Apart from Elon Musk it’s clear the US president has the ear of South Africans, or those who have lived here. From Moneyweb.
Everyone by now is aware that Elon Musk has the ear of US President Donald Trump, and is to a large extent shaping US attitudes to SA.
Apart from Musk, there are several others with strong South African ties in Trump’s inner circle, including David Sacks, the US’s new AI and crypto czar; billionaire investor Peter Thiel, a key backer of Trump for many years; and Joel Pollak, who has been tipped as the next US ambassador to SA.
The most influential of these is Musk, also the world’s wealthiest man.
Though he has distanced himself from South Africa and, according to the Musk biography by Walter Isaacson, couldn’t wait to get out of here fast enough, he still evinces a strong interest in the country where he grew up.
That interest has been amplified of late, where Musk has used his massive X platform to characterise SA’s Expropriation Act as “openly racist” and has frequently berated the ANC for its lengthening list of race-based laws.
“What’s happening in South Africa is deeply wrong. Not what Mandela intended at all,” he wrote in early March.
Whether or not Musk is guilty of spreading misinformation – as many news outlets allege – it’s clear he has fixed SA in the crosshairs of the US administration and likely pushed for the executive order signed by Trump on 7 February 2025, which cut aid to South Africa while offering Afrikaners refugee status in the US.
Read: Trump ends thousands of USAID-funded programmes in SA
Musk now steers the US Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), which has hacked waste in many government departments.
Musk’s influence spiked post-Trump’s November 2024 presidential win, with reports of him having a hand in some of the picks in Trump’s team.
There are also reports that Musk’s denial of a Starlink licence in SA (for failing to meet BEE requirements) has fuelled policy revenge, though he also met President Cyril Ramaphosa in September 2024 on the sidelines of a United Nations meet-up, apparently to smooth ties – though there’s little evidence of Musk warming to SA or Ramaphosa of late.
Read: ‘Starlinking’ South Africa through unconventional means?
Musk is inarguably one of the world’s greatest influencers, and as the owner of X, he has the potential to sway political opinions and potentially unseat governments.
Less well known are some of the other South African connections in the Trump circle.
Joel Pollak
Born in Yeoville, Johannesburg, in 1977 to an Orthodox Jewish family, Joel Pollak moved to the US at age two.
He is a Harvard Law graduate who went on to become senior editor-at-large at conservative news site Breitbart.
He returned to SA to study at the University of Cape Town in 2002 and ended up as DA leader Tony Leon’s speechwriter.
There he met his future wife, Julia Bertelsmann, whose mother, Rhoda Kadalie, was a prominent figure in the anti-apartheid movement.
Pollak recently spoke to Moneyweb editor Ryk van Niekerk, cautioning South Africans to listen to what Trump is saying about the country and expressing frustration from across US party lines on the direction of SA foreign policy – not least its embrace of “pariah regimes” around the world.
He has written sympathetically about SA’s white farmers and criticised the ANC, aligning with Musk’s views.
His appointment as ambassador to SA awaits US Senate approval.
David Sacks
David Sacks, the new crypto czar in the Trump administration, was born in Cape Town in 1972 but moved to the US at age five.
He co-founded PayPal in 1998 alongside Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, Luke Nosek, and Ken Howery – what’s now dubbed the ‘PayPal Mafia’.
Sacks is adored by the crypto crowd and was appointed by Trump to craft a pro-crypto legal framework to overturn the hostile approach taken by the former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler. Last month, Sacks outlined his immediate priorities: put legislation in place for stablecoins and set up a bitcoin reserve for the US – which was announced last week.
Sacks is an interesting character. He produced the rather excellent satirical movie Thank You for Smoking in 2005, and in 2006 co-founded Geni.com, a genealogy site for tracing family trees.
In 2008 he launched Yammer, a social network for businesses, that was eventually sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion.
After Yammer he became interim CEO of Zenefits, a troubled HR software firm and managed to slash its losses in just 10 months.
In 2017, he co-founded Craft Ventures, a venture capital fund that with a string of bullseyes – from Airnb to Uber, Neuralink, Slack, SpaceX (Musk’s company), Palantir (Thiel’s company) and crypto company BitGo.
The Craft Ventures fund is still going with billions under management.
He’s always been a crypto enthusiast, with a particular fondness for bitcoin.
“What bitcoin offers is a different kind of currency where it’s not backed by a government; it’s backed by math; it’s backed by encryption,” he said in a 2022 interview.
It’s not known if Sacks still has family ties in SA, but if so, please let us know.
Sacks was key in the Trump administration’s decision last week to launch a strategic bitcoin (BTC) reserve, using about 200 000 BTC (worth roughly $17 billion) already seized by law enforcement in criminal and civil cases.
As a side note, it’s remarkable that PayPal had such strong South African connections.
Another member of the team was Roelof Botha, born in Pretoria in 1973, who joined PayPal as director of corporate development in 2000 and was a critical player in the company’s public offering before venturing off to found Sequoia Capital, which now manages north of $85 billion.
Botha, who is not part of Trump’s inner circle, has kept his political views to himself, unlike the other members of the ‘PayPal mafia’ – Thiel, Musk and Sacks.
Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel was born in Germany in 1967, but in the 1970s his parents moved (briefly) to Johannesburg, where he attended Pridwin Preparatory School, before the family relocated to Swakopmund in South West Africa, then under South African administration.
By age 10, he had relocated with his family to the US, so the SA link in this case is not particularly strong.
He founded digital payments company Confinity in 1998, bootstrapped with personal cash of anywhere between $500 000 and $1 million, before merging with Musk’s X.com (the digital payments company Musk formed in the 1990s and revived in July 2023 after he bought Twitter) – giving birth to PayPal.
Thiel became the CEO and then chair of PayPal, steering it to a $1.5 billion sale to eBay in 2002.
He pocketed $55 million (more than R1 billion if converted at today’s exchange rate) for his 3.7% stake.
He is famously remembered for taking big bets on hedge fund Clarium Capital in 2002 and Facebook in 2004. In 2003 he launched Palantir Technologies, currently valued at $108 billion – a more than three-fold leap since 2023, boosted by Trump’s election in 2024.
Thiel is a Trump mega-donor and introduced US Vice President JD Vance to the president.
He appears to have no specific views on SA, but his libertarian and free market (and anti-aid) bias has undoubtedly influenced Trump’s picks.
