It’s no exaggeration to say that Elon Musk He is the richest man and maybe also the most powerful in the world. According to Forbes, he is $60 billion more than Louis Vuitton owner Bernard Arnault and $71 billion more than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
According to the US media magazine Bloomberg, his exorbitant fortune of 195 billion dollars is due to several things: an unerring instinct for business, investments that are as successful as they are dazzling, an irrepressible will to win and, of course, a mother who became his key to success .
If there’s one thing South African tycoon Elon Musk has in common with his mother, it’s tenacity. Model, dietitian, author, businesswoman and designer Maye Musk rose to fame long before she became the famous mother of the world’s richest man and two other children who, like Elon, trod the path of triumph.
While Elon Musk is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX, CEO and product architect of Tesla, founder of The Boring Company, co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI and most recently owner of Twitter; Kimbal Musk, his brother, is the founder of three food companies: The Kitchen Restaurant Group, Big Green and Square Roots.
Of course, Maye’s youngest daughter isn’t far behind either. Tosca Musk has a solid and acclaimed career as a producer and director of films and television shows. They are three brothers whose names are synonymous with triumph in the ears of everyone around the world.
What do they have in common? A mother who taught them independence, tenacity and diligence as a flagship from an early age.
An established model and nutritionist
The Maye Musk name is currently known for being the mother of a brilliant business tycoon; However, this was not always the case. Before giving birth to the world’s richest man, she built a prestigious career as a model.
From starring on the covers of Vogue, Time and Elle to appearing in a Beyoncé music video – Haunted – and appearing in commercials for Revlon and Special K, Maye Musk cemented a lucrative and still-active art career that propelled her to stardom, Long before she did his was son.
Born on April 19, 1948 in Regina, Canada, she began her modeling career at the age of 15 and hasn’t let up since. On the contrary, her talent, beauty and stamina have made her eclipse the camera lenses, the most glamorous catwalks and the most famous fashion magazines.
For example, at the young age of 20, she became a finalist for Miss South Africa. A few decades later, in 2015, she appeared in her first show for New York Fashion Week. The following year she signed with IMG, one of the most important international modeling agencies; In 2018 she was named spokeswoman for Covergirl and in 2020 she starred in the Philipp Plein runway show during Milan Fashion Week.
However, her professional achievements are not limited to modeling and the world of entertainment. Betting on a glittering career surrounded by camera flashes didn’t stop Maye for a second from starting her college prep as a Registered Dietitian and Nutritionist at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Both her university career and her master’s degree from the University of the Orange Free State, South Africa, led her to write at least two books on good health and dietary habits, as well as her life as an entrepreneur, mother and model: “Feeling Fantastic : Maye Musk’s Fitness Clinic” and “One Woman, One Plan: A Life of Risk, Beauty and Success”.
In contrast to her professional career, her private life took a bleak turn when she graduated as a dietician and nutritionist from a South African university. She’s never been on a date and was barely going out when Errol Musk, with whom she was in an ongoing relationship, knocked on her door one day with an engagement ring.
“I told him I would never marry him, but shortly after that he showed up to my parents and told them I said yes. My twin sister had a boyfriend, so they thought, ‘okay, let’s do a double wedding.’ (…) I was too polite to say ‘no’ once everything was ready. So suddenly there I was: married to a man who, despite promising me he would change, wasn’t going to change at all,” Maye told Vanity Fair.
Not in love, with few hopes and full of doubts, Maye went on a honeymoon with Errol. The result: she returned from Europe, not only pregnant with Elon, but also injured from the beatings she received from her husband, whom she describes as a “monster”.
In her book “One Woman, One Plan” she tells how Elon defended her from being beaten at the age of almost five: “He hit her on the back of the knee to make her stop”.
After nine years of what had been hell for Maye, she decided to end their relationship and flee Johannesburg, South Africa, to Toronto, Canada, with her three children. There he worked as a nutritionist and sporadically as a model. The role of the single mother, on the other hand, was full-time.
“When I was a single mom, I worked from home as a nutritionist. And then, when I had a modeling job, my daughter sometimes got dressed. Sometimes my three children sat in the front row of the parade because they had to do their homework. You just adapt,” the 74-year-old woman said in an interview with Morning Joe.
Maye lived in a small apartment with Elon, Kimba and Tosca and fed them peanut butter sandwiches and bean soup. The model told CNBC in 2018 that she had to work five jobs to make ends meet and that eating red meat, for example, was a luxury her family often couldn’t afford.
Balance, as she reveals in her book One Woman, One Plan: A Life of Risk, Beauty, and Success, was key to her children’s professional triumphs: “I taught them to be independent, kind, honest, considerate, and educated to be work hard and do good. I didn’t treat them like babies or call them names.”
Maye’s effort, hard work and persistence have paid off: at over 70 years of age, among other things, she showed that modeling knows no age limit and that you can always be the mother of the richest man in the world and two other successful celebrities behind her a lot worse experiences, economic deprivation and unsurpassed personal merits.