By LIESL VENTER IN LANGEBAAN, SOUTH AFRICA and ISABELLE STANEY FOR THE DAILY MAIL
Errol Musk’s homelife is a picture of controlled chaos – equal parts mundane domesticity, eccentricity and intrigue.
As the Daily Mail arrived for a pre-scheduled interview with Errol, 79, he was dressed in scruffy clothes as he finished up work repairing a broken toilet, cutting himself in the process.
The mother of Errol’s two youngest children, girlfriend Jana, 38, is bustling about the sprawling Langebaan, South Africa, ranch-style home. Their relationship is a stark reminder that this is no ordinary family.
Errol raised Jana as his stepdaughter from the age of four. But in 2017, when she was 30, they conceived a child together. Now, they have two kids. Their five-year-old is playing on the kitchen counter.
The walls of their house, with its huge windows and sweeping sea view, are filled with artworks, many painted by Errol himself. One piece stands out – a half-finished portrait of the world’s richest man, Errol’s eldest son, Elon Musk, 53.
Errol and Jana’s bizarre union – she is the daughter of Errol’s ex-wife, Heide Bezuidenhout – rankled his older children and, according to Elon’s biographer Walter Isaacson, led Elon to cut contact with his father temporarily.
Speaking with Errol now, however, he claims all that unpleasantness is in the past.
‘I have just spoken to Elon earlier today,’ Errol tells the Daily Mail. ‘We talk about family a lot. You know? Who needs what?’
Indeed. A Bentley that Errol once said was gifted to him by his billionaire son is parked in the garage.
As Daily Mail arrived for a pre-scheduled interview with Errol Musk (pictured), 79, he was dressed in scruffy clothes as he finished up work repairing a broken toilet, cutting himself in the process.
‘I have just spoken to Elon earlier today,’ Errol tells the Daily Mail. ‘We talk about family a lot. You know? Who needs what?’ (Pictured: Elon Musk at Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress).
But as Errol talks, something unusual happens: a houseguest wanders upstairs, a Chinese businessman that he says is staying with him to negotiate the transportation of his seven-year-old son, Elon’s half-brother Rush, to China to take part in a gaming tournament.
‘They say he will be the biggest thing in China. They say he’s a prolific gamer and he’s a champion,’ Errol says, seemingly unconcerned about the prospect of shipping his young child off to a country considered by many to be America’s most powerful adversary.
This is just one of several startling insights Errol offers into his private life. At times he is unexpectedly revealing, at others he’s guarded and carefully chooses his words.
But his most opinionated offering is reserved for recent allegations made by 26-year-old right-wing influencer Ashley St Clair, who claims she secretly gave birth to Elon’s 13th child last year and is now suing the billionaire for full parental custody.
After making it clear that he has no specific knowledge of the situation, adding ‘I would be very annoyed if my father commented on things like this’, Errol proceeds to speculate at length on St Clair’s allegations.
‘I would find it very strange if a woman is saying she has had a child with Elon and telling people quite publicly about it. If it turns out not to be true, she would be a little crazy, don’t you think?’ he says.
Does he believe St Clair’s allegations or not? It’s impossible to know – and he refuses to clarify.
‘Any woman with a slight brain would be mad to turn down the opportunity if she were to be offered a child with Elon,’ he says.
The roundabout compliment is at sharp odds with the caustic words Errol often reserves for Elon, having even suggested recently that Elon was a bad father in the run up to the tragic death of his own first son, Nevada, who died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in 2002 at just 10 weeks old.
‘He hasn’t been a good dad,’ Errol said on an episode of the Wide Awake podcast last month. ‘The first child was too much with nannies and died in the care of a nanny.’
But, in our interview, Errol’s usual criticisms of Elon seem to have vanished. In fact, he seems eager to defend his son.
‘I think Elon is a good father. He is trying to be,’ Errol says. ‘No one sets out to be a bad father. It’s very difficult.’
These compliments, however, often come with a sting – and never more so than when he’s discussing Elon’s relationship with his four-year-old son, X, whom he shares with singer Claire Boucher, also known as Grimes.
Errol claims that Claire Boucher – ‘Grimes’ (pictured with Elon in 2018) – is responsible for the ‘very weird’ names of her children: X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl and Techno Mechanicus.
In recent months, Elon has been carrying his four-year-old son, X, on his shoulders into meetings with President Donald Trump at the White House.
In recent months, Elon has been carrying X on his shoulders into meetings with President Donald Trump at the White House – something Errol does not seem to approve of.
‘I think it was a bit over the top, but I see what he’s trying to do,’ Errol says. ‘He is trying to nurture a bond that he may have ignored with the others.’
His words grow sharper when the subject turns to Grimes: ‘She is nice, an attractive girl in some ways… She is a little nuts.’
He also alleges she is responsible for the ‘very weird’ names of her children with Elon: X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl and Techno Mechanicus.
‘It’s not Elon’s work,’ Errol insists. ‘He was trying to make [Grimes] happy.’
Errol is much more effusive when it comes to Shivon Zilis, the mother of two other of Elon’s children and the director of his company Neuralink, which is developing technology to directly link the human brain with computers.
‘His relationship with [Zilis] is good. She’s an incredible woman,’ Errol says. ‘I like her more than any of the other women I’ve ever met with him. She’s absolutely lovely. And she’s a real good mother and everything. She is certainly the best woman I’ve ever seen him with.’
Meanwhile, the father of seven and grandfather to 20 seems to have fully embraced a rose-tinted view of his own parenting, painting a picture of an idyllic childhood for Elon.
‘[Elon] is treating X the way I treated him,’ Errol says. ‘Elon was always with me. When he was small, he would sit on my lap.’
Elon remembers things very differently.
In a 2017 Rolling Stone interview, he described Errol as a ‘terrible human being’ with a ‘carefully thought-out plan of evil.’
‘Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done,’ Musk claimed.
Errol habitually dismisses negative accounts of his behavior. And he is quick to brush off the allegations of domestic abuse that Elon’s mother Maye, 76, made against him in 2019.
‘She started saying that when we were married, I hit her and I beat her… this is absolute rubbish,’ he now says. ‘I just put it down to «it’s women». Then everybody understands. Women don’t have to make sense of anything.’
Errol’s favorite topic to return to is his children, expressing pride in his youngest son, Rush, who he says is ‘smarter at seven than [Elon]’ was at that age.
Though one thing Errol is deeply approving of is Elon’s politics.
In this interview, Errol’s usual criticisms of Elon seem to have vanished. Instead, he seems eager to defend him. ‘I think Elon is a good father. He is trying to be,’ Errol says. ‘No one sets out to be a bad father. It’s very difficult.’ (Pictured: Errol holding his son Elon as a baby).
Errol has long supported Donald Trump – a fact that allegedly caused some consternation for his children back in 2015.
‘Elon and [his brother] Kimbal said to me, «how could you be so stupid? You know? Don’t you realize Trump’s evil?»,’ Errol says, pointing out that both men donated to the Clinton campaign.
Now, of course, Elon heads up the new Department of Government Efficiency for Trump and has the ear of the president. That pleases Errol greatly.
‘If you’ve got any brains at all, then you support Trump,’ he says. ‘Was it a surprise for me to see Elon step up and support Trump? No.’
As our conversation winds down, Errol grows contemplative, his voice turning quiet, thoughtful.
‘Children are easy,’ he says. ‘It’s when they become teenagers that it gets difficult.
‘They have so many questions – about life, about the world. «Why is this like that? Why is that like this?» They also follow their own minds, something Elon is realizing with his own children.’
For a brief moment, the mask seems to slip. ‘I won’t say I was a good parent,’ he admits.
But the humility is fleeting and he quickly adds: ‘But I’d like to see someone who says they were a better parent. I’d like to see them.’
