Joshua Benton wrote about Elon Musk’s grandfather in The Atlantic. Benton spent more time researching him than did Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson. It’s not a pretty picture but it might provide insight into Musk’s worldview. I hope not.

Benton wrote:

In Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, a mere page and a half is devoted to introducing Musk’s grandfather, a Canadian chiropractor named Joshua N. Haldeman. Isaacson describes him as a source of Musk’s great affection for danger—“a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions” and “quirky conservative populist views” who did rope tricks at rodeos and rode freight trains like a hobo. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” Isaacson quotes Musk as having said. “Risk energized him.”

But in 1950, Haldeman’s “quirky” politics led him to make an unusual and dramatic choice: to leave Canada for South Africa. Haldeman had built a comfortable life for himself in Regina, Saskatchewan’s capital. His chiropractic practice was one of Canada’s largest and allowed him to possess his own airplane and a 20-room home he shared with his wife and four young children. He’d been active in politics, running for both the provincial and national parliaments and even becoming the national chairman of a minor political party. Meanwhile, he’d never even been to South Africa.

What would make a man undertake such a radical change? Isaacson writes that Haldeman had come “to believe that the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft.” One of Haldeman’s sons has written that it may have simply been “his adventurous spirit and the desire for a more pleasant climate in which to raise his family.” But another factor was at play: his strong support for the brand-new apartheid regime.

An examination of Joshua Haldeman’s writings reveals a radical conspiracy theorist who expressed racist, anti-Semitic, and antidemocratic views repeatedly, and over the course of decades—a record I studied across hundreds of documents from the time, including newspaper clips, self-published manuscripts, university archives, and private correspondence. Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead “White Christian Civilization” in its fight against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the “hordes of Coloured people” they controlled.

Benton writes that Haldeman wrote a self-published book, and there is only one copy in all of North America, at Michigan State University. Benton traveled there to read it. It’s title:

The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa.

In this book, Haldeman expressed his hope that South Africa would become “the leader of White Christian Civilization as she is becoming more and more the focal point, the bulwark, and the subject of attack by anti-Christian, anti-White forces throughout the world.”

He was, quite simply, a vociferous racist and anti-Semite. Isaacson’s father was Jewish. It’s surprising that he paid so little attention to Musj’s lineage.