The news
JOHANNESBURG — The South African government plans to intensify talks with billionaire Elon Musk over investments in his native country.
President Cyril Ramaphosa recently said he had a conversation with the world’s richest man after Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink approached the government to seek regulatory approval.
The president is looking forward to more conversations with Musk as the government ramps up efforts to attract investment, Ramaphosa spokesman Vincent Magwenya told Semafor Africa. “The chat was not just about Starlink but also a broader set of investments including Tesla and Space X,” Magwenya said.
Starlink provides broadband internet via a network of more than 5,000 satellites deployed by sister company SpaceX. The company currently operates in more than a dozen African countries, including Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Malawi and Botswana. But it has failed to gain regulatory approval in several countries, including South Africa.
Ramaphosa said in a speech to reporters in Pretoria last week that he had told Musk: “I want you to come home and invest here.” The president added that he and Musk “will have another conversation.”
Learn more
The Ramaphosa-led government has a special programme to cut bureaucracy and make doing business easier, thereby attracting more investment.
A deal with a prominent investor like Musk could ride on the positive sentiment gripping South Africa after May’s election, which saw no clear winner, and could lead to the formation of a coalition government.
The country’s currency and stock markets have strengthened, as has consumer confidence. Ratings agency Fitch said last week that the coalition government had reduced the political uncertainty that came with the election. Fitch said in a statement on Friday that it expects the government to continue its reform program, “which will contribute to a modest increase in real GDP growth.”
Step back
Elon Musk will seem an odd bedfellow for the African National Congress, the anti-apartheid liberation party. Musk, who left the country at 17 during apartheid, rarely talks about Africa or South Africa in his daily tirade of posts on X. But this past July, he joined far-right commentators in spreading misinformation on the platform he owns, sharing posts claiming that white farmers were being genocided in South Africa.
And in a post responding to apartheid-era anti-white boer song by fierce politician Julius Malema, he lashed out at President Ramaphosa, saying: “They are openly committed to genocide of white people in South Africa. @CyrilRamaphosa why are you not saying anything?”
In an essay on his biography by Walter Isaacson last November, South Africa-based writer Eve Fairbanks criticized Musk for perpetuating an exaggerated myth about the past and the daily realities of white South Africans: “South Africa is a deeply misunderstood country, and Musk’s comments thicken the clouds of misunderstanding that swirl around it,” Fairbanks wrote.
