One main takeaway — that Pretoria and Durban during Musk's childhood and adolescence were indeed starkly segregated, with deep racial divides around wealth and human rights — is unsurprising, but it's still interesting to hear Musk's former associates grappling with those realities in retrospect.
A less intuitive takeaway from the story is that rather than simply going with that flow, it sounds as though the young Musk did, in small ways, sometimes oppose the racist norms of his environment. At the same time, Errol himself still sounds a little nostalgic for the days of apartheid, telling the newspaper that South Africa was "mostly better and safer" back in those days.
One time at lunch, a white student used an anti-Black slur, and Mr. Musk chided the student, but then got bullied for doing so, Mr. Ranwashe said.