Elon Musk has said he can’t be racist because his partner is half Indian and one of his sons is named after an Indian scientist.

The world’s richest man, who has previously said white people were a “dying minority” and supported far-Right parties in Europe, made the remarks in an interview with The Economist.

Mr Musk has four children with Shivon Zilis, a Canadian tech executive whose mother was born in India.

One of his sons with Ms Zilis, Strider Sekhar Sirius, is named after Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an Indian-American physicist.

“My partner is ... half Indian, and I have four children with her. One of them was named after a famous Indian physicist. So I would say I’m not racist,” Mr Musk said.

“And also, if you look at the people that are employed at my companies, we have senior executives of all races. I don’t think there’s any racism there.”

Mr Musk has frequently posted about race in recent months.

He wrote on his social media site X in January that “Whites are a rapidly dying minority”. The same month, he responded “true” to a post stating that “white solidarity is the only way to survive”.

Mr Musk has backed Rupert Lowe and his Restore Britain Party and supported Tommy Robinson, the far-Right activist, saying: “You either fight back or you die.”

He has also claimed that civil war in Britain was “inevitable” and been accused of stoking June’s race-related riots in Belfast.

When asked whether he was anti-Muslim, Mr Musk responded: “If people are coming to a country with antithetical views, I am against that ... I’m against rape and murder, I’m against the imposition of rules and laws that are contrary to what we’ve come to accept in the West.”

He said that people characterised as being on the far-Right were “just normal people”.

Mr Musk conceded that he had not visited Britain in several years, despite his frequent posts about the UK, but said he had been “literally a hundred times”.

“If you have a ... large and growing, rapidly growing, group of people whose beliefs are antithetical to Western beliefs, at some point there will be a reckoning,” he said.

“They will try to implement their views and those who oppose it will oppose it.”

Mr Musk, who recently became the world’s first trillionaire after his rocket company SpaceX listed on the stock market, said that he had become too involved in politics with his work for Donald Trump’s now-defunct department of government efficiency (Doge).

“I think I got a little too involved in politics, got carried away, frankly,” he said.

He claimed, without providing evidence, that “zero people” had died from cuts he had made to the United States Agency for International Development, and said private philanthropy from the likes of Bill Gates and MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife, could fill the gap.