In recent weeks, Trump’s coalition has split in a public debate largely taking place online about the tech industry’s hiring of foreign workers. Hard-right members of Trump’s movement have accused Musk and others in Trump’s new flank of tech-world supporters of pushing policies at odds with Trump’s “America First” vision.

Bannon is ramping up public attacks on billionaire Elon Musk amid an intensifying debate on the right about Musk’s influence in the incoming administration. In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera this past week,

Bannon said Musk “should go back to South Africa,” where he is from, asking, “why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, White South Africans . . . making comments at all on what goes on in the United States?