Photo: GIANLUIGI GUERCIA/AFP via Getty Images
Elon Musk’s father, Errol Musk, has been accused of sexually abusing five of his children and stepchildren in a New York Times report published Tuesday. Errol, a former politician and entrepreneur who claims to have made his fortune in emerald mining — though several accounts, including Elon’s, dispute that — has been married three times and has seven children, not including his stepchildren. An outspoken pronatalist, he once told The Sun that “the only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce.” Elon, his oldest child, has been estranged from his father for years, though it’s unclear when exactly they stopped speaking.
The bulk of the allegations center on one of Errol’s stepdaughters, whose mother was his third wife, Heide-Mari Bezuidenhout. (They married in 1992.) According to the Times, the stepdaughter told relatives Errol had touched her in the family’s home in 1993, when she was 4 years old. Ten years later, she says she caught him smelling her used underwear. In 2009 — when she was 21 and her mother and Errol had already divorced — he allegedly “kissed her and stuck his tongue into her mouth,” prompting her to file an interim protective order, which was granted.
Errol denied the allegation to the Times, claiming it was the stepdaughter who had “inappropriately kissed me.” She says she later had a child with Errol when she was in her 20s. (Errol has actually claimed to have two children with one of his stepdaughters, whom he said he reconnected with in 2017, eight years after divorcing her mother. Per the Times, the stepdaughter says only one of her children is his.)
Family members have also reportedly accused Errol of abusing two of his biological daughters as well as one of his stepsons. In 2023, his own then-5-year-old son reportedly said Errol had groped his buttocks, an accusation that prompted family members and a social worker to intervene. Three different police investigations into Errol have reportedly been opened in South Africa and California, including one stemming from the allegations of the youngest son, which the Times says prosecutors dropped due to insufficient evidence. A second case has since been closed, and it’s unclear if the third remains ongoing. Errol has not been convicted of any crimes.
In a statement to the Times, Errol called the allegations against him “false and nonsense in the extreme,” claiming they were made up by relatives who were “putting the children up to say false things” in order to get money from his son Elon.
In interviews, Elon has repeatedly distanced himself from his father, whom he says he cut off sometime after buying him a house in Malibu in the early aughts. In a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone, Elon said Errol was “such a terrible human being” who had done “almost every evil thing you could possibly think of.”
