San Francisco Business Times, July 22, 2011

What it takes to be the mother of Tesla’s ‘genius boy’

by James Gardner Managing editor

Maye Musk says one thing often surprises people when they learn she’s the mother of Tesla Chairman and CEO Elon Musk: “People say, ‘He has a mother?’”

The Business Times found Ms. Musk after she gushed on Twitter about her baby boy turning 40. We wanted to know more about Elon Musk’s childhood. We learned perhaps more than we anticipated about Ms. Musk along the way, from tweets such as: “Booked for a nude (tasteful) shoot for NY magazine tomorrow. Great motivation to eat carefully today.”

Musk, you see, is a career fashion model, who at age 64 is still actively working, represented by agencies in New York, London, Paris, Hamburg and Toronto.

But she’s clearly also the source of some of her son’s fearsomely brainiac genes: She has two master’s degrees in dietetics and nutritional sciences. She’s passed the dietitian registration exam in three countries, including one in South Africa, which she took in Afrikaans.

Musk was a single mom for most of her three kids’ growing-up years in South Africa.

While younger siblings Tosca Musk, a movie producer and actress, and Kimbal Musk a chef-restaurant owner (and a member of Tesla’s board) are all bright and successful, only one was dubbed “genius boy.” That would be Elon, after he read an entire Encyclopedia Britannica around age 8, she said. Though Elon found school “boring,” he was always reading — even in the car — and could retain most of what he read. He also devoured anything associated with space and astronomy as a kid, his mother said. So Musk’s SpaceX venture, which makes rockets for private space flight, was no surprise to her.

As his mother, she says the hardest thing in dealing with Elon’s celebrity is the criticism. She often has to stop herself from replying to online commenters who have negative things to say about his businesses or his lifestyle, particularly his rather messy divorce.

But, as any mother would, she says the critics have Elon wrong: “He’s just determined to make things better.”