Listen, math is hard and families can be harder. When a family becomes a math problem, that’s the hardest of all. Like, when the jumble of important familial dates is so complicated that it’s taking a little while to subtract this year from that one, this month from nine months ago. First Elon Musk gave us a reason to count backward, and now his father, Errol Musk, is doing the same after he confirmed he had a second child with his stepdaughter a few years ago.
Here’s what’s going on as far as one layperson can tell: Errol Musk has had two children by his stepdaughter Jana Bezuidenhout. He and Jana’s mother, Heide Bezuidenhout, were married when Jana was four, and stayed married for 18 years. They had two children together, who are of course Jana’s half sisters (Heide was Errol’s second marriage, after Elon’s mother, Maye Haldeman Musk, and Errol divorced).
Jana would have been around 22 when they split, and is now reportedly 35. Errol and Jana’s son and first child together is now five years old, so that means there was an eight-year gap between his divorce and the kid. Still, Musk the elder told The Sun that the coupling is a hard pill to swallow for his daughters with Heide for some reason. “They still don’t like it,” he said. “They still feel a bit creepy about it, because she’s their sister. Their half sister.”
But there’s a perfectly normal explanation! Errol was simply a bad dad! In 2018, when news of Errol and Jana’s first child together broke, The Sunday Times reported that “he did not consider Jana, 30, his stepdaughter as he claimed she was raised away from the family for long periods of time.”
Errol also told The Sun that he and Bezuidenhout the younger have no plans to marry. “It’s not practical. She’s 35 next birthday,” he said. “So eventually if I’m still around, she might wind up back with me…. Any man who marries a [younger] woman, even if you feel very sprightly, it’s going to be nice for a while, but there’s a big gap…and that gap is going to show itself.”
Circling back to the premise of this article, if the math is correct here, then Elon’s eldest children, the twins by his first marriage, have an aunt who is about 15 years younger than them. It’s a regular You’ve Got Mail.
While the Foxes in the Nora Ephron classic seem to get along well enough, that’s not quite the case for the Musks. Elon has intimated he and his father have a contentious relationship, but I suppose there’s a simple geometrical elegance to the idea that he and his father can see eye to eye on at least one creepy thing. As Errol said, “The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce.”
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