THERE is a common origin story to the new far-right billionaire backers of Donald Trump: apartheid South Africa.

Both Elon Musk and Peter Thiel — the biggest tech billionaires backing Trump — grew up there, where their fathers grew rich, respectively, mining diamonds and uranium — sectors at the core of the apartheid economy.

“The centrality of South Africa for the far right and for neoliberals is quite extraordinary,” said Boston University’s Professor Quinn Slobodian in a recent interview. “For Musk himself the experience of growing up there with a very authoritarian dictatorial father was a very dystopian one, from the way his biographer recounts it.”

Musk saw South Africa as a Darwinian war of all against all, according to Slobodian, and is now bringing this nihilistic vision of the world to his high-profile support for various far-right figures from Trump to Nigel Farage and Germany’s AfD.

It can hardly be a coincidence that these two billionaires, alongside others with South African links, such as Trump fundraiser David Sacks, are now in the vanguard of a new global far-right elite pushing the world toward fascism and a civilisational war.

The billionaire class has been raking in trillions of dollars at the expense of ordinary people for decades, a process that accelerated with both the Covid crisis and the Ukraine war.

As the recent killing of a US health industry executive exposed, the super-rich increasingly fear that ordinary people will start to hate those who are exploiting them and causing millions to suffer and die prematurely.

In a recent interview with Piers Morgan, Thiel was asked why he thought so many people sympathised with Luigi Mangioni, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The question threw him.

“Um… it’s… uh… I don’t know what to say.”

After almost visibly melting on camera, Thiel eventually said: “I still think you should try to make an argument and I think this is… there may be things wrong with our healthcare system but you have to make an argument and you have to try to find a way to convince people and change it by that.”

What this interview and others make clear is the likes of Thiel and Musk cannot handle anything other than soft-ball questions about how wealth inequality and surveillance technology are together undermining and destroying society.

Thiel on Gaza

When he was confronted last year about artificial intelligence’s role in Israeli military technology used to carry out genocide in Gaza, something his own companies are heavily involved in, Thiel was once again incoherent.

“Look again … I’m not … I’m not … you know, you know … with … without, without going into all the … you know I’m not on top of all the details of what’s going on in Israel, because my bias is to defer to Israel. It’s not for us to second-guess every, everything. And I believe that broadly the IDF gets to decide what it wants to do, and that they’re broadly in the right…”

In other interviews, Thiel has focused on the biblical prophecy of apocalypse that he feels could come to pass as a result of the destructive technology unleashed since Hiroshima in 1945.

Nuclear proliferation is something of a close family interest. Thiel’s father was involved in the clandestine drive of apartheid South Africa to acquire nuclear-grade uranium in Namibia.

What he doesn’t mention is that his firm’s own technology is bringing that apocalypse ever closer. Palantir is a major investor and creator of AI technologies. For over a decade, it has received major contracts across the US government — including the Department of Defence, Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

As a co-founder of Paypal, an early investor in Facebook and founder of sinister defence tech firm Palantir, Thiel is also currently taking over NHS data under a £480 million British government contract signed in 2023. His views of public healthcare are controversial: “Highways create traffic jams, welfare creates poverty, schools make people dumb and the NHS makes people sick,” he has said.

Palantir technologies are deployed to both US-backed wars in Gaza and Ukraine. As Responsible Statecraft reported last year, “Palantir has tested in real time its new Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) on the Ukrainian war front. It has been described as ‘an intelligence and decision-making system that can analyse enemy targets and propose battle plans.’ Other Palantir security technologies include AI for predictive policing and surveillance.”

Fear of the billionaires

Perhaps then it is not surprising that Thiel says he does not support controlling these technologies, despite what he admits are existential risks.

Thiel explained his opposition to government control of tech capitalism in a Hoover Institute interview: “Once you get a totalitarian one-world government and the reason I like to throw that risk in is that it seems to me that the implicit solution to existential risks is to lean in, to a very non-democratic one world state, that will highly regulate and stop these technologies, and if Greta [Thunberg] gets everyone on the planet to ride a bicycle maybe that’s a way to solve climate change. But it has this quality of going from the frying pan into the fire.”

Thiel believes that big government and climate regulators are among the causes of the slowdown in improvements to living standards over the last 50 years. He “leans in” on this explanation rather than the obvious: the billionaires and corporations have sucked up all the gains from technology, leaving ordinary people struggling.

And if you didn’t think billionaires already control the US, in the incoming Trump presidency, at least 13 billionaires have been appointed to government posts.

In the past, billionaires were donors and influencers, and politicians deferred to them because they wanted their “investment.” But under Trump, they will be running the government.

This presents a significant political risk to the men who control the technology that now dominates our lives. They need strategies to ensure that the public doesn’t blame them for why living standards are not rising, and why the Western world feels more and more like a techno dystopia.

The strategy that billionaires have arrived at is to create a fear and hostility towards “the Other” — migrants, Muslims, terrorists, the “woke.” Such imagined threats distract from the very real forces of billionaire capital, ecological destruction and imperial violence that are shaping our world.

Elon’s plans for Britain

In this vein, SpaceX and X owner Elon Musk has appointed himself as the Wizard of Oz of the far-right “great replacement”/“rape crusaders.” He now says Farage is no longer fit to lead the anti-immigrant Reform party because he will not support jailed agitator Tommy Robinson.

Robinson is in jail for contempt of court for repeating dangerous lies about a Syrian refugee child. It’s a pretty low kind of martyrdom for a pro-Israel street thug, but for Musk, backing Robinson is what he wants from Reform if he’s going to fund it with his infinite millions.

Musk’s investment in Trump — a whopping $250m for his campaign, has reportedly made him $200 billion in rising stock values since the election, something of a record return.

He has also taken a very strong interest in British politics since stirring up hatred around the Southport stabbings last summer, which sparked riots across England. He said that “civil war is inevitable” and did his best to incite it.

He appealed to King Charles to remove Keir Starmer and his Cabinet from office because of the former director of public prosecution’s lack of action against paedophiles when he was top prosecutor from 2009-13.

More than that though, Musk has appointed himself as leader of the West’s anti-Muslim far right, and he has no fear that anyone will stop him. He is drunk on his own Islamophobic Kool-Aid.

While Musk is very big on the “threat” from Muslims, spreading inflammatory lies on his platform X, Thiel is big on the threat of “one world government” — the pet fear of most right-wing libertarians.

Staying top dog

Billionaires like Thiel and Musk are top dogs in the current world order, and they do not want a bigger dog than them stepping in and stopping their reckless, highly profitable activities. They perhaps fear that a party or government espousing socialism or simply brave enough to tax wealth could place controls over billionaire capital, and deprive these masters of the universe of their wealth and power.

In China, the communist party has this power over billionaires. They are not the top dogs in China’s social system — unlike in ours. That may explain why when China’s real estate sector got out of control, the government cracked down and deflated the sector. In the West, the opposite happened: the state regularly pumps real estate values, leading to today’s worst-ever housing crisis.

Musk is a key figure in Trump’s new administration, in which his role will be to slash and burn the US government, in a manner similar to the chainsaw-wielding far-right president of Argentina, Javier Milei.

History has taken a dizzying turn. Everything is accelerating towards the apocalyptic — genocide in Palestine, Trump’s plans to seize Panama and Greenland, Musk and the right-wing media on the rampage with the relentless anti-Muslim hysteria.

For the ideologues of the billionaire class, the favoured strategy to hold on to power is to rile the masses into genocidal hate, to whip up fear, anything to stop them from joining the dots and turning on the billionaires who are expropriating our present and future and profiting from permanent war.