Who is Elon Musk’s mom Maye? Meet the model, dietician, and author

The billionaire’s mom was born Maye Halderman on April 19, 1948, in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, and her family moved to Pretoria, South Africa when she was a toddler in 1950. Maye described her parents as “very famous“ and, they flew around the world in a prop plane in 1952. So it seems like taking to the skies, has always run in Elon’s blood.

Maye met Elon’s dad Errol Musk in high school, and they got married in 1970. The model and engineer had three children, Elon, and his siblings Kimbal and Tosca. However, Maye has been open about the alleged abuse she suffered in the relationship. Hollywood Life notes that Errol allegedly abused her and made her cut off contact with her family. She didn’t walk away until the South Africa divorce laws changed in 1979. “I was too scared to tell anyone [about the deeper violence]. Like every abused woman, I was embarrassed,” she told Harper’s Bazaar.

Maye worked full-time in South Africa to support her children, but they all eventually relocated to Canada. Elon was already there having moved when he was 18 after graduating high school. His siblings convinced their mom to join them, per Style. Since Maye was born in Canada, they obtained Canadian passports.

Once she got to Canada, the hustler kept going, at one point working 5 jobs., “I was a research officer at the University of Toronto. I was teaching two nights a week at a nutrition college, and two night weeks at a modeling agency, I modeled, and I gave talks, and I had a private practice,” she told Forbes.

Maye has always been beautiful and she was a finalist in the 1969 Miss South Africa beauty competition when she was 21.

Maye shared on Instagram that her mom had a dancing school in Regina, Saskatchewan in the 1940s and after they moved to South Africa she sent her and her sisters to dancing schools. “We studied ballet, modern, tap, Spanish, etc,” she wrote.

Maye has an impressive modeling career with decades of work in print and runway for brands like Special K, and Revlon. She also appeared nude on the cover of Time magazine in 2011, and New York magazine the following year. In September 2017, she became CoverGirl’s oldest spokesmodel at age 69.

She made a cameo in Beyonce’s music video for “Haunted.” In 2017 she told Vanity Fair, “My friends tell me: I was famous before Elon was famous,” per Hollywood Life.

She has 13 grandchildren. Back in April 2020 Maye shared this photo with her 11 grandchildren. Elon and Grimes welcomed X AE A-XII in May 2020, and their daughter Y, brings the number to 13.

Along with beauty, she’s always had brains and she has a business as a dietitian giving presentations around the world. She has two master’s degrees, one for dietetics from the University of the Orange Free State in South Africa. The educated woman later earned another in nutritional science from the University of Toronto. Maye also used her platform to speak on important issues and she recently interviewed about the war in Ukraine.

Maye published her memoir Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success in 2019, and she is also the author of Feel Fantastic (1996). After years of hard work and perseverance, Maye has an estimated $20 million net worth. And she has no plans of stopping, “I will never retire. My mum never retired. I’ll work until no one wants me anymore, and then I’ll find something else and I’ll still be a dietitian doing nutrition research, which I love,” she told the New York Times.