Just saw Elon Musk clarifying something that apparently needed clarifying - he's not Afrikaner, he's actually from a British/English background. Born in Pretoria back in 1971, but his roots are English, not Dutch/German/French settler descent like Afrikaners are.

What's wild is he drew a comparison to JRR Tolkien, who was also born in South Africa (Bloemfontein, 1892) but had English parents. Apparently Musk is a huge Tolkien fan - like, he's cited his work on social media multiple times, and there's even this story about Tolkien's books playing a role when he was courting Grimes. Kind of a cool connection between two people born in South Africa but coming from that British heritage.

Someone had written about Musk growing up in an Afrikaner family, which apparently bugged him enough to post about it. The whole thing got me thinking about how different those two communities actually were - English South Africans vs Afrikaners had pretty different cultural identities. Anyway, interesting to see him set the record straight on where he's actually from. Makes you wonder what other details people get wrong about these figures.