Joshua Norman Haldeman died in a plane crash in 1974, when his grandson Elon Musk was three years old. He was a chiropractor, a pilot, a political organiser in two countries, and a self-published author.
Three accounts of that life exist, drawn from the same set of facts. His family and profession record an adventurer. His grandson’s authorised biographer records a quirky conservative populist. Two researchers who went into the archives in 2023 record a pro-apartheid antisemitic conspiracy theorist. This page sets out all three and what each rests on.
The undisputed facts
Version one: the adventurer
This is the account preserved by his family and his profession. Maye Musk’s memoir attributes the 1950 move to meeting missionaries who described South Africa’s beauty. His son Scott Haldeman, writing in the Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association, records several stated reasons and concludes the primary one was probably his adventurous spirit and a wish for a better climate in which to raise his family.
In this telling the Kalahari expeditions are the defining feature, the 1940 arrest is a consequence of outspoken wartime anti-communism, and the politics are incidental to a life of risk-taking.
Version two: the quirky populist
Walter Isaacson’s authorised biography of Elon Musk discusses Haldeman only briefly, presenting him as a risk-taking adventurer and characterising his politics as quirky. Isaacson’s account of the emigration is that Haldeman had come to believe the Canadian government was taking too much control over individual lives and that the country had gone soft, and so chose South Africa — which was still under white apartheid rule.
Version three: the archive
In September 2023, two pieces published within days of each other set out a different account, and both rest on Haldeman’s own published words rather than on recollection.
Jill Lepore, professor of history and law at Harvard, wrote in The New Yorker under the title “The World According to Elon Musk’s Grandfather”, subtitled as a piece about what happened to antisemitic rants before social media. She has said she located Haldeman’s Pretoria political writings from 1960 and 1962 in an archive that year. Her assessment, offered explicitly as a correction to Isaacson’s framing, was that Haldeman was a pro-apartheid antisemitic conspiracy theorist who attributed much of what troubled him about the world to Jewish financiers, and that in South Africa he was an ardent defender of apartheid.
Joshua Benton, founder of the Nieman Journalism Lab, wrote in The Atlantic under a title describing Haldeman as antisemitic and apartheid-loving, and characterised him as a radical conspiracy theorist holding racist, antisemitic and antidemocratic views. Benton located excerpts from Haldeman’s self-published 1960 book.
What he wrote
Haldeman argued that South Africa could become the “leader of White Christian Civilization”, describing the country as a bulwark against “anti-Christian, anti-White forces”.
He also wrote a book defending South Africa’s system of apartheid, and promoted conspiracy theories including material drawn from the fabricated antisemitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Technocracy Incorporated
The organisation Haldeman led in Canada advocated that government be run by engineers and technical experts rather than elected politicians. Its members sometimes used numbers in place of names, practised quasi-military salutes, and by the late 1930s had adopted grey uniforms. Contemporary newspapers described it as having the tone of an incipient fascist movement.
Canada banned it after declaring war on Germany in 1939, on the basis that it was opposed to the war. Haldeman was arrested in 1940 as a director of what had by then become an illegal organisation.
The same event carries opposite meanings in the competing accounts: a chiropractic biography frames it as vocal wartime anti-communism briefly landing him in jail; the archival account frames it as the banning of a movement sympathetic to the Axis position. The verifiable core is that the organisation was proscribed as anti-war and that he was arrested as one of its directors, fined, and released.
What is not established
Nazi party membership. There is no evidence that Joshua Haldeman or his wife Winnifred belonged to the Nazi party or to any Nazi movement in Canada. That claim circulated widely on social media in January 2025 and was examined by Snopes, which found no direct evidence for it. Technocracy Inc’s uniforms and salutes are not party membership and this site does not report them as such.
The motive for the 1950 emigration. Snopes also found no conclusive evidence for the claim that Haldeman moved to South Africa specifically because he supported apartheid — as distinct from the documented fact that he defended it in print after arriving. Isaacson’s account and the archival account are not mutually exclusive, and neither is proven.
The caveat, from the historian who did the research
Lepore addressed the obvious objection to her own article inside it:
Jill Lepore“Elon Musk is not responsible for the political opinions of his grandfather, who died when Musk was three years old.”
The page is here for two narrower reasons. First, the material is genuinely contested — an authorised biography and an archival investigation describe the same man incompatibly, and readers encountering either in isolation are being given a partial account. Second, this family history is repeatedly invoked, by supporters and critics alike, in arguments about Elon Musk’s views on South Africa. Anyone reaching for it deserves to know exactly what it does and does not support.
Outstanding on this page
Haldeman’s 1960 book and his 1960 and 1962 Pretoria writings should be cited directly. We rely on Lepore’s and Benton’s accounts of documents we have not ourselves examined. The Lepore and Benton articles are paywalled at source and are cited here through Snopes’ reporting of them, which is a weaker citation than we would like. Lepore returned to the subject in The New York Times in April 2025 and that piece has not been reviewed for this page.
Sources
- No proof Elon Musk’s grandparents belonged to Nazi partySnopes · 29 January 2025 · Lepore and Benton quoted, competing family accounts
- Musk’s critics claim his grandparents belonged to Nazi Party — here’s what we knowSnopes · 5 February 2025
- The World According to Elon Musk’s GrandfatherJill Lepore · Harvard faculty listing · citation of record
- Discussion quoting Lepore’s article at lengthLanguage Log · 25 September 2023 · Isaacson framing and Lepore’s caveat
- Who was Elon Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman?Business Insider · September 2023 · contemporaneous press on Technocracy Inc
- The prehistory of Technocracy and Elon’s grandpaThe Brooklyn Rail · May 2025 · cites Benton, The Atlantic
- The Canadian roots of Elon Musk’s conspiracist grandpaCBC · Social Credit, Diefenbaker, the apartheid book
- Haldeman, Technocracy and Social Credit in 1940s CanadaStanding the Gaff · Toronto Star record of the 1944 meeting, 1940 arrest
This article follows the standards set out in How This Site Sources Its Claims. If you believe anything on this page is inaccurate, please use our corrections policy and right of reply. Corrections are published, dated and logged.