Sometimes, the apple truly doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Errol Musk, 76, announced Tuesday in an interview with The Sun that he fathered a second child in 2019 with his 35-year-old stepdaughter Jana Bezuidenhout. Bezuidenhout was only 4 years old when Musk married her mother, Heide Bezuidenhout — and 22 when they divorced.
The controversial news came mere days after Insider revealed Musk’s son, technology magnate and Twitter troll Elon Musk, had twins with one of his employees. With nine kids of his own, the SpaceX CEO joked in a tweet that he was doing his “best to help the underpopulation crisis.”
“A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far,” added Elon Musk.
The billionaire nonetheless went “berserk” when he learned that Jana Bezuidenhout gave birth to Errol Musk’s child, Elliot Rush “Rushi” Musk,” in 2017, according to The Daily Mail. That same year, he told Rolling Stone that his father was “a terrible human being.”
In Errol Musk’s mind, however, having a second child with Jana Bezuidenhout was his God-given duty.
“The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce,” he told The Sun.
Errol Musk nonetheless admitted that the birth of his newborn daughter “wasn’t planned” and said she was likely conceived in the year and a half that he and Jana Bezuidenhout cohabitated after Rushi’s birth. The couple currently don’t live together, according to Rolling Stone.
“I haven’t checked her DNA,” Errol Musk told The Sun. “But she looks just like my other daughters. She looks like Rose and Tosca mixed up. She looks exactly like Rushi, and she behaves like him. So it’s pretty obvious, you know.”
Cyrus McCrimmon via Getty Images
While his son doesn’t approve, Errol Musk said Elon Musk was only born because he didn’t overthink the notion of having a lot of children. It was the elder Musk’s first marriage to model Maye Haldeman Musk in 1970 that produced Elon, Kimbal and Tosca.
Errol Musk separated from Haldeman Musk in 1979 and married Heide Bezuidenhout several years later. She already had two children — including Jana — but gave birth to two more with Errol Musk before they divorced in 1997. Errol Musk, who has seven kids in all, recently admitted that his latest two “kids were starting to get on my nerves” — but he’s open to having more.
“If I could have another child, I would,” said Errol Musk. “I can’t see any reason not to. If I had thought about it, then Elon or Kimbal wouldn’t exist.”