The Musk Family Tree, Explained

The Musk family spans five generations and four continents — from a Minnesota-born chiropractor who moved his family to apartheid-era Pretoria, to a Tesla-and-SpaceX CEO with fourteen publicly known children by four different mothers. This guide walks through who's who, where they come from, and how the cousins on the Haldeman side ended up running SolarCity.

How to read the graph

Each circle is a person. Solid lines connect parents to children; pink lines connect spouses and co-parents. Dashed pink lines mark divorces. Click a node to focus on it; drag to rearrange the layout.

Generation 1 — the Haldeman great-grandparents

Elon's middle name Reeve is a borrowing, but his unusual first name comes from his great-grandfather John Elon Haldeman, a Minnesota farmer who died in 1909 leaving his widow Almeda — Canada's first recorded female chiropractor — to raise their son Joshua alone in Saskatchewan.

Generation 2 — the grandparents on both sides

The paternal line — Walter Henry James Musk, a WWII RAF cryptographer, and his English-born wife Cora Robinson — stays in South Africa. The maternal line — Joshua Haldeman, the Saskatchewan chiropractor-aviator-Technocracy activist, and his second wife Winnifred Fletcher, a dance teacher — emigrates from Canada to Pretoria in 1950, looking for an apartheid-era "Atlantis." Their daughter Maye marries Errol Musk twenty years later.

Generation 3 — Errol, Maye, and Maye's siblings

Errol Musk married Maye Musk in 1970 and divorced her in 1979. He went on to marry his second wife Heide Bezuidenhout (1992–2004), and later had at least two children with Heide's daughter from a prior relationship, Jana — a publicly reported but contested family arrangement that Snopes fact-checked in 2018. Maye's older brother Scott Haldeman became an internationally known neurologist; her twin sister Kaye is the mother of the Rive brothers.

Generation 4 — Elon, his siblings, and his cousins

Errol and Maye's three children are Elon (1971), Kimbal (1972) and Tosca (1974). Errol's two daughters with Heide — Alexandra and Asha — are Elon's paternal half-sisters. Errol's two children with Jana Bezuidenhout sit on the same row. On the Haldeman side, Kaye's sons — Lyndon, Peter and Russ Rive — are first cousins.

Elon's partners — three marriages and three co-parents

Elon's romantic history splits cleanly into three marriages and three unmarried co-parenting relationships. He married Canadian author Justine Wilson in 2000 (divorced 2008); married actress Talulah Riley in 2010, divorced 2012, then remarried her in 2013 and divorced again in 2016. He has never married any of his subsequent co-parents: musician Grimes, Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis, or author Ashley St. Clair.

Generation 5 — fourteen children, four mothers

As of May 2026, Elon has fourteen publicly known children across four mothers: six with Justine (the first, Nevada, died of SIDS at ten weeks in 2002); three with Grimes; four with Shivon Zilis via IVF; and Romulus with Ashley St. Clair, whose paternity was confirmed by a court-ordered LabCorp test in April 2025 and whose custody remains contested. Kimbal has three children with his first wife Jen Lewin.

Vivian Wilson's break

In 2022, Vivian Jenna Wilson (formerly Xavier) legally severed ties with her father, dropped the Musk surname and took her mother's. The graph keeps her on the tree because the family relationship still exists; the legal one does not. By 2025 she had a Teen Vogue cover, a Tomboyx campaign, and a New York Fashion Week runway debut; in 2026 she launched a merch line whose proceeds go to the Trevor Project.

A century in dates

Generation by generation

From a Saskatchewan chiropractor to a Pretoria-born CEO

The shortest path from Joshua Haldeman — the Saskatchewan chiropractor who moved the family to Pretoria in 1950 — to his grandson Elon runs through Maye in just two parent edges.