism none of these accounts establishes.