President Donald Trump evoked Elon Musk during his Oval Office meeting with South Africa’s president on Wednesday, during talks about the ongoing attacks white farmers in the country are facing.
Trump went back and forth with President Cyril Ramaphosa over whether what is occurring in South Africa is indeed a ‘genocide’ against white farmers. At one point, during the conversation, a reporter asked Trump how the United States and South Africa might be able to improve their relations.
The president said that relations with South Africa are an important matter to him, noting he has several personal friends who are from there, including professional golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, who were present at Tuesday’s meeting, and Elon Musk.
Unprompted, Trump added that while Musk may be a South African native, he doesn’t want to ‘get [him] involved’ in the ongoing foreign diplomacy matters that played out during Tuesday’s meeting.
‘I don’t want to get Elon involved. That’s all I have to do, get him into another thing,’ Trump said to light laughter. ‘But Elon happens to be from South Africa. This is what Elon wanted. He actually came here on a different subject — sending rockets to Mars — OK? He likes that better. He likes that subject better. But Elon’s from South Africa, and I don’t want to talk to him about that. I don’t think it’s fair to him.’
Musk, who was present at the Oval Office meeting Tuesday, has been an open critic of his native-born country’s government and has described the ongoing conflict there as a ‘genocide.’
Ahead of the meeting with Ramaphosa earlier this month, Musk-owned X garnered backlash over its AI chatbot, Grok, providing unsolicited responses about attacks against white farmers in South Africa.
Musk’s artificial intelligence company, which makes the technology for Grok, said following complaints that an ‘unauthorized modification’ to Grok’s algorithm is the reason why it kept talking about race and politics in South Africa, according to the Associated Press.