When I read the New York Times article entitled ‘Elon Musk Left a South Africa That Was Rife With Misinformation and White Privilege’, I immediately thought of one of Musk’s late South African compatriots.
Harry Frederick Oppenheimer, the gold and diamond magnate, was, like Musk, the pre-eminent SA-born capitalist of his time. And, like Musk, Oppenheimer garnered his fair share of attention from the American newspaper of record.
Heir to both the global De Beers diamond cartel and the Anglo American Corporation, the world’s largest gold producer, founded by his father Sir Ernest Oppenheimer in 1917, the second-generation Oppenheimer was a crusading entrepreneur.
‘HFO’ – Oppenheimer’s sobriquet in the upper echelons of Anglo – was constantly pursuing the next frontier, though his ambitions were terrestrial rather than celestial. Fortune ranked him as one of the world’s ten richest men in the 1960s, and later he would be a regular fixture on the magazine’s list of billionaires. HFO’s politics generated as much controversy as Musk’s, and they were of keen speculative interest to the commentariat.
From the 1960s until his death in 2000, Oppenheimer’s companies completely dominated every sector of the South African economy. HFO was also an international financier. By the early 1980s Anglo American had become, through an affiliate mining finance house, Minorco, the largest single foreign investor in the United States.
A South African empire has reached the US, Thomas Lippman wrote in the Washington Post in 1982, by which point Minorco was the biggest shareholder in Phibro Corporation, the world’s leading commodities trader. Phibro, in turn, had recently bought Salomon Brothers, the New York-based investment bank and number-one bond-trading firm globally.