Elon Musk’s father Errol is criticizing his son’s parenting skills.
During an episode of the Wide Awake Podcast, Errol, 78, told host Joshua Rubin that Elon “hasn’t been a good dad.”
“They were too rich, too many nannies. Then he had five children with the same woman, five sons all brought up. Each one had its own nanny,” he said.
“The first child was too much with nannies and died in the care of a nanny… Elon’s gonna shoot me for saying this, but that’s what I think. That’s no good.”
According to Errol, the child-care staff increased in 2008 when Elon split from his ex-wife, Justine Wilson Musk, with whom he shares twins Griffin and Vivian, 21, and triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian, 19. They also shared their late son Nevada, who died in 2002 at 10 weeks old due to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
“When they got divorced, the nannies were six on this side, six on that side,” Errol said. “It was really a weird situation.”
Since the split, Elon, 53, has welcomed children X Æ A-Xii, 4, Exa Dark Sideræl, 3, and Techno Mechanicus, 1, with ex Grimes. He also has twins Azure and Strider, 2, and another baby born in June 2024 with Shivon Zilis.
Errol revealed that he hasn’t spent “a lot of time” with his grandchildren but referred to them all as “very nice and smart and very pleasant.”
When Errol was asked about how he feels towards his son’s past partners, he said, “Well, fathers are not terribly interested in any of their children’s husbands or wives more or less unless they go out of their way.”
During the podcast, Errol also opened up about his relationship with his former stepdaughter, Jana Bezuidenhout, whom he helped raise from the age of four. Errol married Jana’s mother, Heide Bezuidenhout, in 1992 but the pair separated and got re-married in 1999. After the pair divorced again in 2004, Errol and Jana reconnected in 2014 and sparked up a romantic relationship. They ended up having a son together in 2017 and in 2022, Errol revealed that he’d become a father again at the age of 76.
He claimed that he didn’t help raise Jana, saying that when he got back together with her mother in 1999 after their brief separation, she made her children “wards of the state” because she could no longer afford to raise them.
“When I re-married Heide, her children weren’t with us. The first two years of our [second] marriage, again from 1999 to 2001, it was just Ali and in 1999 Rose was born, so we had a little baby,” Errol explained during the podcast. “It was just me and Heide and we would try and see the children when we were allowed to, her children, which was not often. Once a month or something. Then we decided that we were going to apply to have them taken out of the children’s home.”
Errol said her three children left the home in 2002, when Elon had his first child.
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“By 2002, Elon had made nearly $200 million with PayPal and so he invited us over. They paid for us to come over and meet his little boy who was three months old,” Errol said. “On the way there, we arrived in Raleigh in North Carolina and the airline called me off the plane to tell me that they need to tell me something. That I need to make a call to my children to tell me that the little boy had died the night before. The baby, Nevada, he passed away. It was a horrific situation.”
After that visit, Elon moved Errol, Heide and their children to America and they lived in Malibu. Errol claimed that Heide was never happy living in the United States and wanted to return to South Africa.
Errol said Elon had their passports, so they had to obtain temporary passports and race to the airport before his son could stop them from leaving.
“Elon and Kimbal [Elon’s brother] said they never want to speak to us again. That was the estrangement between me and Elon. Nothing else,” Errol claimed.
After this, he decided to divorce Heide again for the second time in 2004.
“The next time I saw her [Heide’s] daughter was 2014 … 10 years later.”
“In 2014, I got a letter from Jana saying that she is in desperate states. She was now about 28, 27, 29 or something. She had a little girl of six that had been taken away from her by the state because she couldn’t look after the child,” he said.
After the pair reconnected, they had their first child in 2017. Jana wanted to keep it quiet, but Errol said he wanted people to know.
“I knew Barbara Jones, who’s the Daily Mail reporter in South Africa, and so I called her up because I’d been in newspapers for years from back in the ’70s. I called her up and I said, ‘Do you want to hear something interesting?’ and I told her the whole thing. It was front page news in the Daily Mail the next day,” he revealed, confirming he leaked the news.
As of this writing, Elon has not publicly responded to his father’s appearance on the podcast.
During his time on the Wide Awake Podcast, Errol also addressed Elon’s straight-arm, Nazi-like gesture during his speech at U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
“Elon was so nervous getting out there. He’s not good at public speaking. He’s got a lot to learn on that score. It takes a long time to be a public speaker and some people have a natural ability. It depends on your intelligence. The more intelligent you are, the harder it is,” he said.
Errol said he could see Elon “struggling trying to get through the few things he has to say.”
Elon responded to the accusations that his gesture looked like a Nazi salute on X several hours after he left the stage.
“Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” Elon wrote.
The tech billionaire also posted a series of Nazi-related puns on X to his more than 210 million followers.
He referred to Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and leading members of the Nazi Party, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler.
“Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations! Some people will Goebbels anything down!” Elon wrote on X, the social media platform he owns.