80-year-old Elon Musk's father has been making non-stop public appearances, is even Elon Musk unable to escape the influence of his family of origin?

The 80-year-old Errol Musk and 55-year-old Elon Musk are truly "so much alike": both are highly controversial and share strong business ambitions. One, at 80, remains active in the public eye, living a flamboyant and high-profile life; the other, at 55, keeps generating buzz between his business empire and personal relationships, always staying at the center of public opinion.

Recently, Musk's breakup with his girlfriend has drawn global attention. On the other side, 80-year-old Errol Musk, Elon's elderly father, has appeared in China.

The 55-year-old Elon Musk has recently been caught up in a new romantic scandal. After publicly showing affection for Zilis, the mother of his four children, the two separated quickly. The fast plot twist once again made the public marvel at his "life pace".

It is rumored that Errol Musk, Elon's biological father, has a fully scheduled two-week trip in China. He first went to Guangzhou to visit the Tesla Center and experience the Nio battery swap station; then he traveled to Foshan to browse jade stores; later he moved to Shanghai, appeared in a clubhouse at Xintiandi, put on a new Chinese-style jacket, and sat at the mahjong table, showing a gesture of integrating into local life.

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There were many young women watching him on the scene, and the old man's movements of touching mahjong tiles were also teased by netizens as "quite skillful". At the dinner table, he also took out the newly bought jadeite to show his interest in Chinese culture.

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When you put the father and son together, they are really "so much alike": both are highly controversial and have strong business ambitions. One is still active in the public eye at the age of 80, living a flamboyant and lively life; the other is still creating topics between the business territory and personal emotions at the age of 55, always standing at the center of public opinion.

1. From the father's "controversy" to the "controversial" father

In Elon's childhood, the memories left by his father were not warm.

Maye wrote in her autobiography that Errol had a strong and highly controlling personality, and he basically controlled all the family's finances and life arrangements. Almost all of her decisions at that time had to be approved by Errol first, including daily expenses, social activities and trips. Worse still, Maye suffered domestic violence during her marriage, and the young Elon witnessed all of this.

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These experiences left a deep shadow on Elon.

In 1979, Maye ended this marriage. After the divorce, she fell into trouble for a time. The two sons Elon and Kimbal lived with Errol in Pretoria, while the young Tosca stayed with her. Later, as her career gradually stabilized, Maye began to consider bringing the children to live with her.

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But at this time, 10-year-old Elon made a decision that he would regret very much later, choosing voluntarily to go back and live with his father.

The reason was sad: he thought his father was too lonely alone and wanted to accompany him.

However, the child's kindness did not bring the warm time he imagined. Elon later said many times that it was the most difficult period in his childhood.

Errol did not treat his son badly in terms of material conditions. He provided luxury houses, private tutors and high-quality schools for Elon. But growing children need not only good living conditions, but also emotional support. In Elon's description, his father brought him more pressure.

He once described his father as a "terrible person" and an "evil person", believing that the years living with his father had a long-term impact on him.

Interestingly, even with such a father, the children were not trapped by this experience. They went their separate ways, and each of them was more restless than the last.

There is no need to introduce the eldest son Elon, who has now become one of the most controversial and influential entrepreneurs in the world.

The younger brother Kimbal devoted himself to researching "how to make people eat better". He opened restaurants, carried out urban agriculture projects, and even tried to grow vegetables on rooftops and in containers, hoping to solve people's food problems in new ways.

The younger sister Tosca entered the film and television industry and founded the streaming company Passionflix, which focuses on producing romance and emotional content and participates in production herself. In 2021, the company moved from Los Angeles to the metropolitan area of Atlanta, Georgia, and she also adjusted the focus of her life accordingly.

Compared with the career development of the three children, Errol's love life after divorce is even more full of controversy, and the most concerned one is his relationship with his stepdaughter Jana.

Jana Bezuidenhout is the daughter of Heide, Errol's remarried wife, from her previous marriage. When Errol married Heide in the early 1990s, Jana was only 4 years old.

Many years later, the adult Jana returned to live with Errol again for financial reasons, and their relationship changed later. In 2017, 71-year-old Errol welcomed their first child, and then had a second child.

After the news was exposed, it sparked huge discussions. Elon also publicly expressed shock and anger, and the father-son relationship further deteriorated.

Faced with the controversy, Errol's response was very direct. He said: "The only thing people have to do on Earth is to reproduce."

However, despite the anger, Elon's own family and relationship problems are no less controversial.

As an adult, Elon has been in relationships with many women and has many children. After breaking up with Grimes, he also attracted public attention due to child support issues.

Recently, he once again became the focus due to the change in his relationship with Zilis. The two have four children together. They even showed affection in their interactions on September 24, but a few days later, Zilis revealed on the X platform that they had separated, saying that the change came very suddenly.

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In these complex relationships, Maye has lived a completely different lifestyle.

Maye travels frequently to China in recent years, and she especially loves Shanghai. She takes the subway, visits vegetable markets, uses WeChat Pay, and goes to shopping malls to pick out toys and small gifts like ordinary elders. She likes the convenience and safety here, and her life is very relaxed.

Having experienced the same marriage, the two later chose different directions: Maye enjoys the simple days at present, while Errol continues to occupy news pages in various ways.

2. Two Musks, One Busy "Buying the World", One Busy "Changing the World"

But if you only look at business capabilities, Errol Musk is actually no simple figure.

Errol was born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1946, with British, Dutch, French, German and other European ancestries. His father Walter Henry James Musk once participated in World War II and later engaged in military-related work; his mother Cora Amelia Robinson was born in Liverpool, UK, and later moved to South Africa.

Different from Elon, who started his business from the internet in his early years, Errol took the engineer path at first. He graduated from the University of Pretoria with a major in electromechanical engineering, and later became an electromechanical engineering consultant, participating in the construction of office buildings, shopping malls, residential projects, and even air force bases.

But outside of work, Errol kept looking for new opportunities: doing real estate, getting a commercial pilot license, and even modifying planes by himself. In 1972, he was elected as a Pretoria city councilor as an independent, and later joined the Progressive Federal Party, but quit due to political stance differences.

It was real estate that made Errol's wealth grow rapidly.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the South African real estate market developed rapidly. With his engineering background, he could judge the land value more accurately, and accumulated wealth by acquiring land and developing commercial projects.

Maye recalled in her autobiography that when the two divorced in 1979, Errol had already achieved financial freedom, owning multiple properties, yachts, planes, luxury cars, and one of the largest houses in Pretoria at that time.

In addition to real estate, Errol also dabbled in mineral investment. In 1986, he obtained the revenue rights of part of the emerald mines in Zambia, which further increased his wealth.

For the young Elon, the influence his father brought him was not only wealth, but more importantly, Errol let him get in touch with the engineering, technology and business world at a very early age.

For example, when Elon was 12 years old, he received his first computer Commodore VIC-20 from his father Errol. This was a rare thing in the early 1980s. Without this computer, Elon, who started teaching himself programming in his teens, might not have been exposed to the technology world so early.

However, with the same business talent, the two finally used it in different places.

Errol is good at acquiring wealth, looking for opportunities, and good at grabbing attention; but in intimate relationships and family management, he has always been accompanied by controversies.

The same business talent was used by Elon for bigger goals such as Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink. In his love life, Elon also did not completely get rid of the complex influence from his family.

Now 80-year-old Errol still has a keen business sense.

After arriving in China in September 2026, he visited the Tesla store. Instead of just glancing around like an ordinary tourist, he observed the details around the car, checked the chassis and body structure, and discussed technical parameters with the staff.

The biggest similarity between Errol and Elon is perhaps not wealth or controversy, but that both of them have extremely strong personal will.

It's just that one is more about expanding his own world, and the other is trying to change the outside world, which is the most interesting and complex part of the Musk father and son.

3. The Same Ambition, One Turned It into Assets, the Other "Leads" the Future

Looking back at this father and son, one gave the other business talent, while the other spent his whole life getting rid of that influence.

Elon has been drawing a clear line from his father since he was an adult, and the two have been out of contact for seven years. On November 18, 2023, Elon invited his father to Boca Chica, Texas to watch the second test flight of Starship, which was the first meeting after seven years of no contact. People present said that the whole family cried, but the father and son only talked about scientific topics after sitting down, and did not mention any trivial family matters.

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Heide Musk (Errol's ex-wife) later told The Sun, "They immediately sat down at Elon's table and started talking, just like no time had passed," and the conversation was "typical Musk style".

After this conversation, the father-son relationship did ease. In 2025, Elon gave his father a Bentley Flying Spur. This kind of easing is more like a compromise: Elon uses money to fulfill his maintenance obligations, Errol enjoys the feeling of being supported, and the two tacitly put aside their emotional problems.

But Elon's business achievements are far beyond what his father can match.

As of early October 2026, Tesla has a market value of about 1.5 trillion US dollars, and its automobile output has exceeded 10 million as early as July, turning electric vehicles from marginal toys into mainstream choices.

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SpaceX is even more impressive. Its first quarterly report after landing on NASDAQ in June 2026 shows that the global paid users of Starlink have exceeded 12 million, doubling year on year; the connection business where Starlink is located generated revenue of 4.29 billion US dollars in a single quarter, a year-on-year increase of 66%, and the operating profit was 1.656 billion US dollars. After conversion, Starlink generates about 18.2 million US dollars in operating profit every day, redefining the aerospace industry with rocket launch and satellite internet.

Neuralink is also advancing the clinical progress of brain-computer interfaces. Since 2025, many ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) patients have implanted the N1 chip, which can decode neural signals into synthetic speech, restoring the ability to "speak with their minds". However, it is still in the research stage and has not yet obtained official marketing approval from the FDA, so there is still a long way to go before real mass production.

What Errol provided was a starting point: engineering thinking, adventurous genes, and a technology-oriented atmosphere. But Elon magnified these advantages to the global scale and applied them to the direction of changing the world.

Elon spent many years trying to get rid of his father's influence, only to finally find that the two have amazing similarities: equally strong-willed, equally persistent, equally unyielding, and equally convinced of their own judgments.

Of course, the controversies surrounding the father and son cannot be avoided. If you