Keeping up with the Musk Family
Admired 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 unusual like 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 at the age of fifteen, which later led her to cover of Vogue and from Time Magazine, walking the runway at New York Fashion Week, and appearing in a Beyoncé music video, as well as on Special K cereal boxes. I was famous until Elon was famous! he confessed to the New York Times in 2016.
It was also in South Africa that he met Elon’s future father, Errol Musk, who attended the same high school as him. They married in 1970, and Elon was born without a break. The couple divorced 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 a some work to support his family while continuing his studies. to become a dietician. 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, making her the oldest model to represent the brand. All his activities ensured him a fortune of several million dollars.
Less is known about Errol Musk, with whom Elon is no longer in touch now and whom he has described as a very bad father in several interviews, who is said to have had a sad childhood. In any case, it seems to him that he inherited his passion for engineering and aeronautics, the man 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 troubled emotional life: after his divorce from Maye, Errol did marry another woman, Heide Bezuidenhout, before divorcing and starting a relationship with his 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 produces and streams films based on popular romance novels. This niche service, which has raised $22 million from various investors, is in 150 different countries.
Kimbal Musk, philanthropic and controversial entrepreneur
Kimbal, who invested in his sister’s streaming platform and looks nothing like his brother, except for the cowboy hat he often wears screwed to his head, is also the first to focus on the new industry. technology. Together, the brothers 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 founded with his brother which later became 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.
Since then he has launched several companies aimed at promoting healthy and local food: The Kitchen, a brand that brings 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 public than his brother, he is very rich (his fortune is estimated at 700 million dollars) and has experienced several controversies. During the pandemic, some former employees of his restaurant chain accused him of brutally cutting off their access to a fund to which they had contributed to protect in the event of a major blow, and at the beginning of 2022, The US stock market watchdog opened an insider trading investigation after he sold 30,000 Tesla shares at once.
Finally, it is difficult to evoke Elon Musk’s family without talking about the youngest generation: the billionaire actually has no less than nine children, including triplets and two sets of twins. Her two youngest children, with whom she had the musician Grimes, had original names, as they were called X Æ A-Xii and Exa Dark Sideræl. Another way for the billionaire, who says he is deeply concerned about the falling birth rate and the prospect of a decline in the world’s population, to help save the human species from destruction?
