BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Striking At 70: Maye Musk On Entrepreneurship And Her Fearless Family

This article is more than 5 years old.

“My parents are the only people to have ever flown from South Africa to Australia in a single-engine plane,“ model and nutritionist Maye Musk declares. “They went all the way up Africa, across Arabia and then across Asia, without any navigation. Who else would do that with a compass and a map?”

Thinking outside the box and pushing boundaries is a Musk family trait. And this 70-year old grandmother of 10 and mom to Elon, Kimbal and Tosca Musk is no exception.

In the past 6-months, Musk has been named a Covergirl, appeared in an ad with Karlie Kloss for Swarovski and walked in a runway show for Dolce & Gabbana. She graced the pages of Vogue Korea, Britain, Germany and Australia, and Harpers Bazaar threw her a 70th birthday party in Manhattan. Musk has 170,000 followers on Instagram and highlights her modeling adventures and nutrition advice with her catchphrase hashtag ‘justgettingstarted.’

When I asked Musk what her greatest achievement is, she told me it is having three great kids and surviving. And survived she has, from South Africa to Canada to the United States. I met the striking dietitian for brunch at an upper Westside café in Manhattan to find out the secret behind her septuagenarian drive. Her entrepreneurial spirit and tenacity were palpable.

“I've never feared aging and my mom didn't either,” Musk says over a meal of bean soup, avocado and whole grain bread. “She died at 98 and stopped working at 96. My mom never worried about losing her confidence and I suppose that's helped me a lot because I feel the same.”

Musk was born Maye Haldeman, and emigrated from Saskatchewan, Canada to Pretoria, South Africa in 1950. She was 7-years-old when her parents, who she describes as adventurers and explorers, took off on their 3-month South Africa-to-Australia voyage. A family friend moved in with Maye, her twin-sister Kaye, and their 3 other siblings to take care of them. When not on odysseys to far-flung places in their single-engine Bellanca aircraft, Musk’s parents worked in their chiropractic practice next-door to the family home on the lilac-lined streets of Pretoria.

Maye Musk

“My parents were entrepreneurs, they ran their own business and my brothers and sisters and I started working when we were about 8 years of age,” says Musk. “We would do their monthly bulletins and photocopy newsletters, and then put the stamps on the envelopes.”

When they were 12, the twins were paid to work as receptionists for their dad before school, and again from 4 until 6 in the afternoon. Musk’s work ethic and zest to keep busy stayed with her throughout her teens. Standing 5’8 with shoulder-length brown hair, she started modeling at 15. Believing her fashion career would be short-lived, she also pursued a bachelor of science degree in dietetics that was taught in Afrikaans – one of the four languages she now speaks.

“Because I was a model, I was very proud, and I wasn't going to fail,” says Musk. “I said, ‘I don't wanna be the dumb blond, I'm going to study sciences, and I'm gonna pass it. Even if it's in another language.’ And I did.”

Musk married within months of graduating and had sons Elon and Kimbal and daughter Tosca over the next three years. She juggled motherhood with modeling, as well as working as a dietician two afternoons a week. In 1979, Musk and her husband parted ways. The 31-year-old single-mom worked to build her dietician practice by cold-calling doctors and sitting in their waiting-rooms for hours in the hope they would meet with her and send her clients. Musk also flew all over South Africa doing print and runway shows. In 1983, she went back to university to get a masters degree. She wasn’t the only Musk to make an impression on students at the university.

“Elon had his first computer program published at 12,” says Maye. “He brought it to me and I showed it to the computer science students and they said to me, 'Oh my gosh. He's 12-years-old and he's doing these shortcuts in programming? How does he even know this kind of thing?'"

When Elon was 17 he pushed Maye to regain the Canadian citizenship she was entitled to by being born there. She did, and within weeks Elon held a Canadian passport too. Having recently graduated from Pretoria Boys High, Elon was ready to live abroad.

“He said, "I'm moving to Canada," says Musk. “I said, 'Why?' He says, 'I want to be in the USA and that's closer.'"

Trusting his instincts, Musk bought Elon a one-way ticket, gave him some money to survive on, and the name of a cousin who lived on a farm in Saskatchewan. Three weeks after getting his Canadian passport, Elon touched down at Montreal airport and took a Greyhound bus to the farm in Swift Current. His brother Kimbal and sister Tosca soon wanted to follow suit.

Musk, then 41, looked into Ph.D. programs and connecting with a modeling agency in her homeland, with a view to relocating the whole family to North America. She sold her home in Johannesburg, South Africa, but was restricted from taking the proceeds of the sale with her to Canada because of strict South African capital controls that blocked funds from leaving the country. Deciding on Toronto as her new base, Musk set her mind to starting-from-scratch in another country. She flew to Ontario in 1989 with 15-year old Tosca, leaving Kimbal in South Africa to finish high school, and worked hard to establish herself and provide for her children.

“I had five jobs,” says Musk. “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.”

Not only did Musk understand the power of PR, she also knew the importance of dusting herself off from rejection, and that relentless drive was necessary to achieve her goals.

“When I wasn't working, I was marketing myself," says Musk. "Sending out newsletters, raffles, contacting the TV stations, the radio stations. Most said no or just ignored me, but that's what happens. But then it slowly started changing.”

Her tenacity paid off. Musk became President of the Consulting Dieticians of Canada and grew that organization from 90 members to 1000 members in a year. Her own dietician practice expanded to 25 clients-a-day and she employed three part-time dietitians to work for her. When she landed lucrative television commercials or runway modeling jobs, her employees met with her nutrition clients.

In 1989, 18-year-old Elon moved to Kingston, an hour east of Toronto, to attend Queen’s University. Kimbal followed the year after. Tosca left to go to film school at the University of British Columbia in 1994. Maye was 46, an empty nester, and relished in having more time to dedicate to building her business in Toronto.

"They all went their own ways and for the first time I had no children and it was actually wonderful," says Musk. "I had no idea. I could actually work out at night. I didn't have to go home. I didn't have seven loads of laundry on a Sunday afternoon."

When Elon and Kimbal graduated and moved to Silicon Valley, California, to start the business mapping technology company Zip2, Musk flew from eastern Canada to the west coast of the U.S. every 6-weeks to visit her boys. She says she gave them $10,000, all of her savings from her work in Toronto, to keep Zip2 going, and helped out financially where she could.

"I would find a really cheap hotel, and then get them groceries, furniture, paper, their photocopies, whatever I could afford," says Musk.

She was in Silicon Valley the week Zip2 received its first-round of significant investment from venture capitalists.

“I said, 'All right, we're going to the best place in Palo Alto for dinner,'" says Musk. “We went there and I said, 'This is the last time you see my credit card.'"

In the summer of 1996, Musk moved to San Francisco to be closer to her family and establish her nutrition practice in the U.S. At her 50th birthday party, she recalls Kimbal and Elon presenting her with a wooden house and car, and telling her that one day they would buy her real-life versions of those things. In 1999, Compaq purchased Zip2 for $307-million, and her sons stayed true to their word to buy their mom a home.

Musk’s preference was an apartment in the Flatiron district of New York City so that she could continue her ascent in the modeling world. She relocated from the west to east coast, and lived in Manhattan for 13-years, traveling to Europe frequently for modeling gigs and scoring her first billboards in Times Square and Madison Square Gardens.

Musk is now signed to IMG and in higher-demand than ever. In November 2017, she appeared in Covergirl's Simply Ageless campaign and was named as a face of the brand.

Camilla Pane, the CEO of Coty, Covergirl’s publicly-traded parent-company, pronounced Musk a ‘boundary-breaking cultural change agent’ in the company’s Q1 2018 earnings call. Pane described the campaign as the biggest reinvention of the Covergirl brand in its 60-year history. He noted a video featuring Musk had ‘an astounding 4.1 billion impressions and 11 million views in a matter of few days’, and that there was ‘a significant spike in the sales of the product franchises which were put on air.’

Columbia Business School Professor Bernd Schmitt says it makes good business sense for brands looking to expand their reach to feature diverse faces. He teaches a class on Managing Brands and Identity and advises corporations on creative strategy, branding, and customer experience management. 

"Since the success of Dove’s 'Campaign for Real Beauty,' advertisers have been attentive to featuring not only young women," says Dr. Schmitt. "That campaign featured a woman older than 90 with wrinkles as beautiful. U.S. customers increasingly like to see models with diverse characteristics. It has become a positive value."

Musk hopes that Covergirl and other brands celebrating her age will help to bring about a cultural shift in how older women are perceived and perceive themselves.

“It just seems that women are scared of aging, and I've never feared aging,” says Musk. “I think it gives hope to women as they age they can continue to work and be relevant and confident and comfortable with themselves.”

Now living in Los Angeles, Maye still works as a dietician and gives wellness talks. Her close-knit family gets together most weekends. She is pleased to see the entrepreneurialism that she learned from her parents in each of her children.

L.A.-based Tosca founded Passionflix in 2017, a female-focused streaming service that targets the billion-dollar romance novel industry. Kimbal lives in Colorado and is the founder of The Kitchen, a collective of 5 restaurants that source directly from local farmers. He also runs a non-profit, Big-Green, that has built 200 learning gardens in schools across the U.S. with the aim of teaching kids about vegetables and eating well.

Elon founded X.com which became electronic payments company PayPal and was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. He is CEO of electric-car company Tesla and the founder and CEO of rocket manufacturer SpaceX. According to its website, the mission of SpaceX is to ‘enable humans to become a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species by building a self-sustaining city on Mars.’

I asked Musk about her pioneering son’s plan to colonize Mars and how she would feel if he planned to go there.

“He always felt space was important, for research, exploration,” says Musk. “I don't stop my kids from doing anything they think is right. As long as you're doing something that is good for the future, then I think you should remain positive and do it.”

When asked what advice she would give to the next generation of entrepreneurs, Musk says to think about the big picture and not be deterred by rejection.

“It is a long process and you have to survive through that time,” says Musk. “Work long hours. If you are unhappy at your work, change it, even if it means you're financially strapped. Be open to trying new avenues.”

Dennis Leupold/Harpers BAZAAR

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn