Does an old photo show Elon Musk's grandfather Joshua Haldeman standing in front of the office of Technocracy Inc. in Canada? No, that's not true: The black-and-white image shows Howard Scott, an American engineer who founded the technocracy movement in 1933, according to reverse image search results. Haldeman's obituary says he was a chiropractor in Canada.
The claim appeared as a post (archived here) on X.com on January 26, 2025. It read:
This is Elon Musk's grandfather Joshua Haldeman in front of the office of Technocracy, Inc. before he was arrested for being a Hitler sympathizer in Canada. Note the map behind him, which is the same as this official map of the 'Technate of America.'
Does that ring any bells?
The is a screenshot of the post at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Mon Jan 27 18:25:17 2025 UTC)
Reverse images searches of the post led to several older examples of the image, all naming the man as Scott. These include the Technocracy Technate Picture Archive, the Technocracy Think Tank webpage and this Synchronofile article.
Lead Stories found no examples beyond recent social media posts indicating the man was Joshua Haldeman.
Lead Stories found this image of Howard Scott on the San Jose State University Department of Economics webpage that discusses the technocracy movement. It is archived here.
(Source: sjsu.edu screenshot taken on Mon Jan 27 11:15:00 2025 UTC)
This academic description said that Scott founded technocracy in 1933 as a response to the economic disaster of the Great Depression. He believed that scientists and engineers should manage the economy, not business people:
Technocracy stressed, as indicated above, the tremendous increase in productivities that had occurred in recent years in some industries and traced the economic downturn of the early 1930's to this increase in productivity that resulted in layoffs of workers. A notable case of increased productivity was in the manufacture of incandescent light bulbs. At one time each bulb had tobe blown by hand. The light bulb manufacturers in the later 1920's introduced a machine that created the light bulbs automatically. This machine with a small crew replaced many, many glass blowers.
Technocracy had some other features that were intriguing to the general public. Technocracy asserted that the unit of currency should be energy. Technocracy advocated the consolidation of the nations of North America into one big nation state.
Time magazine published an article about the rise of technocracy in the United States on January 23, 1933, just five weeks before Franklin D. Roosevelt began his first term as president. Roosevelt's New Deal approach quickly shifted attention away from Scott's movement, according to the San Jose State article.
Elon Musk's maternal grandfather (his mother's father) was Dr. Joshua Haldeman, according to his obituary on findagrave.com. This is one of several photographs of Haldeman on that web page:
(Source: findagrave.com screenshot taken Mon Jan 27 14:17:00 2025 UTC)
Haldeman was the "earliest" chiropractor to practice in Canada, according to a 1995 article by the Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association. After graduating from chiropractic school in 1926, "Haldeman would develop national and international stature as a political economist, provincial and national professional leader, and sportsman/adventurer," the article said. His political activities included work for Technocracy Inc of Canada, it said.
Dr. Haldeman also earned a place in the political history of Canada, owing to his service as research director for Technocracy, Inc. of Canada, his national chairmanship of the Social Credit Party during the second world war, and his unsuccessful bid for the national parliament. His vocal opposition to Communism during the war briefly landed him in jail. His 1950 relocation of his family and practice to Pretoria, South Africa would open a new page in his career: once again as professional pioneer, but also as aviator and explorer.
Lead Stories found no descriptions of Haldeman's brief arrest during World War II being connected to support for Adolf Hitler, as the text in the X post claimed.
