Two marriages, 12 kids and several high-profile romances (see: Amber Heard, Grimes), Elon Musk is indeed, as he said in a 2023 eponymous biography, “just a fool for love.”
Turns out Elon Musk‘s months-long romance with Amber Heard cut deep.
Smitten from the moment he saw the 38-year-old actress in 2013’s Machete Kills, the SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO, 52, invited her to SpaceX’s L.A. headquarters the next year, a 2023 eponymous biography revealed.
But it wasn’t until April 2017—following the end of her 15-month marriage to Johnny Depp and his second stab at being married to second wife Talulah Riley—that the couple went public with their new romance, South Africa-born Elon joining the Texas native in Australia where she was filming Aquaman.
And while their relationship certainly had its highs (Elon gave fanboys a thrill last September when he revealed a photo of Amber in the costume she’d commissioned after he told her she looked like Mercy from the video game Overwatch), it wasn’t all fun and games.
“It was brutal,” Elon told biographer Walter Isaacson in Elon Musk. Agreed his ex, “Elon loves fire, and sometimes it burns him.”
Among their too-hot-to-handle moments: A December 2017 fight in South America that took place in front of Elon’s brother Kimbal Musk.
The way Kimbal sees it, he mused to the biographer, his brother “falls in love with these people who are really mean to him. They’re beautiful, no question, but they have a very dark side and Elon knows that they’re toxic.”
Elon, however, who recently welcomed his third child with Shivon Zilis, director of special projects at his company Neuralink, maintains a much more rose-colored-glasses-tinged view. “I’m just a fool for love,” the father of 12 noted to writer Walter. “I am often a fool, but especially for love.”
Ah, romance. Fire up “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” on Spotify and join us for a wild ride through Elon’s complex family tree.
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Maye Musk (Mom)
Maye was born in Saskatchewan, Canada and emigrated with her parents to Pretoria, South Africa in 1950, when she was 7. She and Elon’s father, Errol Musk, split in 1979.
After Elon moved to Canada at age 17, Maye obtained Canadian citizenship by birthright and moved there too. There, she established a dietician practice and became President of the Consulting Dieticians of Canada. She also worked as a model.
In 2019, after Elon sold his company Zip2 for more than $300 million, he bought his mom an apartment in New York City, where she lived for 13 years and continued her modeling career after being signed to the IMG Models agency.
“I brought my children up like my parents brought us up when we were young: to be independent, kind, honest, considerate and polite,” Maye wrote in an essay for CNBC. “I taught them the importance of working hard and doing good things.”
Denver Post Photo by Cyrus McCrimmon/Getty Images
Errol Musk (Dad)
Elon’s father is an engineer and like Elon, was born in South Africa.
Though Errol said in a 2015 Forbes interview that he used to often take his kids on trips overseas—”Their mother and I split up when they were quite young and the kids stayed with me. I took them all over the world.”—his relationship with Elon isn’t picture perfect.
In an emotional 2017 Rolling Stone interview, Elon criticized his father and talked about his upbringing, saying that after his parents split, he moved in with his dad, which, he said, “was not a good idea.”
However, Errol told Rolling Stone, “I love my children and would readily do whatever for them.”
Following his divorce from Maye, Errol married Heide, whose daughter Jana Bezuidenhout was 4 years old at the time. Errol and Heide went on to have two daughters together before they, too, broke up.
Years later, Jana reached out to Errol following a breakup of her own. “We were lonely, lost people,” Errol explained in a 2018 interview with The Sunday Times. “One thing led to another—you can call it God’s plan or nature’s plan.”
Either way, the duo became romantic and welcomed son Elliott in 2017 and then a baby girl in 2019. As Errol put it to The Sun, “The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce. If I could have another child I would. I can’t see any reason not to.”
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Kimbal Musk & Tosca Musk (Siblings)
Kimbal, born in 1972, is a restauranteur and the founder of The Kitchen, a collective of five restaurants that source directly from local farmers. He also runs a non-profit, Big-Green, that has built 200 learning gardens in schools across the U.S., the outlet said.
Tosca, born in 1974, is a filmmaker. In 2017, she founded Passionflix, a female-focused streaming service that targets the billion-dollar romance novel industry.
Twitter / Justine Musk
Justine Wilson (Ex-Wife)
Elon and Canadian-born Justine, his college sweetheart from Queen’s University in Ontario, married in 2000. In a 2010 article she penned for Marie Claire, titled I Was a Starter Wife: Inside America’s Messiest Divorce, Justine said that while dancing at their wedding reception, Elon told her, “I am the alpha in this marriage.”
“I shrugged it off,” Wilson wrote, “just as I would later shrug off signing the postnuptial agreement, but as time went on, I learned that he was serious.”
The two faced an unthinkable tragedy when their baby boy Nevada Alexander died at 10 weeks from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). “Nevada went down for a nap, placed on his back as always, and stopped breathing,” Justine wrote in her article.
The couple pursued IVF to conceive again and went on to welcome five more kids: Twins Vivian and Griffin and triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian.
In 2008, Elon filed for divorce.
Twitter / Elon Musk
Griffin, Kai, Damian & Saxon Musk (Sons)
In 2022, Elon revealed he took Griffin and the triplets to meet Pope Francis. While he was honored to meet the head of the Catholic church, Elon added of his ‘fit, “My suit is tragic.”
Threads / Vivian Jenna Wilson
Vivian Jenna Wilson (Daughter)
Also in 2022, Griffin’s twin sister filed a petition to change her full name in accordance with her new gender identity, writing, “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”
In July 2024, Elon spoke out about his daughter’s transition. “I lost my son, essentially,” he said in a Daily Wire interview with Jordan Peterson, adding that his child, who he referred to by her birth name, was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus.”
He also alleged that he was “tricked” into signing medical documents granting Vivian gender-affirming treatments.
She disputed his comments. “He was not by any means tricked,” she said in an NBC News. “He knew the full side effects.”
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Talulah Riley (Ex-Wife)
Elon and Talulah—who starred on HBO’s Westworld—married in 2010. “It all happened very fast,” she told CBS News. “We were engaged after, I think, two weeks of knowing each other.”
The two divorced in 2012, then remarried a year later before divorcing again in 2016. In June 2024, she wed Love Actually alum Thomas Brodie-Sangster.
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Amber Heard (Ex-Girlfriend)
Elon and Amber went public with their romance in early 2017, a year after she filed for divorce from Johnny Depp and Elon ended his (second) marriage to Talulah. Though their relationship didn’t last long.
“I just broke up with my girlfriend,” Elon told Rolling Stone at the time. “I was really in love, and it hurt bad…Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think.”
ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images
Grimes (Ex-Girlfriend)
Elon and the singer dated on-and-off for four years, starting in 2018. In September 2021, Elon told Page Six that he and Grimes “are, I’d say, probably semi-separated,” adding, “It’s mostly that my work at SpaceX and Tesla requires me to be primarily in Texas or traveling overseas and her work is primarily in LA. She’s staying with me now and Baby X is in the adjacent room.”
However, in March 2022, she told Vanity Fair that they “live in separate houses” and are “best friends.”
She later tweeted, “Me and E have broken up *again* since the writing of this article haha, but he’s my best friend and the love of my life, and my life and art are forever dedicated to The Mission now.”
When news broke in September 2023 that the couple share three children together, the “Crystal Ball” singer confirmed that, yes, their most recent addition Techno Mechanicus had joined son X Æ A-12, 3, and daughter Exa Dark Sideræl.
Theo Wargo/Getty Images for TIME
X Æ A-Xii Musk (Son)
In 2020, Elon and Grimes welcomed their first child together, a son. They soon modified the spelling of his name in order to meet California’s legal guidelines, which only permit letters from the English alphabet. Switching over to roman numerals, the parents agreed to spell his name, X Æ A-Xii.
“X, the unknown variable,” Grimes explained on Twitter. “Æ, my elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence) A-12 = precursor to SR-17 (our favorite aircraft). No weapons, no defenses, just speed. Great in battle, but non-violent.”
Grimes continued, “A=Archangel, my favorite song” adding a rat and sword emoji. “Metal rat.”
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Exa Dark Sideræl & Techno Mechanicus Musk (Kids)
In her 2022 Vanity Fair interview, Grimes revealed she and Elon privately welcomed a baby girl via surrogacy.
“Exa is a reference to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS (the ability to perform 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second),” she said. “Dark, meanwhile, is the unknown. People fear it but truly it’s the absence of photons. Dark matter is the beautiful mystery of our universe.’”
Sideræl—pronounced “sigh-deer-ee-el”—is, according to mom, “the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative earth time,” and a nod to her favorite Lord of the Rings character, Galadriel, who “chooses to abdicate the ring.”
Walter Isaacson revealed in his biography Elon Musk that Exa was born in December 2021 via surrogate.
The book also stated that around Father’s Day 2022, the on-again, off-again couple welcomed a child named Techno Mechanicus, nicknamed Tau, also via surrogate. The biography includes a photo, dated June 2022, of Elon feeding the baby boy.
X / Shivon Zilis
Strider & Azure (Kids)
In 2022, Business Insider published court documents that stated Elon welcomed twins in November 2021 with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis. The babies were born in Austin, Texas, where he lives.
He also seemingly weighed in on the report on X, writing, “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”
“Mark my words,” he added, “they are sadly true.”
Walter Isaacson wrote in his 2023 biography Elon Musk that the twins’ full names are Strider Sekhar Sirius and Azure Astra Alice.
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Baby No. 12
In 2024, Elon and Zilis welcomed their third baby together. The billionaire confirmed the news in June 2024, telling Page Six, “All our friends and family know,” adding, “Failure to issue a press release, which would be bizarre, does not mean ‘secret.’”
