The Musk Family's Upbringing

What kind of family produces someone like Musk?

How much does a child's success have to do with their parents?

Elon Musk runs companies that reach the heavens and the depths: SpaceX, the space transport company that wants to send people to Mars; OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT; Neuralink, a neurotechnology company working on brain-computer interfaces; and The Boring Company, which builds tunnels for the Hyperloop.

People either love Elon Musk or hate him, but there's no denying he's a remarkable person. So today, let's look at him from the perspective of his mother, Maye Musk, and see what kind of family of origin he grew up in. Audrey Hepburn once said, "Elegance is the only beauty that never fades." Maye took that line and lived it to the fullest.

She was a model and a nutritionist. At 67, her image ads were practically everywhere in America. At 69, she became the oldest spokesperson for the American cosmetics brand CoverGirl. She has lived in three countries and eight cities. She went through an unhappy marriage to a husband who was a textbook example of a cheating scoundrel, and it took her ten years to finally get out.

We'll get to how much of a scoundrel he was later. Maye stayed single for more than 40 years. She holds two master's degrees and raised three excellent children. Elon is the eldest. He has a younger brother, Kimbal Musk, who is an entrepreneur, environmentalist and venture capitalist, and a younger sister, Tosca Musk, who is a director and film producer. She founded the company PassionFlix. In 2019, Maye published a book called A Consistent Life, and what I'm sharing today comes from that book, about the things this family has done.

I can only describe it with one word: crazy. Let's take it step by step. There's an old saying, "Read ten thousand books and travel ten thousand miles." The Musk family took the "travel ten thousand miles" part and turned it into something extraordinary. Maye's family lived in Regina, Canada, and had five children. She was the youngest. She had a twin sister. One day, her parents were driving from Regina to Carl's house when they saw a farmer selling an airplane, the old kind with a single propeller. Her father fell for it at first sight.

But he didn't have any money with him. So what did he do? He traded their car for the plane and drove it home. At the time, her father was 44.

What came next was a move that would make anyone's jaw drop. In 1950, her parents decided to emigrate to South Africa. At the time, she and her twin sister were only two years old, and there were two other children aged six and eight. Her parents took all four kids on a two-month boat trip to Africa. Anyone who has kids can imagine how hard that must have been. And what about the airplane?

Her father took the plane apart, packed it up, and shipped it to South Africa too. Once they arrived in South Africa, the family set up camp at the airport, pitching a tent.

They waited for her father to reassemble the plane. Then they planned to settle in a city where English was spoken, because a shared language would make life much easier. So the whole family climbed into the plane and headed for their destination. On the way, they passed through Cape Town, the capital of South Africa, just in time for the jacaranda season. The whole city was wrapped in a sea of blue flowers. Her father had never seen anything so beautiful, and on the spot he declared, "Let's stay here." And that's how the family settled down.

Once they had settled in, her parents began flying their plane all over the world, including a round trip of 5,000 kilometers to Australia. In that era, there was no GPS, and no radio either. Her parents relied on a compass and paper maps and visited 60 countries. Her father often said one sentence: "There's nothing the Haldeman family can't do." Haldeman was her father's surname, and this line became the family's motto.

If that doesn't sound crazy enough, consider this: the whole family, parents and all five kids, drove cars and flew planes across the Kalahari Desert, spending three weeks searching the desert for the legendary Lost City. Their mother was in charge of planning and packing the food, water, gasoline and other supplies, along with the five children. Can you imagine what it's like to live in the desert with five kids for three weeks? Along the way, they came across gravestones of people who had died in the desert. While hunting, Maye once jumped into a river to retrieve a bird that had fallen into the water. When she climbed back out, she suddenly felt a stone she was standing on move. Only then did she realize the river was full of crocodiles. There were also other dangerous encounters, like lions.

In the end, they never found the Lost City, and they went back and forth to the desert many more times. But the family had many unforgettable adventures and joyful moments in the desert. Does Elon Musk's blood carry that adventurous gene inherited from his grandparents? Still, they were not simply reckless adventurers. Maye later said that when she thought about it, she still felt some lingering fear.

Yet her parents planned carefully before every trip, the two of them discussing every detail together. So bravery doesn't mean recklessness. Thinking ahead and acting with careful planning is the right way to go.

Things can very easily go in the wrong direction, so you have to make a solid plan and consider all the possibilities. When things don't go as expected, you can quickly come up with a backup plan and keep moving forward.

Unfortunately, her father later died in a plane crash. But Maye passed the same belief on to her children, which was this:

There's nothing the Musk family can't do.

On February 6, 2018, when SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket made its successful maiden flight, people remembered a quote:

"Cowards never start, and the weak die along the way. Only we who keep moving forward, one step at a time, will not stop." Anyone who has walked a lonely road must deeply understand these words.

Now, Maye's daughter, Tosca Musk, did something both crazy and laughable. Elon Musk, at 17, went to Canada by himself. He felt North America was a better place to pursue his interest in computers. He first went to Montreal to look for a relative, but didn't find them. Then he went to Toronto to look for another relative, and still didn't find them. Finally, he went to Saskatchewan and found a relative there.

And his younger sister, Tosca, who was only 15 at the time, saw that her older brother had settled down. So she also wanted to go to Canada to be with him, because she thought it would be more interesting and more fun. So she egged on their mother to move to Canada.

Maye said, "Canada is fine, but first I need to see whether I can find a job." So she told Tosca, "Let me go to Canada to check things out first, and then I'll come back and decide."

Maye spent three weeks in Canada scouting things out. When she came back, she discovered that Tosca had sold their house. All of her furniture and her car had been sold by her 15-year-old daughter.

All she had to do was sign a document, and that was it. That's how they ended up in Canada. Maye rarely disciplined her children, because she had to work all day to earn money to support the family.

She said she never regretted it. She was always busy with work. First, there was no choice: rather than give up her job and let everyone go hungry, it was better to let the children see how she stayed optimistic about life. Second, in that relaxed environment, the other children were free to develop on their own, and they learned to take responsibility for their own lives.

When Maye was young, her father opened a clinic. The whole family worked for him, including her and her twin sister. Their job was to mail letters to clients, charging by the hour. Her father paid her five cents an hour. So from a young age, her life was shaped by a big family in which everyone helped one another and parents gave their children full trust, treating them the way they would treat adults.

Maye later treated her own children the same way. When she was writing her first book, she showed the draft to Elon Musk first. Elon told her, "This is too boring. You should write about what your clients actually need, not so much about technical information like metabolism." After that, Elon gave the book many suggestions. Later, Kimbal helped her revise it five times. Tosca helped her revise it six times. And Maye's mother took on the job of reading the text aloud, so they could check whether the words flowed smoothly. That is what a family that truly loves each other looks like: everyone helping one another, rather than only fighting among themselves.

When people asked Maye how she raised such successful children, she said, "I just let them follow their own interests." The three children's current careers are not very different from the interests they had when they were 12. She never even checked their homework, because doing homework well was the children's own responsibility. Likewise, when those kids applied to high school and college, applied for scholarships or student loans, and handled everything else, they did it all themselves.

Maye herself never even saw what those application materials looked like. Taking care of those matters was also the children's own job.

Because children must learn to take responsibility for their own future. This reminds me of the concept of "task separation" in Adlerian psychology.

To live a happy life, we have to learn task separation: distinguish which tasks belong to us and which belong to others. For our own tasks, we need to take responsibility. For other people's tasks, we should not interfere. This applies to children too. Whether a child studies well is the child's own task. The three children grew up in this kind of environment.

They became independent and free, which benefited them for the rest of their lives. At the same time, these children also saw their mother working hard on her own, striving to afford rent, food, and secondhand clothes. That is the parenting philosophy Maye taught us: set a good example for your children, let them take responsibility for themselves, and encourage them to pursue their own interests.

Speaking of Maye's tragic marriage, there's a saying that fits: the ending of the story was written at the beginning. At 16, she had an on-and-off boyfriend who was very good at math and science. He kept saying he would marry her. But then Maye discovered that he was also dating another girl. So she broke up with him for good. She was so heartbroken that she lost ten pounds. After that, she moved to another city and found a job.

By then, she was just 21. Her boyfriend disappeared for a year, then suddenly reappeared with an engagement ring and proposed to Maye. Maye firmly refused.

Then the story took a melodramatic turn. He went back to Pretoria and told his parents that Maye had agreed to marry him, and his parents actually believed him.

Coincidentally, Maye's twin sister was also about to get married. So his parents decided to hold a grand wedding for the two sisters together.

They began preparing enthusiastically. Once everything was ready, his parents sent Maye a telegram that basically said, "Congratulations, come home quickly to get married." In that era, long-distance phone calls were very expensive, and most people didn't make them. Anything important was sent by telegram. Telegrams were charged by the word, so people always kept their messages as short as possible, concise and to the point.

When Maye saw this telegram, she was completely bewildered. On top of that, she was in a very low point in her life. And there was still a bit of a tradition of parents arranging marriages at that time. So in the end, she went back home and got married. At the wedding, her husband immediately became angry, because he felt that the other couple was stealing the spotlight from him.

And that was the beginning of ten years of domestic violence for Maye. After they were married, they went to Europe for their honeymoon. Maye took care of everything: packing luggage, cooking meals, and paying all the expenses from her meager savings. Meanwhile, her husband spent his time reading Playboy every day, because he couldn't get it in South Africa.

After that, Maye gave birth to three children in a row, Elon Musk and his younger brother and sister. Her daily life consisted of helping her husband with his work, running a small clinic of her own, raising the children, and doing all the housework. Even when she was about to give birth, her husband still forced her to do physical labor. Later, his daily beatings and vicious verbal abuse of her gradually moved from behind closed doors to the point where he didn't hold back even in front of friends and guests. But Maye could not get a divorce for a long time.

On the one hand, her husband made very vicious threats against her physical safety. On the other hand, under South African law at the time, domestic violence was not recognized as grounds for divorce. It was only after the law changed that Maye finally managed to divorce him with the help of a lawyer. Even during the divorce process, her husband once chased her down the street with a knife. By then, he was already successful and had made a lot of money. But in the divorce, she asked for nothing. Maye only wanted the children, and she wasn't thinking about anything else. She just wanted to get as far away from him as possible.

Later, the judge ruled that her husband must pay child support and must give Maye a car. But her husband not only kept Maye's own pickup truck. He also owned five luxury cars, yet he went out and bought the cheapest car he could find, a Toyota without air conditioning. He told Maye, "You can either take this Toyota, or I can give you a nice car, but you have to let me inspect the car's condition once a month." Maye chose the Toyota. And her husband never paid child support.

Through her story, Maye wants to tell everyone this: if you are in a relationship that makes you unhappy, or even afraid, you must get out of it as soon as possible. When you discover a mistake, you must take action to correct it right away. If you delay, things will not get better, and the cost of getting out will only keep growing.

I heard that once, Elon Musk went to Norway, and he called in the people at the service center to ask them about a problem with a car part. No one knew how to fix it, and some of the middle managers didn't raise their hands. Elon said right away, "You're all fired." Looking at it from another angle, this may also be his way of correcting mistakes quickly.

So now the question arises: does one's family of origin play a decisive role in whether a person succeeds?

Maybe the reason I haven't succeeded is that I don't have a grandfather who could fly a plane. But change has never been a simple thing. If you are dissatisfied with your current situation, or dissatisfied with the class you were born into, then what you may need to do is become that grandfather who could fly a plane.

That's all for today. See you next time!

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