Do Elon Musk and His Father Get Along?

Errol Musk wants the world to know that he and his son Elon are actually on very good terms.

“Always have been,” he said in an interview on Friday, just days after comments that he made calling Elon a bad parent went viral.

On a recent episode of the Wide Awake podcast, Mr. Musk talked about his son Elon, who is the subject of most of his interviews.

“He hasn’t been a good dad,” Errol Musk said on the podcast. “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.”

Perhaps most punishingly, Errol pointed out the death of Elon’s first son, Nevada, who died of sudden infant death syndrome in 2002. Errol claimed that it had occurred in the presence of a nanny. (In a separate instance of Elon’s parenting being called into question this week, Grimes, the mother of three of his children, posted and then deleted a series of messages on X asking Elon to help with one of their children’s unspecified “medical crisis.”)

Errol said he had not been trying to start a war with his son. “The press takes things out of context,” he said from his hotel in what he described as the “the most beautiful city in the world,” by which he meant Dubai. “I’m here to meet people in business and so on,” he explained.

Although Elon has previously said that his father went “a little crazy later in life,” it so happens that the two men have a fair amount in common. Both talk in lofty terms about their accomplishments. Both have numerous children. (Elon has 12, one of whom died as an infant; Errol has seven.) Both have engineering backgrounds. Both are known for having volatile relationships with people.

Both are big supporters of President Trump, although that was not always the case.

And both have a long history of making inflammatory comments about each other on a wide variety of topics.

Elon’s Upbringing

Errol, who ran multiple businesses in South Africa, divorced Elon’s mother, Maye Musk, when Elon was 8.

She later said Errol had been abusive. He said in interviews that he had no idea why they divorced.

Elon and his brother Kimbal lived primarily with their father for several years and worked for him on many of his ventures, including a lodge for tourists visiting 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 later denied that, saying it had been his idea for Elon to go to North 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’d gone crazy.

Errol mostly took his son’s public comments in stride. In 2014, he told The Mercury News he had “no doubt” his son would “get man to Mars in his lifetime” as the founder and chief executive of SpaceX.

Around that time, Elon was quoted in another biography of himself, recalling with a measure of affection how he and Kimbal went to Errol’s engineering sites as children and learned the basics of plumbing, bricklaying, window fitting and electrical work. But he also said: “It would certainly be accurate to say that I did not have a good childhood. It may sound good. It was not absent of good, but it was not a happy childhood. It was like misery. He’s good at making life miserable — that’s for sure.”

A Change in Tone

In 2017, Elon was the subject of a Rolling Stone cover story by the writer Neil Strauss. This time, his rage toward Errol was made clear.

“He was such a terrible human being,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Strauss. “My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil. He will plan evil.”

He added: “Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.”

Mr. Strauss described tears streaming down Elon’s face as he said this.

In an email to Mr. Strauss, Errol said he had never “intentionally” hurt or threatened anyone. He said that he had once shot and killed three men who broke into his home and that he had been cleared of all charges on self-defense grounds. He added, “I love my children and would readily do whatever for them.”

According to Errol, this included giving Elon money for school and helping to pay for his early business ventures.

“This is not true,” Elon told Rolling Stone in response. “He was irrelevant. He paid nothing for college. My brother and I paid for college through scholarships, loans and working two jobs simultaneously. The funding we raised 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, then 72, had recently fathered a son with his stepdaughter Jana Bezuidenhout, then 30.

Errol tried to minimize the relationship he’d had with Ms. Bezuidenhout’s mother, Heide, telling 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 Ms. Bezuidenhout had a second child.)

The Mail reported that several family members had cited Errol’s having had a child with Ms. Bezuidenhout as a breaking point with Elon.

Errol denied that during his “Wide Awake” podcast interview, saying that the discord arose in the early 2000s, when he was living in Malibu, Calif, with Heide. She became miserable and was determined to move back to South Africa, he said. When Errol told Elon he would be moving, their relationship deteriorated.

Speaking from Dubai on Friday, Errol said the real reason Elon had called him evil in 2017 was because of political differences between them.

“At that time, he supported the Democrats,” Errol said. “At the time, he was mixing 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 joking, he made outlandish and untrue statements about Michelle Obama being a transgender woman and he implied that the comedian Joan Rivers had been assassinated after making a joke about it. And he repeated debunked claims about votes having been stolen from Mr. Trump in the 2020 election, saying he believed 15 million votes were missing.

He also shared a theory on why Elon, who had donated to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016, had shifted his allegiance, devoting himself to Mr. Trump’s re-election bid in 2024 and spending more than $250 million on the effort, according to filings.

Errol said he believed a major turning point came after the 2020 election, when President Joe Biden invited a group of electric vehicle manufacturers to the White House to discuss the green energy transition, but did not include Elon. Errol emphasized: “They didn’t invite Tesla. They didn’t invite Tesla.”

Despite the various inflammatory comments between them, Errol said on the podcast that he and Elon had been in touch with each other, and he waxed poetic about the luxury car he said his son had recently given him.

“It’s a Bentley,” he said.