Tosca Musk on her big brother Elon’s advice - August 13, 2022

As the founder of Netflix-style streaming service Passionflix, Tosca Musk shares the same gift for entrepreneurship and risk-taking as her older brother Elon, the world’s richest man.

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By Helena de Bertodano

If your last name is Musk, there’s a fairly good chance you’re related to the billionaire inventor-entrepreneur Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, aka the richest person in the world. Which brings with it a lot of baggage. “I have a very familiar last name,” says Tosca Musk, Elon’s younger sister, a filmmaker and director who runs the streaming platform Passionflix, which adapts romance novels for the screen.

Her name is both a liability and an advantage, she says, when we meet in the Santa Monica hotel where she is staying. “I don’t like that my kids watch YouTube and there are jokes about my brother; it makes them feel a little uncomfortable. And they don’t understand why people would say [negative] things about him.”

Because he’s just Uncle Elon to them? “Exactly. And I’m incredibly proud of my older brother. He is a phenomenon. He’s exceptional in so many ways and his goals to help humanity are beyond anything that anybody can imagine. So there’s no taint at all.”

Has she ever thought about changing her surname? “No!” she says, appalled. “I love my name. I don’t have an issue with it.”

Tosca Musk, 48, is forthright, to say the least. Three years younger than Elon, she is close to both him and her other brother, Kimbal, a successful restaurateur and entrepreneur. “Kimbal’s goal is to solve the obesity crisis in America. He’s just so human-forward as well.”

So while Kimbal, 49, solves the obesity crisis and Elon, 51, saves the world, Tosca is dedicated to bringing happiness to humankind – specifically to women, who make up 98 per cent of Passionflix’s audience. “I’m a very strong advocate for positive storytelling,” says Musk. “I think we need more stories about love and hope. We have enough sad and depressing movies out there. I hate violence.”

As well as screen adaptations of romance novels, many of them directed by Musk herself, Passionflix also licenses romance films from studios. In her own movies, Musk does not include any frontal nudity below the waist – and rarely even above – and she objects to any description of the site as “soft porn” or “a guilty pleasure”.

“I’d rather portray a connection – the love and passion and lust between two people – than show gratuitous nudity. We don’t have to spend all of our time looking at breasts.”

Musk says that people wrongly associate “passion” with what she calls “the other P word”: “There is no passion in porn.” She finds it tiresome that critics sometimes dismiss the films as “not real art”: “I feel like it’s very disrespectful towards the romance genre.”

“I’d rather portray a connection than show gratuitous nudity. We don’t have to spend all of our time looking at breasts.”

It is not too fanciful to say that her dedication to the genre perhaps springs from the lack of romance in her own life. Her parents’ marriage was worse than miserable, and she says she has never had a truly meaningful romantic relationship herself. She had her two children, twins Isabeau and Grayson, in 2013 via sperm donor and IVF. “I didn’t want to have children with somebody I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with,” she says. “And have to be attached to [that person] and have them make decisions about my children and my life ultimately. And I certainly didn’t want to go through brutal divorces.”

She seems almost too rational to have a platform for romance movies. “I’m very practical and very rational,” she agrees. “But I do think that I’m also a romantic and maybe the practicality and the rationality is a little bit of an armour against being as romantic as I could be.”

One downside of the surname Musk is that people assume she is wealthy. “That’s really annoying. I don’t have tons of money. [Elon and I] are not the same person. Also it’s not like he’s cutting me cheques. We’re two different people.” In fact, she says, “I’m very frugal.”

Although Kimbal and their mother, Maye – a dietitian and model who at 74 was recently on the cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit – were small angel investors in Passionflix, Musk will not say if Elon was involved financially. I would assume not, as funding seems to be the biggest hurdle for the platform, still a slim operation with just six employees.

Musk prefers to go it alone anyway. “If the idea is good, I should be able to raise the money to do it.” She says that Elon occasionally helps in other ways.

“He said to me, ‘I will give you advice. But if I give you advice you need to take it. Otherwise, I’ll never give you advice again.’ I was like, ‘If you give me advice, I will take that advice.’ ” So what was the advice he gave you? She answers vaguely: “It was just early on in the starting of Passionflix, more about an ongoing experience.”

Does she ever think his advice is wrong? “No, he’s never wrong. Not even a little bit.”

Many people told her Passionflix would be a failure. “They still tell me all the time that it won’t work. And we’re still here.” Like her brothers, she is not easily put off an idea, however ridiculous the rest of the world might deem it. “That’s probably [true of] everybody in our family. If we say we’re going to do something, just believe us, we’re going to do it. A lot of people will say things are not going to work because they aren’t used to taking risks. With us, it’s like, well, no one’s done it before. Doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

She is easy, convivial company, blunt but ready to laugh. We start the interview by sitting in the almost empty bar at the hotel. The bartender offers us a drink: “Perhaps something virgin without alcohol?” Musk looks at the bartender in amazement. “I’ll have something with alcohol. Vodka, please.”

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk and her siblings grew up in Johannesburg. Her mother suffered both physical and mental abuse at the hands of their father, Errol, an engineer. When she eventually summoned up the courage to divorce him, he chased her through the streets with a knife. In her book, A Woman Makes a Plan, Maye writes that Errol would hit her in the children’s presence: “I remember that Tosca and Kimbal, who were two and four respectively, would cry in the corner, and Elon, who was five, would hit him on the backs of his knees to try to stop him.”

Musk says today she doesn’t recall much about those days. “I don’t remember [the abuse] when we were living together. But I remember it as I was growing older. It was more against [my mother] than against me.”

In the early days of her childhood, there was plenty of money. Musk – named Tosca by her father after the Puccini opera – remembers “a lovely big house in Pretoria”. But everything changed after her parents’ divorce in 1979, when she was five.

“I don’t know what happened to my father’s money. Good question.” She feels that their childhood is sometimes misrepresented. “Some people spew hate language towards us because they think we grew up with a silver spoon and were given everything – which is so far from the truth. When I was growing up it was just a matter of survival.”

Musk says she derives her strength from her mother, Maye. “I think Tosca’s stronger than me,” says Maye, when I speak to her a few days later. “She really says it as it is and takes no nonsense. Whereas I can accept nonsense for a while – and then suffer for it.” She says that Tosca became her receptionist at the age of five. “From the age of eight she was typing my reports for me.”

It was her mother who introduced Musk to romance novels: Judith Krantz, Danielle Steel, et al. Maye explains, “When I was married I read romance books. They just give me some hope in life.” Mother and daughter would watch the screen adaptations. “On a Sunday, we would watch them together and eat ice-cream,” says Musk. “That would be our treat.”

The three children were close, but Musk remembers the fights, too. “I got chased around and tied up and a dirty sock stuffed in my mouth. All the things that boys do to their younger sisters.” Her mother’s twin sister had three sons – and the two families spent a lot of time together. “So it was five boys and me. I had to learn how to spit really far.”

Elon, she says, loved playing Dungeons & Dragons and would always win. “I would beg to play with him. Within minutes I would roll the dice and die.”

I ask her what her strongest memory is of Elon as a child. She thinks for a while. “I’ll tell you a story of childhood. When we were younger, we went to Sun City [a resort in South Africa], and Elon ate everything in the buffet and on the way back [on the plane], he vomited all over me. And I couldn’t move because we didn’t want to get the vomit on the plane seats. So, I had to hold the vomit until we landed. And then I was washed off. Pineapple chunks,” she says in disgust. “I mean, pineapple chunks. On me!”

He’s going to really thank you for that memory, I say. She shrugs and laughs.

Tosca Musk hated school. “Is anybody happy at school?” When she was a teenager, the family moved to Canada. School was even worse there. “It was horrible. The kids were mean. They all had their cliques; I was cliqueless. I didn’t know how to dress because in South Africa we wore school uniforms. Also, we had no money at all. We lived in a rent-controlled apartment and we bought our clothes off whatever discount rack there was at the discount store.” So Musk decided to speed up school by studying twice as hard. “I did day school, night school and summer school and finished two years early.”

Somehow, she also found time to work: first at a fast food outlet, then in a grocery store. Drawn towards film, she bought a video camera when she was 17 and started making short movies. She went on to study film at the University of British Columbia, then worked for Canadian entertainment company Alliance. “It took her 15 years to pay off her student loan,” says Maye. In 2001 she wrote and directed her own feature film, Puzzled, with Elon as an executive producer. She co-founded Passionflix in 2017.

At aged 37, Musk decided it was time to have children. “I rationalised the entire thing. If I meet somebody today, we date for a year; now I’m 38. We move in together; now I’m 39. We decide we’re going to get married; now I’m 40 because it takes forever to plan a wedding. At 41, we try to have children. Oh, now we can’t. So I’m going to go through all the drugs and hormones that you have to go on in your 40s to try to have children. That’s just going to end the marriage right there: that massive amount of stress. So the likelihood of me being able to have children – had I even met somebody at 37 – just didn’t make sense.”

Her family could not have been more supportive of her decision to use a sperm donor. “I told my eldest brother first and he said immediately, ‘I think that’s a good idea. You’d make a great mother. I support you in that.’ My mum was like, ‘Ooh, that’s fabulous. So how do we choose a donor? Do we all just get drunk and spin a bottle?’ ”

In fact, a “matchmaker” helped her sift through potential donors. “My matchmaker recommended that I choose somebody that looks like me: tall, blond, blue-eyed, square-jawed – because then my kids will always look like me.”

She has never looked back. “It was the best decision I ever made. I can’t even imagine life without my children.” Their childhood is very different from hers. “I don’t have the struggle and abuse side of things. So that’s somewhat better. I raise my kids more like a team member. I include them in decision-making.”

“I have standards. I expect to be treated in a very specific way and I would treat people the same way. I never got that treatment.”

She says there has been no one significant in her life since she had children: “There wasn’t anybody significant in my life before I had children, either.” Not even in her 20s? “No. Never. All [my relationships] were very brief. Certainly, there were those childhood crushes.”

Has she been unlucky or does she just have very high standards? “I think that I have standards. High or not. I expect to be treated in a very specific way and I would treat people the same way. I never got that treatment.”

So far, Musk has raised almost $US22 million for the Passionflix platform and is hoping to raise a further $US10 million. It’s the most complex part of the business. For a start, “[People] couldn’t invest in the company because they thought they would have a close connection to my brother.” Second, the movie industry is still a male-dominated world. “We would normally pitch in a room full of men who would be like, ‘Haha, fantastic, tell me more about the [she adopts a leery voice] romance genre.’ ”

She had dinner with one potential investor. “He said to me, ‘Okay, I’ll give you three [million dollars] but I’ll own 50 per cent of the company. And let’s discuss this up in my room.’ I was like, ‘No, I don’t need to go to your room because we’re sitting here. Also, you’re not going to own 50 per cent of my company because that’s not what I’m offering.’ And he goes, ‘Well, where else are you gonna get the money?’

“Actually,” she continues, “this is one of the best pieces of advice that I got from my brothers: ‘You should pay attention to who is investing in your company because you will be married to them forever.’ ”

The siblings remain close. “I don’t know if they’ll agree with me but I think we share a lot of characteristics. We certainly enjoy each other’s company. We try to see each other as often as possible. Kimbal’s a chef so he’ll cook dinner. Normally, we’re just hanging around the table and having a chat and laughing.” Even Elon occasionally cooks. “He once made exceptional cinnamon buns.” From scratch? “Probably not. But it was more than putting them on a plate. There was some doughy thing that he needed to do. They were delicious.”

Although Passionflix is now available in 150 countries, including Australia, and dubbed into nine languages, subscriber numbers are relatively modest. “Six figures” is as specific as Musk wants to get.

In the next decade she hopes that the platform will become a household name and that she can start making major movies. “I would love to make the $50 million or $100 million epic romance films. I could make a movie like The English Patient or Shakespeare in Love; those are within my genre. And I’m not going to shy away from an Academy Award.”

While she’s joking, it would be foolish to underestimate her. She is, after all, a Musk.

This is an edited version of a story that first appeared in The Times magazine.

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(The Sydney Morning Herald)