Elon Musk‘s father has been accused of sexually abusing five of his children and stepchildren since 1993, including one he allegedly touched when she was four years old – who he later had a child with.
The explosive allegations against Errol Musk, 79, are allegedly why the tech billionaire and Tesla founder has kept his distance from his estranged father over the years.
Despite being outspoken on social media, the 54-year-old mogul has rarely delved into his strained relationship with his father.
The dad made headlines when he had a baby with his own stepdaughter, who was 40 years younger than him.
The accusations have repeatedly seeped into Elon’s life, reported the New York Times, which has seen more than 50 personal letters and emails and has conducted interviews with relatives.
On several occasions, family members have contacted him for assistance and he has sometimes taken action to intervene, the newspaper said.
The family drama has meant the SpaceX founder has remained tied to South Africa, where he was born and where Errol lives, despite his booming business empire in the U.S and former role in the Trump administration.
Elon Musk’s father Errol has been accused of sexually abusing five of his children and stepchildren since 1993
Errol is accused of sexually abusing five of his children and stepchildren in South Africa and California, as per police and court records, personal correspondence, social workers and interviews with relatives, The New York Times reported.
The earliest allegation dates back to 1993 when the businessman’s stepdaughter, then four years old, accused him of touching her at a family house.
She told relatives about the incident. A decade later, she said she caught Errol sniffing her dirty underwear.
She said she later had a baby with him when she was in her 20s and has grappled with drug use, while her mother – who married Errol twice – has struggled with mental health issues.
Other family members have accused him of abusing a stepson and two of his daughters.
Two years ago, his then five-year-old son accused him of groping his buttocks, causing family members and a social worker to intervene, The New York Times said.
Over the three decades of allegations, three separate police investigations were opened, according to records and relatives cited by The New York Times.
The explosive allegations against the 79-year-old are said to be the reason the tech billionaire and founder of Tesla and SpaceX has kept his distance from his estranged father over the years
But none have yielded any results, and Errol has not been convicted of any crime. Two of the inquiries ended, while it’s not clear how the third concluded.
In a desperate five-page letter addressed to Elon around 2010, one family member discussed some of the allegations and begged him to intervene.
‘We really need your advice, help and guidance in these matters because we daily see these children suffer,’ the relative wrote to Errol’s eldest son in the letter, which was viewed by The New York Times.
It is not known whether the tech giant read the letter, but his assistant got in touch with a relative after others wrote to him about the accusations.
He has also provided financial assistance for two half sisters and a former stepmother, and sends monthly support to his former stepsister.
At one point, Elon even attempted to keep his stepfamily and half-siblings in California, where they would be far from Errol, who has at least nine children and stepchildren and has been married to three women.
Elon was not involved in the police investigations in South Africa.
His father has ‘left a massive wound in our family,’ Elmie Smit, whose sister was his third wife, told The New York Times.
She was one of the relatives who emailed Elon over the years, imploring him to intervene, and she has sometimes heard from an assistant in response.
Errol fiercely denied the allegations to The New York Times, calling them concocted by family members who were ‘putting the children up to say false things’ in an attempt to swindle money from Elon.
The patriarch called the reports ‘false and nonsense in the extreme’.
He claimed he had a positive relationship with the X owner and that the two of them are ‘very close’.
In one email, Errol claimed to be aware of only a single abuse accusation, while simultaneously offering explanations for the circumstances around two others, The New York Times reported.
He was born in Pretoria and studied electromechanics at university. He became a successful businessman in his 20s and 30s, including as a partner in an engineering company, and at one point was a Pretoria City Council member.
Elon revealed he was ‘creeped out and furious’ after his father had a child with his own stepdaughter, in a 2023 authorised biography written by Walter Isaacson.
In the biography, he said he didn’t keep communication with his estranged father.
He broke into tears in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stones magazine when he accused his father of having done ‘almost every evil thing you could possibly think of’.
In recent months, relatives have grown frustrated at Errol’s attempts to capitalise on the family name, such as his work on a meme coin called MuskIt and his plans to build a Musk tower in Dubai.
In June, Ms. Smit went on the South African podcast ‘Wide Awake’ and anonymously described some of the abuse allegations, including the 1993 incident with Errol’s four-year-old stepdaughter.
‘My kids are safe and looked after,’ the stepdaughter, 37, told The New York Times.
‘Elon has always been there,’ she added, describing how her main financial support comes from the tech mogul, who sends her monthly payments and also bought her a car.
In 1970, Errol married his first wife Maye Musk, a dietitian and model. Nine years later, they divorced.
She accused him in a 2019 memoir of physical and verbal abuse, which Errol denied.
Together, they had three children: Elon; Tosca Musk, who leads a streaming service; and Kimbal Musk, an entrepreneur.
In the biography, the billionaire described his difficult relationship with his father.
He recounted how after he confronted a school bully as a child and lost a fight, his father berated him for an hour.
‘He lost it, went ballistic, as he often did,’ Elon said. ‘He had zero compassion.’
Errol had a brief marriage with his second wife, Sue Wilson, before marrying his third bride, Mari Bezuidenhout, in 1992.
She was about 19 years his junior, and had three young children — two boys and a girl — with her first husband, who had died in a car accident. Together, they soon had a daughter.
In 1993, Errol’s four-year-old stepdaughter confided in her aunt, Ms. Smit, that Errol had put her on a row of rubbish bins at the family residence in Pretoria and touched her, The New York Times reported.
Her aunt and other relatives said they immediately got in touch with the authorities.
The police opened an investigation into the accusations.
As part of a divorce settlement, Ms. Bezuidenhout, who suffers from mental health issues, later withdrew charges against Errol.
During the divorce, she was given a house, car and monthly allowance, according to family members and the 2010 letter from the relative seeking Elon’s help.
After the divorce, Errol claimed a judge had granted him custody of their young daughter and that two judges rejected the abuse allegations.
Ms. Bezuidenhout was only allowed to visit the children with a social worker present, he said.
Ms. Bezuidenhout briefly married and divorced a third husband in 1996 before entering a psychiatric hospital after suffering from depression, according to family members.
Her three children from her first marriage were put into an independent welfare home.
She remarried Errol in 1999, who retained custody of their daughter.
Her three other children left welfare care in 2000 and the following year, Errol and Ms. Bezuidenhout had another daughter.
In 2002, Errol, Ms. Bezuidenhout and their family travelled to visit Elon in California, who had bought them a $2 million house in Malibu.
His stepdaughter, then 14, went to her room one day and discovered Errol sniffing her dirty underwear, according to family members and personal notes, The New York Times’ report said.
Errol denied the accusation, telling The New York Times he was cleaning up her room after returning from a trip and had found the house ‘in a terrible state’.
Relatives alerted the police, told Elon, and filed a complaint with child protective services in Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles Police Department denied a records request from The New York Times, saying investigation records were exempt from disclosure.
A restraining order was issued against Errol, three people with knowledge of the filing said.
Ms. Bezuidenhout then petitioned for divorce in Los Angeles Superior Court, citing ‘irreconcilable differences’, and requested custody of the children, but the petition was dismissed in 2009 for inaction.
Following the abuse allegations, Elon moved his father to a boat in Los Angeles and then back to South Africa, but Errol said he chose to leave the U.S. of his own accord.
Family members said Elon wanted to keep the children in California to protect them from his father and even explored seeking legal guardianship of them.
In 2009, Errol’s former stepdaughter, then 21, accused him of kissing her and sticking his tongue into her mouth, according to an application for an interim protection order.
‘I don’t want him to be allowed to come close to me,’ the former stepdaughter wrote in the interim protection order, which she was granted by the Magistrate’s Court for the district of Stellenbosch.
Errol accused her of pouncing on him in a spare bedroom while he was sleeping. She ‘inappropriately kissed me,’ he told The New York Times.
In the interim protection order, she also directly accused him of sexually abusing his two daughters with Ms. Bezuidenhout and his stepson, years before he had died aged 16 in 2006.
Errol dismissed the accusations that he had abused his stepson as ‘nonsense’ and described the allegation that he had abused his two daughters as ‘absurd’.
According to family members and notes, the former stepdaughter dropped out of college and fell into drugs before going to a rehabilitation clinic and ending up temporarily homeless.
She said this was due to traumatic experiences growing up.
In 2011, Ms. Smit, the sister of Ms. Bezuidenhout, wrote to Elon for urgent help.
His assistant said she had spoken to the entrepreneur and ‘it goes without saying that you are all in a very difficult situation there’.
She called the circumstances of Errol’s former stepdaughter ‘dire’ and confirmed that Elon would pay for her to stay in a rehabilitation clinic.
Later, when she was 29, the former stepdaughter reached out to Errol for support.
They became intimate, Errol said in a 2018 interview with The Sunday Times, calling them both ‘lonely, lost people’.
‘One thing led to another — you can call it God’s plan or nature’s plan,’ he said.
He also said that he and his former stepdaughter had children together in 2017 and 2019, but she told The New York Times that she only has one child with Errol.
Their son, then five, said in 2022 that he had been groped by his father, according to relatives who contacted the police.
‘He said, “Dad gropes his behind,”‘ Ms. Bezuidenhout, the boy’s grandmother, texted a relative around 2023. ‘He screamed: “no dad.”‘
A social worker who was involved said she attempted meeting with family members to discuss the situation, but they would not cooperate. She contacted the police.
A police spokeswoman confirmed there was an investigation into child sexual abuse allegations under a case number named by the family, but declined to name those involved.
Prosecutors dropped the case because of insufficient evidence, the spokeswoman added.
Errol told The New York Times that ‘there was no evidence because this is nonsense’.
In 2023, Elon wrote on social media that the one condition that he and Kimbal Musk had in supporting their father was that Errol would not engage in bad behavior.
Their father ‘nonetheless did,’ Elon said.
