Musk family
Maye's father Joshua N. Haldeman was a notable chiropractor, aviator, and politician who was a proponent of technocracy and apartheid.
Haldeman was a Canadian chiropractor and political activist who, in the early days of formalized apartheid, moved to South Africa.
[3] Prior to the move, Haldeman headed the Canadian branch of Technocracy movement and ran for the Parliament of Canada on the Social Credit Party ticket.
[4][5] Over the course of his life, he publicly expressed racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-democratic views, promoted a number of conspiracy theories, and was a supporter of South Africa's apartheid system.
[citation needed] Walter served as a cryptographer in a military intelligence unit in Egypt during World War II.
[12][11]: 52 [13][14] In 1980,[15]: 71 he became a member of the Progressive Federal Party, the new official opposition formed in 1977, and ran as their Sunnyside nominee in the 1981 election.
[11]: 52 [16]: 225, fn 119 In 1983, his resignation from the PFP over its stance towards the constitutional referendum was front page news for the ruling National Party's organ Die Burger, which portrayed the opposition as divided.
[16]: 225, fn 119 [17] Musk rebelled against the PFP's call for rejecting the new constitution and cited his agreement with the New Republic Party's position that the Tricameral Parliament was a step in the right direction.
[8]: 27 His lucrative engineering business took on "large projects such as office buildings, retail complexes, residential subdivisions, and an air force base."
He also owned an auto parts store, at least half a share in an emerald mine, and even "one of the biggest houses in Pretoria"[8][18] In 1979, Musk and wife Maye divorced.
[10][19] Maye's book recalls that at the time of the divorce, he owned two homes, a yacht, a plane, five luxury cars, and a truck.
1 He later referred to his wealth during Elon's teen years in an interview with Business Insider South Africa, saying he had "so much money we couldn't even close our safe" and mentioned his emerald dealings.
[31] In 2017, Musk was interviewed by Neil Strauss of Rolling Stone for a profile of Elon titled "The Architect of Tomorrow".
[54] He is the co-founder and chairman of Big Green, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has built hundreds of outdoor classrooms called Learning Gardens in schoolyards across America.
[55][56][57] Musk is also the co-founder and chairman of Square Roots, an urban farming company growing food in hydroponic, indoor, climate controlled shipping containers.
Her work includes K. Bromberg's Driven, Rachel van Dyken's Matchmaker's Playbook, and her web series, Tiki Bar TV.
Musk is the wealthiest individual in the world; as of February 2025[update], Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$397 billion.
He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University, and with his brother Kimbal co-founded the software company Zip2, that was later acquired by Compaq in 1999.
[68] He met his first wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson, while attending Queen's University in Ontario, Canada; they married in 2000.
[72][73] The elder twin later came out as a trans woman and, in 2022, officially changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson,[74] adopting her mother's surname because she no longer wished to be associated with Musk.
[74] Musk blamed the estrangement on what the Financial Times characterized as "the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists", and has said that Vivian's gender transition is primarily what sparked his drive to "destroy the woke mind virus".
[75][76] In a July 2024 episode of Jordan Peterson's podcast, Musk said that he had "lost [his] son, essentially" because of gender-affirming care.
[78] On November 7, 2024, in response to a news article about his daughter's reaction to Trump's election, Musk repeated "the woke mind virus killed my son.
[95] Despite the pregnancy, Musk confirmed reports that the couple were "semi-separated" in September 2021; in an interview with Time in December 2021, he said he was single.
[100][101][102] In July 2022, Insider published court documents revealing that Musk had had his eighth and ninth children, twins born via IVF with Shivon Zilis, director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, in November 2021.
[105][106] Also in July 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk allegedly had an affair with Nicole Shanahan, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in 2021, leading to their divorce the following year.
[115] Lyndon Robert Rive (born 22 January 1977) is a South African-American businessman known as the co-founder of SolarCity, and its CEO until 2016.
