Errol Musk wants the world to know that he and his son Elon are actually on very good conditions.
“Always been,” he said in an interview on Friday, just a few days after comments that he made Elon a bad parent, went viral.
In a recent episode of The Wide Awake Podcast, Mr. Musk about his son Elon, who is the subject of most of his interviews.
“He has not been a good father,” Errol Musk said on the podcast. “They were too rich, too many nanny girls. Then he had five children with the same wife, five sons who were all mentioned. Everyone had their own babysitter. '
Perhaps the most punishable, be Errol at the death of Elon's first son, Nevada, who died in 2002 of the sudden childhood syndrome. Errol claimed that it had taken place in the presence of a babysitter. (In a separate case of Elon's parenthood that is being questioned this week, Grimes, the mother of three of his children, posted a series of messages on X with X asked Elon to help with one of the non -specific 'medical crisis' of their children)
Errol said he hadn't tried to start a war with his son. “The press takes things out of the context,” he said from his hotel in what he described as the “the most beautiful city in the world”, meaning Dubai. “I am here to meet people in business, and so on,” he explained.
Although Elon has said earlier that his father 'was a bit crazy later in life', it happens that the two men have a considerable amount in common. Both talk about their performance in elevated terms. Both have countless children. (Elon has 12, of whom one died as a baby; Errol has seven.) Both have technical backgrounds. Both are known for volatile relationships with people.
Both are great proponents of President Trump, although that was not always the case.
And both have a long history of making inflammatory comments on each other about a wide range of topics.
Elon's upbringing
Errol, which ran several companies in South Africa, separated the mother from Elon, Maye Musk, when Elon was 8.
She later said that Errol had been offensive. He said in interviews that he had no idea why they were divorced.
Elon and his brother Kimbal mainly lived with their father for a few years and worked for him on many of his companies, including a lodge for tourists who visit the Timbavati Private Nature Reserve.
In interviews with Walter Isaacson for his biography of Elon, the Tech Mogul said that before he left South Africa for Canada in the 1980s, his father predicted that he would be back in a few months because he would “never be successful” . Errol denied that later, and said it had been his idea for Elon to go to Noord -America.
In the early years of Elon's celebrity, he spoke about his father in ways that suggested a difficult relationship. In an interview with GQ in 2008, he said that his father “was quite an astute engineer,” before adding that he thought he had gone crazy.
Errol usually took on the public comments of his son. In 2014 he told the Mercury news that he was' undoubtedly 'that his son' would 'bring man to Mars in his life' as the founder and chief executive of SpaceX.
Around that time, Elon was quoted in another biography of himself and remembered with a certain degree of affection how he and Kimbal went to Errol's Engineering sites like children and learned the basic principles of plumbing, Braklaying, window fitting and electric work. But he also said: “It would certainly be precisely to say that I didn't have a good childhood. It may sound good. It was not absent, but it was not a happy childhood. It was like misery. He is good at making life miserable – that is certain. “
A change in tone
In 2017, Elon was the subject of a Rolling Stone cover story by the writer Neil Strauss. This time his anger was made clear to Errol.
“He was such a terrible person,” Mr. Musk told Mr Strauss. “My father will have a carefully thought out plan of evil. He will plan angry. “
He added: “He did almost every crime you can imagine. He did almost every malignant thing that you could imagine. '
Mr Strauss described the tears that flowed over Elon's face as he said this.
In an e -mail to Mr Strauss, Errol said that he had never “intentionally” wounded or threatened. He said he had once shot and killed three men who broke into his house and that he had been released from all the accusations on self -defense grounds. He added: “I love my children and would easily do something for them.”
According to Errol, this included giving Elon money for school and helping to pay for his early business companies.
“This is not true,” said Elon Rolling Stone in response. “He was not relevant. He paid nothing for the university. My brother and I paid for the university through fairs, loans and at the same time working of two jobs. The financing that we collected for our first company came from a small group of random angel investors in Silicon Valley. “
A breaking point
In 2018 the Daily Mail reported that Errol, when 72, recently a son had conceived a son with his stepdaughter Jana Bezuidenhout, then 30.
Errol tried to minimize the relationship he had with the mother of Mrs. Bezuidenhout, Heide, and told the mail that he barely remembered her.
“I got my 30-year-old girlfriend, Jana, pregnant and we had a baby who is now 10 months old,” he said. (In 2022, Errol and Mrs. Bezuidenhout had a second child.)
The e -mail reported that various family members had cited Errol that a child with Mrs. Bezuidenhout had had a breaking point with Elon.
Errol denied that during his “Wide Awake” podcast interview and said that the disagreement came into existence in the early 2000s, when he lived with heathland in Malibu, Calif. She became miserable and was determined to go back to South Africa, he said. When Errol Elon said he would move, their relationship deteriorated.
Speaking from Dubai on Friday, Errol said that the real reason that Elon had called him angry in 2017 was because of political differences between them.
“At that time he supported the Democrats,” Errol said. “At that time he mixed with the wrong people.”
His son, he said, had “learned from his mistake.”
Common ground
Errol Musk is by no means a mainstream Trump supporter.
On the podcast, without any indication that he was kidding, he made bizarre and false statements about Michelle Obama as a transgender woman and he implied that the comedian Joan Rivers had been killed after he had made a joke about it. And he repeated invalid claims about voices stolen from Mr Trump in the 2020 elections, and said he believed that 15 million votes were missing.
He also shared a theory about the reason why Elon, who had donated to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2016, had moved his faithfulness, had devoted himself to Mr Trump's re -election in 2024 and had spent more than $ 250 million on to The effort.
Errol said that he believed that an important turning point came after the 2020 elections, when President Joe Biden invited a group of electric vehicles in the White House to discuss the Green Energy Transition, but did not include ELON. Errol emphasized: “They did not invited Tesla. They have not invited Tesla. “
Despite the different inflammatory comments between them, Errol said on the podcast that he and Elon had been in contact with each other, and he was poetic about the luxury car he said his son had recently given him.
“It's a Bentley,” he said.
