South African president phones influential billionaire Musk after Trump's funding threat
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa spoke with Elon Musk a day after U.S. President Donald Trump promised to cut the country's funding over a land expropriation law
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — South African President Cyril Ramaphosa spoke with Donald Trump's “influential” billionaire adviser Elon Musk a day after the new U.S. president promised to cut funding for South Africa over a land expropriation law, Ramaphosa's spokesperson said Wednesday.
Ramaphosa’s conversation with Musk was “logical,” spokesperson Vincent Magwenya said, because the South African-born Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur has held previous investment-related discussions with Ramaphosa and is a Trump ally.
The land law, which was signed by Ramaphosa last month, is contentious because it gives the government scope to expropriate land from private parties.
Trump announced Sunday that he would stop financial assistance while the U.S. investigated why South Africa was “confiscating land” from some people, without saying who. He told reporters wrongly that the South African government was taking away land and “actually they’re doing things that are perhaps far worse than that.” Trump again didn’t provide details.
The South African government said Trump’s announcement and related criticism of the country by Musk was full of “misinformation and distortions” and the call to Musk was to set the record straight.
Musk, who is leading the Trump administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency, has long criticized the government in his homeland, a key U.S. trading partner in Africa, as being anti-white and has cast the law in question as a deliberate act to take land away from its white minority.
He faces scrutiny in the U.S. for his control over parts
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