CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Feb 6, (AP): South African President Cyril Ramaphosa spoke with Donald Trump's "influential” billionaire adviser Elon Musk a day after the new US president promised to cut funding for South Africa over a land expropriation law, Ramaphosa's spokesperson said Wednesday. Ramaphosa’s conversation with Musk was "logical,” spokesperson Vincent Magwenya said, because the South African-born Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur has held previous investment-related discussions with Ramaphosa and is a Trump ally.

The land law, which was signed by Ramaphosa last month, is contentious because it gives the government scope to expropriate land from private parties. Trump announced Sunday that he would stop financial assistance while the US investigated why South Africa was "confiscating land” from some people, without saying who.

He told reporters wrongly that the South African government was taking away land and "actually they’re doing things that are perhaps far worse than that.” Trump again didn’t provide details. The South African government said Trump’s announcement and related criticism of the country by Musk was full of "misinformation and distortions” and the call to Musk was to set the record straight.

Musk, who is leading the Trump administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency, has long criticized the government in his homeland, a key US trading partner in Africa, as being anti-white and has cast the law in question as a deliberate act to take land away from its white minority. He faces scrutiny in the US for his control over parts of the federal government, but the South Africa issue also shows his influence on US foreign policy.

Should Trump follow through on his promise to cut South Africa’s funding, it would stop nearly half a billion dollars a year in assistance, the vast majority of it for the world’s biggest HIV/AIDS program. South Africa has the highest number of people living with HIV in the world at more than 8 million, with around 5.5 million on antiretroviral medication.

The US funds around 17% of South Africa's HIV program through the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, and gave the country $440 million in assistance last year. The South African government said no land has been confiscated, and even groups in South Africa that have been critical of the new law said Trump was wrong in claiming any land had been taken away.