Joy Behar has retracted her bold proclamation that the South African-born Elon Musk was “pro-apartheid” after she said she received flack for her comment.
While speaking about the tech billionaire’s working relationship with President Donald Trump on Thursday’s episode of The View, Behar remarked that Musk purely served as Trump’s ego-booster.
“Elon Musk kisses his butt and strokes his tiny ego — or big ego, whatever it is,” the 82-year-old TV host said.
“And [Trump] can take a nap while the guy, who was not born in this country, who was born under apartheid in South Africa — so has that mentality going on — he was pro-apartheid, as I understand it,” she continued. “A foreign agent; an enemy of the United States [can] do [Trump’s] job.”
Behar’s co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin, who previously served as Trump’s press secretary in 2020 before her early resignation, cut in to argue that while she “doesn’t like Elon,” she wouldn’t go as far as to “call him an enemy of the United States yet. Let’s give him some time.”
The show then went to a brief commercial break. Once they returned, Behar addressed viewers, saying: “Now I’m getting some flack because I said that Musk was pro-apartheid.
“I don’t really know for sure if he was,” she admitted. “He grew up at that time when the apartheid party was in full bloom, before the great Nelson Mandela fixed that. He was around at that time. But maybe he was. Maybe he wasn’t. He might have been a young guy, too.
“So don’t be suing me okay, Elon?” Behar quipped. “They’re allowed to say any lie they want, but we have to be really strict. That’s why this show’s important."
Musk, 52, was born in South Africa in 1971 amid the country’s apartheid regime, which was in place from 1948 to the early 1990s.
The system of institutionalized racism forced segregation between non-white South Africans and white people, ensuring the latter dominated the economy, including agriculture.
Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order to prioritize the U.S. resettlement of white South African “refugees” suffering from what he called “government-sponsored race-based discrimination.”
Trump raged in his order that South Africa’s government is seizing “ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation” and enacting “countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity” in employment, education and business.”
He wrote that the U.S. cannot support the government of South Africa’s “commission of rights violations in its country.”
South Africa's government has denied private land confiscations or racially motivated discrimination. Officials have said the government is looking at unused or publicly owned land to give citizens help who suffered generations of apartheid.
