Riches to richest The apartheid-era years of privilege that shaped Musk

With an imposing double-winged redbrick main building, and school songs lifted directly from Harrow's songbook, Pretoria boys high school is every inch the South African mirror of the English private schools it was founded in 1901 to imitate.

- Rachel Savage

Elon Musk, now one of the most powerful people in US politics, spent his final school years in the 1980s as a day pupil on the lush, tree-filled campus in South Africa's administrative capital, close to his father's large home in Waterkloof, a wealthy Pretoria suburb.

South Africa was rocked by uprisings as apartheid entered its dying years. By 1986, the white minority government imposed a state of emergency. But in the segregated white enclaves, life was affluent and peaceful.

"While the country as a whole was very much in flames and in turmoil, we were blissfully very safe in our little leafy suburbs," said Jonathan Stewart, who was a year above Musk at Pretoria boys, which also counts the Labour politician Peter Hain, the Booker prize-winning novelist Damon Galgut and the murderer and Paralympian Oscar Pistorius among its former pupils. "You had this wealthy set, in relative terms, and everybody else was excluded."

Musk, who was born in Pretoria in 1971, railed on his social media platform X last month against the "openly racist laws" of the country of his birth and responded "yes" to the statement: "White South Africans are being persecuted for their race in their home country."

After the posts by the man now at the helm of Donald Trump's "department of government efficiency" (Doge), the US president signed an executive order accusing South Africa's government of "unjust racial discrimination" against white Afrikaners, citing a law allowing land to be expropriated in certain circumstances. The order cut aid to South Africa, which receives 17% of its HIV/Aids budget from the US, and offered asylum to Afrikaners.