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Like mother, like son.
Elon Musk is known for having no permanent residence, preferring to crash at friends’ places or in spartan temp lodgings.
His 78-year-old mother, Maye Musk, reveals that she’s also comfortable roughing it. She grew up camping in the Kalahari Desert and was couch-surfing until she was 60.
“If I have a couch or a mattress on the floor, then I’m good,” Maye told The Post. “Sleeping on the floor — there’s a roof over your head. That’s a luxury.”
When Maye visits Elon at Starbase, SpaceX’s rocket development and launch site in Texas, she sleeps in the garage, she told The Post.
Her willingness to make do epitomizes her unsentimental, no-frills approach to raising three children as a single mother, building a thriving career and creating a meaningful life that she shares in her new memoir, “Timeless: The Art of Reinvention and Resilience at Any Age” (Harper Wave, out now).
In a culture that sees victimhood as a virtue, Maye’s grit and drive to keep building something is refreshing — particularly coming from a woman who could easily be sipping piña coladas on a superyacht.
“People suffer a lot in this world and they don’t think there’s a way out,” Maye said. “They need to focus… how are you going to get out of this miserable situation?”
It’s a question she had to answer in her 30s. After years married to Elon’s dad, Errol, who Maye describes as physically and emotionally abusive in her book, she left him and began eking out a living to support herself, Elon, her younger son Kimbal and daughter Tosca.
(Errol denied claims he abused Maye in an interview with the New York Times last year.)
As a single mother based in South Africa and later Toronto she juggled multiple jobs, from working as a private dietitian and teaching nutrition to modeling, to support her family.
“You can do without dinners and you can do without movies or fancy clothes or anything, as long as you don’t have somebody who’s nasty around, shouting at you all the time,” she said.
At age 50, she moved to New York because New Yorkers “walk fast, they talk fast, they think fast” and it would allow her to prioritize modeling.
Now in her late 70s, she has no interest in slowing down — her career as a model, dietitian, speaker and social media star has been on a rocket ship. In 2022, she was the oldest woman to appear in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition and is currently a CoverGirl face.
“I would say my seventies have been my best,” Maye said. “My best years, really.”
But that also means working diligently — Maye, who lives in downtown NYC, spends four hours each morning building her social media profile and screening modeling and speaking opportunities. It’s work that someone of her stature would typically entrust to a team but she doesn’t have one because she prefers to do it herself.
It’s clearly an ethos her children — not just Elon but also filmmaker Tosca and technologist-turned-chef Kimbal — have embraced.
Though she’s ever the supportive mom, Maye can be a bit bewildered by how cerebral her eldest son is. She recalled him coming down to breakfast years ago, and telling her he had been up all night designing rockets.
“And what do you answer to that… I don’t have an expertise to offer,” she said. “I can just offer scrambled eggs.”
But she also sees a softer side of Elon and how he truly adores his children and his family.
“When he’s with his kids, no one else exists. He just plays with them,” she said. “He’s just lovable. He’s funny. But he is brilliant. He’s a genius. He really is one of a kind, and a genius of the world.”
Since she published her 2019 book, “A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success,” millions of people have taken a different view of Elon.
He has become a political lightning rod. Far-left activists have threatened to bomb one of Kimbal’s restaurants, called Elon a Nazi, and smashed up Teslas at dealerships.
Maye has taken issue with the reporters who cover him — she said she began tracking down some on X and tagging them when she believed their coverage was unfair.
“I would find the journalist who wrote the story. I found their tag so that I could tag them and say, ‘shame on you,’” she said. “I’m angry … it gave me a lot of comfort. It didn’t stop them.”
She’s also had some political confrontations offline. Maye recounted speaking with a friend who supported open borders. When she asked the pal if she would like to live next to undocumented young men, they responded “As long as it’s not near me.”
The immigration debate is something Maye knows personally — it took her decades to finally gain citizenship. Even though her father and her grandparents were American (all born in the Midwest), the fact she was born in Canada meant she spent roughly 12 years on visas working as a dietitian and model before she finally got a green card. Then it was another five years before she was finally granted citizenship.
“[When] you get your citizenship … you just cry. You’re just so happy,” she recalled.
For now, Maye remains laser focused on what is next — in the coming weeks she will be traveling for shoots and speeches in Hong Kong, Austin, Buenos Aires and Shanghai.
When people ask why, as she nears 80, she’s still working she’s quick to slap the idea of retirement down.
Maye said, “I’m having the best time.”
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