Errol Musk wants the world to know that he and his son Elon are in fact in very good conditions.
“It was always the case,” he said in an interview Friday days after comments that he had said he had made Elon a bad parent.
In a recent episode of the Wide Awake podcast, Musk spoke about his son Elon. He is the subject of most of his interviews.
“He wasn't a good dad,” Errol Musk said on the podcast. “They were too wealthy and too many nannies. Then he had five children with the same woman, and five sons all grew up. Each had their own nannies. .”
Perhaps most punished, Errol pointed to the death of Elon's eldest son Nevada, who died in 2002 of sudden infant death syndrome. Errol claimed it happened in the presence of a nanny. (Another example of Elon's parenting being questioned this week was posted by Grimes, a mother of three, who deleted a series of messages to X, and Elon's unspecified “medical crisis” I asked to help one of them.)
Errol said he was not about to start a war with his son. “The press takes things out of context,” he described from the hotel as “the most beautiful city in the world,” meaning Dubai. “I'm here to meet people like business,” he explained.
Elon previously said his father “got a bit crazy later in life,” but he said the two men had quite a bit in common. Both speak in noble language about their achievements. Both have many kids. (Eron has 12 people, one of them died as a toddler; Errol has 7.) Both have engineering backgrounds. Both are known for their insecurable relationships with people.
Both are big supporters of President Trump, but that hasn't always been the case.
And both have a long history of making inflammatory comments about each other on a wide range of topics.
Elon's upbringing
Errol, who ran multiple companies in South Africa, divorced Elon's mother Maymusk when Elon was eight years old.
She later said Errol was abusive. He said in an interview that he didn't know why they divorced.
Elon and his brother Kimbal lived mainly with his father for several years and worked for him in many of his ventures, including a tourist lodge visiting the Private Nature Reserve in Timbavati.
In an interview with Walter Isaacson for Elon's biography, Tech Mogul said before he left South Africa for Canada in the 1980s, his father predicted he would return in a few months as he “never succeeds.” Ta. Errol later denied it, saying that it was his idea for Elon to go to North America.
In the early days of Elon's celebrity, he spoke about his father in a way that suggested a difficult relationship. In an interview with GQ in 2008, he said his father was “a very sharp engineer,” adding that he thought he was crazy.
Errol took mostly public comments from his son in a rough manner. In 2014, he told Mercury News that his son, as SpaceX founder and CEO, will “take people to Mars for his lifetime,” and “without a doubt.”
Around that time, Elon was quoted in another biographies and how he and Kimbal went to Errol's engineering site as children and learned the basics of plumbing, bricks, window fittings and electrical work. That reminded me of it. But he said: “It would certainly be accurate to say I didn't have a good childhood. It might sound good. It wasn't a good thing, but it was a happy childhood It wasn't. It was miserable. He's good at making life miserable – that's for sure.”
Changes in tone
In 2017, Elon was the subject of a Rolling Stone cover story by writer Neil Strauss. This time, his anger towards Errol has been revealed.
“He was a very terrible person,” Musk told Strauss. “My father will make a carefully thought out evil plan. He will plan evil.”
He added: Almost every evil thing you can think of is what he did. ”
Strauss said that tears were flowing in Elon's face, as he said this.
In an email to Strauss, Errol said he never “deliberately” hurt or threatened anyone. He said he had shot and killed three men who had once broken into his home, and that he was exempt from all charges on the basis of self-defense. He added, “I love my children and I'll do anything for them.”
According to Errol, this included giving Elon the money to the school and helping him pay for his early business ventures.
“This is not true,” Elon told Rolling Stone in response. “He was irrelevant. He paid nothing to the university. My brother and I paid to the university by doing scholarships, loans, two jobs at the same time. Because we were the first company The funds raised to come from a small group of random angel investors in Silicon Valley.”
Limit point
In 2018, the Daily Mail reported that Errol, then 72, had recently fathered his son with his stepdaughter Jana Bezidenhout.
Errol attempts to minimize his relationship with Ms. Bezidenhout's mother, Heide, and tells her to email that he barely remembers her.
“My 30-year-old girlfriend, Jana, pregnant, we now have a 10-month-old baby,” he said. (In 2022, Errol and Bezidenhout had a second child.)
The mail reported that several families cited Errol having Bezidenhout's child as Elon's breakpoint.
In his “Wide Awakening” podcast interview, Errol denied that he said he lived with Heide in the early 2000s, when he lived in Malibu, California. She became miserable and decided to return to South Africa, he said. Their relationship got worse when Errol told Elon that he would move.
Speaking from Dubai on Friday, Errol said the real reason Elon called him evil in 2017 was due to political differences between them.
“At the time he supported the Democrats,” Errol said. “At the time he was mixing up with the wrong people.”
His son “learned from his mistakes,” he said.
Common Ground
Errol Musk is by no means a mainstream Trump supporter.
On the podcast, without showing that he was joking, he made a true, non-exotic statement about Michelle Obama being a transgender woman, with comedian Joan Rivers quizzing about it He hinted that he was assassinated after saying this. He then repeatedly claimed that he believed 15 million votes were missing from Trump in the 2020 election.
He also said theories as to why Elon, who donated to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2016, changed his loyalty and devoted himself to Trump's re-election bid in 2024, spending more than $250 million on his efforts. I shared it. .
Errol said that after the 2020 election, President Joe Biden invited a group of electric car makers to the White House to discuss the green energy transition, but the major turning point was that Elon was not included. He said he believes he has come. Errol emphasized: “They didn't invite Tesla. They didn't invite Tesla.”
Despite various inflammatory comments between them, Errol says he and Elon had contact with each other on the podcast, and he poeticly waxes about the gorgeous car his son said he recently gave him. I went there.
“It's Bentley,” he said.
