Adored by some, hated by others, Elon Musk rarely leaves anyone indifferent. The richest man in the world is undoubtedly one of the businessmen with the most singular personality. It must be said that his family is just as extraordinary as him, starting with his mother, Maye Musk.
Maye Musk, model and dietitian
Born in 1948 in Saskatchewan, Canada, she grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, where her parents emigrated in 1950. She began a modeling career there when she was fifteen, which later led her to cover Vogue and from Time Magazine, walking the runway during New York Fashion Week, and appearing in a Beyoncé music video, as well as on Special K cereal boxes.” I was famous until Elon became famous! she confided to the New York Times in 2016.
It is also in South Africa that she meets Elon’s future father, Errol Musk, who attends the same high school as her. They marry in 1970, and Elon is born in stride. The couple separated in 1979. Ten years later, Maye Musk returned to Canada with her three children (her sons Elon and Kimbal and her daughter Tosca) where she held several jobs in order to support her family while resuming studies. to become a dietitian. She ended up opening her practice, first in Toronto, then in New York, while publishing several books and pursuing her modeling career in parallel. In 2017, at the age of 69, she became an ambassador for the cosmetics brand CoverGirl, which made her the oldest model to have ever represented this brand. All his activities ensure him a fortune of several million dollars.
Much less is known about Errol Musk, with whom Elon is no longer in contact today and whom he has described as a very bad father in several interviews, claiming to have had an unhappy childhood. It is in any case from him that he seems to have inherited his passion for engineering and aeronautics, the man having had a brilliant career as an engineer specializing in construction, in addition to being an avid sailor and airplane pilot. From his father, Elon also seems to have inherited a tumultuous emotional life: after his divorce from Maye, Errol indeed married another woman, Heide Bezuidenhout, before divorcing and starting a relationship with her daughter, Jana. , with whom he had two children. Rumors that he owned an emerald mine in Zambia in the 1980s, however, remain unsubstantiated.
Like Elon, his brother and sister inherited the entrepreneurial bug from their parents. Tosca, her sister, worked in the film industry before launching her own streaming service, Passionflix, in 2017, which makes and streams movies based on popular romance novels. This niche service, which has raised $22 million from various investors, is present in 150 different countries.
Kimbal Musk, philanthropic and controversial entrepreneur
Kimbal, who has invested in his sister’s streaming platform and looks like two drops of water to his brother, if we exclude the cowboy hat he often wears screwed on his head, has also first oriented towards the new technologies industry. Together, the two brothers co-founded Zip2, a software company designed to help media enter the digital age, which they sold for $300 million in 1999. He then invested in X.com, a company he co-founded by his brother who would later become PayPal, before leaving Silicon Valley to go to New York, radically change careers and devote himself to catering, taking courses at the French Culinary Institute.
He has since launched several companies aimed at promoting healthy and local food: The Kitchen, a brand bringing together several restaurants that source their supplies from small local producers; Square Roots, an urban farm concept to grow organic vegetables in containers; and the nonprofit Big Green, which builds educational vegetable gardens in American schools.
Although less publicized than his brother, he is also very rich (his fortune is estimated at 700 million dollars) and has experienced several controversies. During the pandemic, he was accused by several ex-employees of his restaurant chain of having brutally cut off their access to a fund to which they had contributed to be protected in the event of a hard blow, and at the beginning of 2022, the US stock market watchdog has opened an insider trading investigation after he sold 30,000 Tesla shares all at once.
Finally, difficult to evoke the family of Elon Musk without speaking of the youngest generation: the billionaire has indeed no less than nine children, including triplets and two pairs of twins. His two youngest children, whom he had with the musician Grimes, have rather original names, since they are respectively called X Æ A-Xii and Exa Dark Sideræl. Another way for the billionaire, who says he is very concerned by the fall in the birth rate and the prospect of a drop in the world’s population, to help save the human species from ruin?