Maye Musk says none of her three children set out to get rich. “They never wanted to make money,” the mother of Elon, Kimbal and Tosca Musk said in Dubai, adding that they wanted to do good and be good at their work. The remarks are going viral again as Elon Musk’s fortune hovers around $1 trillion, but they are not new. They come from a talk in January 2025, as Gulf Today reported at the time.
Maye spoke at the 1 Billion Followers Summit, in a session titled “How I Raised Three Amazing Children, Including the Richest Man in the World.” Her three children went on to run very different businesses: Elon leads Tesla and SpaceX, Kimbal is a restaurateur, and Tosca is a filmmaker, according to Gulf News.
A hard start
After her divorce, Maye said, she built her dietitian practice quickly and worked from home because she could not afford an office. She also described moving the family through nine cities in three countries. The children pitched in: Elon was her “encyclopaedia” and tech expert, Kimbal cooked for the family, and Tosca answered the phone.
She said she let her children choose their own paths, even when that meant paying for school themselves. They took out loans to study what they loved and paid them off soon after they graduated.
“Everything he does is to do good”
Maye said Elon’s work has always been about usefulness more than money. She recalled him telling her that satellites could one day help people stranded in forests or in the middle of the ocean. That was before Starlink became widely known, though the reports of her talk do not name Starlink directly.
Our take: this is a mother describing her children, so treat the motives as her view. What can be checked is the story around it: the moves, the single-parent years and the student loans. It is also worth reading the quote next to the numbers. A fortune near $1 trillion, which we covered in Elon Musk Is a Trillionaire Again, is hard to square with “never wanted to make money” unless you take her point to be about what drove the work, not what the work produced. Either way, it is a January 2025 talk making the rounds again, not a fresh statement.
More on the family: Maye Musk’s parenting advice and the cost of a child and Musk’s first video game at 12.
