Maye Musk has revealed she sleeps in the “garage” when she visits her son, billionaire and world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
Elon, 51, is the CEO of Tesla and founder of SpaceX and is worth an estimated $257.3bn (£219bn).
Maye, who currently resides in New York City, has opened up about her close relationship with her eldest son in a new interview, revealing that despite being valued at $125bn, SpaceX does not have the most glamourous of headquarters.
“I have to sleep in the garage,” she told The Times of her visits to the Texas site. “You can’t have a fancy house near a rocket site.”
Reflecting on her son’s success, Maye said she knew he was remarkably clever by the time he turned three, and that her nickname for him was “Genius Boy”.
She said he “remembered everything he read”. “He was always absorbing information. We could ask him anything. This was before the internet. I guess now we would call him the internet,” she added.
Musk first put his intelligence to practice in 1983, when he created his own computer game.
Maye said she showed it to some university students at the time, who were surprised he knew all of the coding shortcuts.
“These guys were in their second and third year in computer science and they were very impressed,” she recalled.
Elon is the son of Maye and Errol Musk, whom Maye divorced in 1979. Following the divorce, she moved to Canada with Elon and his siblings, Kimbal, 49, and Tosca, 48.
Looking back on that time, Maye said it was “horrifying” as the family suffered from ongoing money issues, and she constantly feared she wouldn’t be able to feed her children.
“I had to wear Elon’s and Tosca’s clothes, because I couldn’t afford to buy new clothes,” she said.
“There were hard times. Tosca and I were joking the other day about how we all lived in a one-bedroom apartment for a year. For a long time after I left my marriage, I had a pain in my gut. I was so terrified about not being able to feed my kids.”
