Elon Musk Mocked After Saying Children Should Be 'Proud' That The 'Whites In The West' Ended Slavery

Elon Musk's latest post on X has reignited a global row over history, race, and public responsibility after he appeared to praise white Western actors for abolishing slavery — prompting ridicule and sharp rebuttals from historians and campaigners.

The Tesla and SpaceX chief's brief message, posted on the platform he owns, argued that children should be 'proud' that 'the Whites in the West' ended slavery, and amplified earlier tweets asserting that the British empire was the driving force behind abolition. The claim conflates complex legal, political, and moral histories into a single, celebratory narrative that scholars say whitewashes imperial violence.

Musk's Post and the Exact Claim

Musk's X post restated an argument he has circulated previously: that the British Empire's 19th-century legislation ended the slave trade and slavery worldwide, and that Western peoples therefore have cause for pride.

The tweet links to material celebrating Britain's Slave Trade Act (1807) and the Slaving Abolition Act (1833), and indicates Musk's reliance on a simple legal chronology rather than the tangled realities of empire. That juridical chronology is real: Parliament did pass the Slave Trade Act in 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act received Royal Assent in 1833, freeing enslaved people within much of the British Empire from Aug. 1 1834.

However, historians note those statutes sit against two uncomfortable facts: Britain had been a major participant in the transatlantic trade for centuries, and emancipation involved the state compensating slave-owners rather than the enslaved.

Scope, Compensation and Continuity

Quantitative records empahsises the scale: archives collated by the Voyages/Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database record tens of thousands of voyages and estimate that some 10–12 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic between the 16th and 19th centuries.

The British state's own paperwork complicates any triumphalist reading. When slavery was abolished in British colonies the government borrowed a vast sum, historically quoted as £20 million ($26 MILLION), to compensate slave-owners; the legacies of that payment and where the money flowed have been the subject of major academic investigation

University College London's 'Legacies of British Slave-Ownership' project digitised the compensation awards and traces how that capital shaped British institutions.

An FOI release from HM Treasury records the long financial tail of that debt; contemporary UK taxpayers were still paying off public borrowing associated, indirectly, with abolition-era finance until very recently, a fact used by commentators to challenge simplistic 'pride' narratives.

The Claim Draws Scorn

Musk's formulation collapses three separate arguments: that abolition was legally enacted; that the British state and parts of British society campaigned for abolition; and that abolition represents a singular moral advance attributable to 'white' actors.

That telescoping obscures the activism of enslaved and freed people, the work of Black and mixed-race abolitionists, and the violent realities of empire before and after the laws. Public historians who study archives and compensation records warn that celebrating the statutes without their context amounts to historical whitewashing.

Campaign groups point out practical continuities: forced labour, indentured labour schemes, brutal colonial governance and the economic extraction that fed industrial growth did not vanish with 1833. UCL's database and archival records of compensation are routinely cited as evidence that emancipation also profited a British elite, not the formerly enslaved, and that the afterlives of slavery persist.

On X, the post drew tens of thousands of replies and widespread mockery: many users highlighted empire's murderous record, famines, and the export of brutality across colonies. Others, often aligned with nationalist or reactionary currents, cheered Musk for pushing back against what they call 'presentist' readings of history.

Musk did not supply new documentary evidence in his post; instead he echoed a long-running public debate about empire that scholars and campaigners continue to contest.

The historical record is nuanced; Musk's tweet is not.