Elon Musk Amplifies FMF-Backed Race Law Index Numbers

On 12 December 2025, Elon Musk shared an X post that displayed the number of race laws in South Africa. The data he cited was produced by South Africa’s Free Market Foundation (FMF). It showed that, 30 years after the end of apartheid, South Africa had more race laws in place in 2025 than at the height of the apartheid era.

Musk wrote, "South Africa now has more anti-White laws than Apartheid had anti-Black laws. This is deeply wrong the goal should be no race-based laws!" The post had been viewed about 16.1 million times.

Musk circulated a FMF chart which showed the number of race laws operational in South Africa from 1910 to the present. The chart, which is replicated below, showed that the number of race laws increased steeply in the 1900s before peaking in the late 1980s. In the early 1990s, the number fell sharply as South Africa broke down its apartheid era-statutes. However, around 1995, the number of race laws began to increase, eventually exceeding the number recorded at the end of the 1980s.

The FMF has been promoting a project of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) that tracks Acts of Parliament that make race or skin colour legally relevant, and records 145 such Acts as still operational. The index is a project of the IRR and has been widely promoted in recent months by the FMF as a way of showing how often race is still written into South African law.

Martin van Staden, head of policy at the FMF and editor of the IRR Race Law Project, said in a statement shared with The Common Sense, "It is heartening that the world continues to take note of the South African government's condemnable persistence in using the racial categories devised under the 1950 Population Registration Act to divide its own society. As Mr Musk says, ‘the goal should be no race-based laws!’, which is a declaration of non-racialism all South Africans should get behind.

“The Index of Race Law that Mr Musk references is a public education initiative of the Institute of Race Relations, and tracks Acts of Parliament that in any way, shape, or form, makes or keeps the inborn race, skin-colour, or ethnic identity of a person a legally relevant factor, or empowers officials to do so. While critics of the Index often say that it omits the ‘redress’ intention behind post-Apartheid race laws, the Index deliberately discounts the underlying intentions of politicians lest it similarly needs to discover and track the intentions of Apartheid planners.

“The Index was last updated on 11 June 2025. As of then, the South African Parliament had adopted 324 race laws since 1910 (when it was established). Of those 324 Acts, 145 remain on the statute book, and of those 136 remain racial. 122 of the 324 race laws (some 38%) were adopted since 1994. The Index presently does not track state policies, regulations, and provincial and municipal laws, where many hundreds of additional race laws no doubt lurk," Van Staden said.