In the opulent glow of red carpets and magazine spreads, Maye Musk glides with the poise of a lifelong model—designer gowns draping her frame, a warm smile masking decades of quiet fortitude. At 77, she’s the picture of enduring elegance, the mother who stood sentinel as her eldest son, Elon, ignited revolutions in electric vehicles, reusable rockets, and artificial intelligence. From Tesla’s sleek showrooms to SpaceX’s thunderous launches, Maye has been there: beaming at galas, gracing Time covers as a symbol of maternal grace, and whispering encouragement amid the chaos of global scrutiny. Yet, beneath this veneer of triumph lies a story few dared to imagine—a raw chronicle of marital abuse, financial desperation, and the splintering of family ties that tested the very bonds she fought to preserve. In a candid 2025 interview with Vanity Fair, Maye peels back the layers, revealing not just the genius she nurtured but the fractures that nearly shattered them all. “Success came at a cost,” she says softly, her voice steady but laced with the weight of unspoken scars. “We were a family in pieces, but we chose to rebuild, one stubborn step at a time.”

Maye’s odyssey begins not in the rarified air of Silicon Valley boardrooms but in the sun-baked streets of Pretoria, South Africa, where she arrived as a child in 1950. Born Maye Haldeman on April 19, 1948, in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, she was one of five siblings in a nomadic family fleeing post-war uncertainties. Her parents, Winnifred and Joshua Haldeman—a chiropractor, adventurer, and political firebrand—embodied the restless spirit that would echo in their grandchildren. Joshua, a pilot and osteopath, dragged the clan across continents: from Saskatchewan’s prairies to South Africa’s savannas, chasing utopian dreams and chiropractic crusades. They settled in Pretoria, where young Maye discovered her twin passions—modeling and nutrition—amid the apartheid-era tensions that simmered like a distant storm.

By 17, Maye was strutting runways in Johannesburg, her lithe figure and sharp features turning heads in an industry that prized youth and conformity. But life veered toward domesticity when, at 22, she wed Errol Musk, a charismatic electromechanical engineer 11 years her senior. Their honeymoon in 1970 was a whirlwind romance, but it curdled swiftly into nightmare. “I came back bruised and pregnant,” Maye recounts in her 2019 memoir A Woman Makes a Plan, her words a stark indictment of the violence that defined their early years. Errol, from a privileged white South African family, wielded control like a weapon—financially isolating her from her Haldeman relatives, belittling her ambitions, and erupting in rages that left physical and emotional welts. Friends dubbed him “the Pig” for his public humiliations, but fear silenced Maye. “I was too scared to tell anyone,” she admits. “He’d twist everything, make me doubt my own sanity.”

Over three frantic years, three children arrived: Elon on June 28, 1971, a wide-eyed boy with an insatiable curiosity; Kimbal in 1972, the affable middle child destined for culinary empires; and Tosca in 1974, the creative spark who would pioneer streaming romance. The family home buzzed with Errol’s engineering gadgets—early computers humming in corners—but harmony was a facade. Elon, the sensitive firstborn, absorbed the toxicity like a sponge. At five, he hurled himself between his parents during one brutal altercation, his tiny frame a futile shield against Errol’s fury. “My absolute boy,” Maye calls him now, her eyes misting. “He saw too much, felt too much. It wired him for the impossible—to fix the world because he couldn’t fix us.”

Divorce, when it came in 1979, was a seismic rupture. South Africa’s archaic laws had barred it until that year, trapping Maye in a gilded cage. Freed at last, she fled with the children to a modest Pretoria apartment, but stability proved elusive. Errol, leveraging his wealth and engineering prowess, lured the boys back with temptations Maye couldn’t match: the coveted Encyclopaedia Britannica, a Commodore VIC-20 computer rarer than hen’s teeth in apartheid-era South Africa. At nine, Elon chose his father, a decision that cleaved Maye’s heart. “It made me very sad,” she confessed in a 2025 podcast with The Diary of a CEO. “I understood the pull—knowledge was his oxygen—but it felt like abandonment.” Kimbal followed four years later, leaving Tosca as Maye’s sole companion. The fracture deepened: Errol’s home, a veneer of intellectual bounty, masked deeper cruelties. Elon later branded his father “a terrible human being,” recounting emotional manipulations that bordered on sadism—midnight interrogations, psychological games that left the boy retreating into books and code.

Maye’s reinvention was Herculean. Modeling gigs in South Africa barely covered rent, so she pivoted to dietetics, earning a master’s from the University of the Orange Free State while juggling auditions and advisory roles. But whispers of instability—Errol’s volatility spilling into custody battles—propelled her northward. In 1989, at 41, she bundled Tosca and fled to Toronto, leveraging her Canadian roots. Elon, then 18 and freshly graduated from Pretoria Boys High, had already bolted to Queen’s University in Ontario, scorning South Africa’s mandatory military service. Kimbal trailed soon after. The siblings’ escape was a quiet rebellion, but for Maye, it was survival’s final gambit.

Toronto greeted them with brutal indifference. They crammed into a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment in the city’s gritty Annex neighborhood—Elon on the couch, Tosca sharing Maye’s bed, the air thick with the scent of instant noodles and ambition. Money was a ghost: Maye wept over spilled milk, rationing groceries like wartime rations. To feed her brood, she stacked five jobs—research officer at the University of Toronto by day, part-time lecturer in nutrition evenings, modeling for catalogs, private consultations, and motivational talks. “I worked every day and four nights a week,” she recalls. “Sundays were for laundry and basics. I barely knew what my kids were up to.” Tosca slung burgers at a local joint; Elon coded away at a Microsoft internship, his Zip2 startup seed planted in dorm-room hacks. Kimbal hustled odd jobs, his entrepreneurial fire kindled by necessity.

These years forged the Musks’ unbreakable ethos: resilience as religion, ingenuity as armor. Elon, bullied mercilessly at school for his awkward brilliance, found solace in sci-fi and simulations—portents of SpaceX’s starry gaze. “My kids learned early that luck is made, not waited for,” Maye says. “We had no safety net, so we wove our own.” Yet the family’s fault lines persisted. Errol’s shadow loomed—sporadic visits laced with manipulation, his later scandals (fathering children with his stepdaughter) a grotesque coda that Elon publicly decried as “evil incarnate.” Maye, ever the diplomat, distanced without demonizing: “He gave them intellect, but I gave them heart.” The boys’ time with Errol left psychic scars—Elon’s aversion to “legacy” thinking, his drive to upend systems born of a childhood dictated by one man’s whims.

By the mid-1990s, fortune’s wheel turned. Elon’s Zip2 sale netted $22 million in 1999; PayPal’s eBay flip in 2002 minted him a billionaire at 31. Maye, modeling in Toronto’s twilight circuit, watched her son buy mansions while she scrimped. “He’d slip me cash for rent,” she laughs now, “but I insisted on earning my way.” Her breakthrough came late: at 67, IMG Models signed her in 2015, catapulting the septuagenarian to CoverGirl’s oldest spokeswoman and Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit icon at 69. Her memoir, A Woman Makes a Plan, soared to bestseller lists, a blueprint for late-blooming triumphs. Today, she’s a wellness guru, her nutrition practice global via apps and endorsements, her net worth eclipsing $50 million—peanuts to Elon’s $500 billion, but a fortune earned on grit.

Publicly, Maye is Elon’s North Star: arm-in-arm at the 2025 Met Gala, her silver hair a beacon amid his entourage; X posts gushing over Tesla’s safety feats or Starlink’s life-saving signals. “Proud mom,” she captions drone-lit family outings with Kimbal’s farm-to-table feasts and Tosca’s Passionflix romances. Yet, in quieter revelations, she unmasks the toll. The 2025 Vanity Fair sit-down, filmed in her Manhattan pied-à-terre, captures her vulnerability: eyes welling as she recounts Elon’s couch-sleeping vigils, the ache of his defection to Errol. “We fractured, but we mended crooked,” she muses. “Elon’s genius? It’s laced with our pain—the urgency to launch because we once felt grounded.”

The fractures ripple forward. Elon’s own family echoes the chaos: Vivian Jenna Wilson, his transgender daughter from first wife Justine Wilson, legally severed ties in 2022, citing his “awful” upbringing and transphobic views. “I don’t exist to him,” Vivian told NBC in 2024, her words a dagger Maye navigates delicately—publicly supportive of Elon’s “woke mind virus” rants, privately urging reconciliation. Kimbal’s 2023 Twitter unfollow spat hints at brotherly strains, though their 2025 Thanksgiving feast—turkey from Kimbal’s Big Green Egg—signals détente. Tosca, the glue, hosts Musk sibling summits, her rom-com empire a counterpoint to Elon’s dystopian quests.

Maye’s openness in 2025—amid Elon’s Trump alliance and DOGE co-chair role—stirs controversy. Critics decry her Fox News defenses of his “dishonest Democrat media” barbs, her X post urging “multiple votes” under false names (a jest gone awry). Yet she stands unbowed: “I’ve survived worse than headlines.” Her China tour, wooing influencers with wellness seminars, positions her as Elon’s “secret weapon”—a silver-haired envoy softening Beijing’s edges for Tesla’s Shanghai gigafactory.

At its core, Maye’s story is a requiem for the unseen labors of motherhood: the spilled milk mopped in silence, the bruises hidden under smiles, the genius coaxed from adversity’s forge. “I raised them to be kind, independent—values from my parents,” she writes in a CNBC essay. “Elon reshapes worlds, but we all started in that tiny apartment, dreaming bigger than our means.” As 2025 wanes, with Elon eyeing Mars colonies and Maye plotting a fitness line, the fractures linger—not as weaknesses, but weld lines stronger than seamless steel. In a family where rockets pierce atmospheres and models defy age, the real miracle is endurance: a mother’s plan, executed against all odds, birthing not just success, but survival.