The logical error here is assuming it’s about skin colour when it’s in fact about centuries of exploitation in Africa that Musk benefited hugely from. I suppose it’s not a logical error if one doesn’t know about the history of colonialism in Africa.

It’s reasonable to assume that any white person who lived in southern Africa (Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa in particular) moved there not for the safari or the lifestyle but for the eye-watering profits that came from exploiting the land as their resource and its peoples as their labour. A lot of contrarian arguments that get voted down on the internet focus on the minority view, and I think this is where you’re coming from - unfortunately in the case of colonial Africa, there aren’t very many clean hands at all, even if they weren’t the ones being cut off.

Unclear analogy - is the substrate going through the mesh the process of nice things existing? Maybe I’m thinking of substrate in a chemical sense rather than biological, or I’m just cooked. Is the mesh some sort of filter that allows bacteria to grow on the substrate (host)?