There is little doubt that Elon Musk, the most famous alumnus of Bryanston High School, likes nothing better than sprinkling droplets of disinformation in the same way that ANC mayors tend to ladle out water tanker tenders.
This week, he waded back into South Africa’s white genocide debate — if you can have a “debate” about something for which there is about as much evidence as there is for unicorns.
What is rankling Musk is South Africa’s bullheaded reluctance to dilute regulations that insist any company offering communications services must have 30% black ownership to qualify for a licence.
In his favourite echo chamber, Musk fumed that the regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa), won’t give his satellite broadband company Starlink a licence “even though I was BORN THERE, because I am not Black”.
Then Musk dropped a clanger: “We were offered many times the opportunity to bribe our way to a licence by pretending that a Black guy runs Starlink SA, but I have refused to do so on principle.”
Now, was this a “bribe” in the same metaphorical way that Cape Town restaurant prices are “extortion”? Or was there an actual request for money — you know, a literal bribe?
It’s hard to say for sure, since Musk mostly speaks ketamine.
Either way, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, responded poorly, telling Musk to “move on” as there are 192 other UN members he could sell to.
It’s a daft response since as creepy as Musk may be, South Africa should be offering all of Carl Niehaus’s unborn parents for a shot at luring Starlink to the country.
In a June 2025 letter to Parks Tau, the minister of trade, industry & competition, Ryan Goodnight, a director of Starlink’s holding company SpaceX, said the company “has never sought an exemption from [BEE] laws, nor have we asked for any special treatment”.
Should it ultimately matter that Musk is unlikeable, right-wing or a conspiracist? Not so much
“The only reason Starlink is not in South Africa today is because Icasa’s licence regulations stipulate that all licence holders must be 30% locally owned. As you are aware, Starlink is a global system, and we must retain sole ownership of all our subsidiaries,” he wrote.
Goodnight pointed out that the ICT sector code allows for “equity equivalence programmes”, which allow multinationals to boost transformation in other ways, such as investing in black business. And this is already being used in South Africa’s pharmaceutical, banking and technology sectors by Microsoft, IBM and Amazon.
Were Starlink given a licence under such a programme, Goodnight said one of its first actions would be to “help solve” the situation where millions of children in rural areas don’t have access to broadband internet. It would provide “over 5,000 rural schools with fully funded Starlink kits and services” and maintenance services, “impacting the lives of an estimated 2.4-million schoolchildren”.
In a confidential submission to the department of communications & digital technologies last July, Goodnight cited World Bank research showing that for each 10% increase in broadband penetration, GDP growth in countries such as South Africa rises 1.21%.
“Giving millions of South Africans access to broadband would constitute one of the biggest empowerment programmes the South African government has undertaken,” he said.
It’s a powerful argument, and one that Magwenya’s offhand “move on” remark ignores. But you can understand the reluctance: equity equivalence programmes don’t exactly scream Lotto billions to ANC-linked oligarchs.
Should it ultimately matter that Musk is unlikeable, right-wing or a conspiracist? Well, not so much.
This week, Musk responded to an old video with rows of white crosses planted on a farm road in South Africa, saying that “each cross is a murdered family”.
Which isn’t true — the CBS investigative programme 60 Minutes visited that road and spoke to the farmer who planted the crosses, Darryl Brown.
“It definitely wasn’t a burial site,” said Brown. “Those crosses were there for less than 48 hours. It was purely an avenue of crosses that we planted there in honour of commercial farmers that had lost their lives.”
So, yes, the crosses do commemorate farmers slain in violence — gruesome and unacceptable — but no, each cross doesn’t represent a family.
Still, if being a militant ignoramus were a crime, we’d have to repurpose the Northern Cape into correctional services facilities for most politicians.
The tide is shifting, though. Communications minister Solly Malatsi (a DA deployee) gazetted a policy in December that would allow for wider application of equity equivalence in the ICT sector, accommodating companies such as Starlink. Malatsi said that of the 19,000 submissions he got over this change, 90% were in support.
Only, you can bet none of that 90% came from the ANC.
Khusela Diko, Ramaphosa’s former spokesperson who now chairs parliament’s communications committee, attacked Malatsi’s proposal as an “affront to the centuries-old fight for equity”, saying it would “reverse the gains of democracy”.
Thankfully, nobody needs to listen to Diko, a woman whose late husband famously scored a R125m personal protective equipment tender. Evidently Diko believes that giving some oligarch 30% of Starlink advances the “fight for equity”, while giving children internet access doesn’t.
Treading a deft political line, Malatsi has been at pains to say his policy change isn’t simply to benefit Starlink. He claims his role is limited to making policy, while Icasa is the sole entity allowed to grant licences.
Now, however, is the time to be bolder: rather than wait for the glacial Icasa to move, Malatsi could try to effect change through the back door — introduce legislation in parliament declaring that satellite companies such as Starlink are ICT companies, not standard communications licencees, and are thus eligible to use equity equivalence programmes.
Malatsi should not be coy: any responsive government should be proud of rewriting the law to inject adrenaline into South Africa’s GDP, while empowering 2.4-million schoolkids.
