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| - A persistent claim that tech mogul Elon Musk's father, Errol Musk, had
(X user @DianeEllison)
The caption in this post reads: "Not once, but twice. Elon Musk's father, Errol Musk, has two children with his stepdaughter, Jana Bezuidenhout."
The claim, which Snopes found to be true, likely stems from reports in British tabloids the Daily Mail and The Sun in 2018 and 2022. The confirmation in these reports comes from interviews with Errol Musk. Snopes has reached out to Bezuidenhout for further confirmation of the statements put forward by Musk.
In 2018, the Mail published an interview with Errol Musk in which he confirmed he had fathered a son with Bezuidenhout, the daughter of his former wife Heide Bezuidenhout from a previous marriage. The boy was reportedly born in 2017 and, according to the Mail, Musk took a DNA test to confirm the child was his.
In 2022, The Sun reported that Musk had fathered another child with Jana Bezuidenhout, this time a daughter, born in 2019. This child had not been DNA-tested at the time of the reporting, though Musk told The Sun the child "looks just like my other daughters. She looks like Rose and Tosca mixed up." Tosca Musk is a child from his marriage to Maye Musk and a full sibling of Elon Musk. Rose Musk — full name Asha Rose — is a daughter from Errol Musk's marriage to Heide Bezuidenhout and a half-sister of Elon Musk.
Also in 2022, Australian radio station KIIS interviewed Errol Musk on the "The Kyle & Jackie O Show." When asked about the story online about him and Jana Bezuidenhout, Musk confirmed it to be true before explaining a little bit about his history with Bezuidenhout and her mother:
Kyle Sandilands: I'm looking online here at you, what's this story here about the stepdaughter? That's gotta be a bulls*** story. What's going on there?
Errol Musk: No, no, no, I was married to her mother for two years in the '90s.
Sandilands: So she's not your kid, obviously?
Musk: No, no, of course not. No, no. I was married to her mother in the '90s, the early '90s for a couple of years and she, I never saw her after we lost … she was actually placed in foster care, you know. But anyways, I never saw her for many years and then about 2014, I think I had seen her maybe around year 2000, and then in about 2014 that's when she came to phone me to say she was, you know, battling and all that sort of stuff and she was 30 years old, she's a lovely girl, and she was really struggling, she had an 8-year-old child and so I said oh you know, let me, let me help and so we became friends and that …
Sandilands: And a romance struck up out of that, that's normal, yeah, I don't see that weird.
Musk: Yeah it's completely normal.
It is worth noting that The Sun and the Mail both reported Musk and Heide Bezuidenhout were married for 18 years, rather than two. We were not able to find records for the marriage or divorce of Musk and Bezuidenhout on ancestry sites or the South African
Similarly, we could not find publicly available records to confirm the relation between Jana and Heide Bezuidenhout. However, a baby photo on a Facebook profile that we believe to be genuine and belonging to Jana Bezuidenhout showed a comment from Heide Bezuidenhout, to which Jana Bezuidenhout replied "Dankie mamma lief vi jo ook." Translated from Afrikaans: "Thank you mom love you too."
The
Snopes has previously reported on a claim that Errol Musk once owned an emerald mine.
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