Maye Musk said she helped her sons navigate the early days of building their startup, Zip2.
In her memoir, “Timeless,” released September 15, Maye described her sons’ differing management styles and the family meetings she held to help them work through disagreements.
She recalled an incident when her sons clashed over an underperforming employee at Zip2.
Her eldest son, Elon Musk, was “about the facts,” even as a kid, she wrote.
“When it came to managing employees, he once again saw the facts. If you’re not working effectively, you should be fired. Simple,” Maye wrote. However, her other son, Kimbal Musk, “was always focused on people.”
“He would have a warm, personal relationship with the employee in question, and therefore wanted to first understand why they weren’t performing and then help them improve,” Maye wrote.
Their contrasting approaches sometimes caused friction, but also made the brothers effective business partners, allowing each to complement the other’s strengths, she wrote.
The brothers also had regular family meetings with her, so she could help mediate their differences.
“During our meetings, I’d help them come up with compromises and decide on their next steps,” Maye wrote, adding that they would revisit the same issues the following week to discuss what had happened and how to move forward.
“Even as young adults, they needed a mother’s help,” Maye wrote.
Maye said she didn’t realize “how important the meetings were to them” until she tried to cancel one to go to a barbecue, and “Elon wouldn’t have it.”
“I ended up giving in and helping the boys discuss and resolve their issues,” she wrote.
Savings, laundry, and unpaid work
Beyond mediating her sons’ disagreements, Maye said she used her savings to help cover their early business costs and took on the domestic labor to support them.
“I had $10,000 in savings from my seven years in Toronto and had given it all to Elon and Kimbal to cover costs, including rent on their first office,” Maye wrote.
The brothers slept in the one-room office and showered at the YMCA, so Maye said she took the cheapest flight from Toronto to San Francisco every six weeks to help them however she could.
“They wouldn’t stop to take care of themselves. I did what I could to fill the gap. I’d stay in a hotel near their office and spend the time doing laundry, shopping for food, and covering office expenses such as equipment and printing,” Maye wrote.
After Zip2 was sold, Tosca Musk — Maye’s daughter and Elon and Kimbal’s sister — was asked to help close the company’s San Diego office.
Tosca had been working for the company, and sharing a four-bedroom apartment with three male Zip2 employees, who left it “disgustingly dirty,” Maye wrote.
Maye said she flew to San Diego to meet her daughter, and together they spent 12 hours cleaning the apartment before returning it to the owner.
“We washed and ironed all the sheets, made the beds, laundered the towels, vacuumed the carpet, wiped the floor in the kitchen, cleaned out the fridge and cupboards, and scrubbed everything, including the dirty bathrooms,” she wrote.
All three of her kids went on to make names for themselves in different fields.
Elon, now the world’s richest person, leads Tesla and SpaceX. He acquired Twitter, now X, in 2022 and briefly was a special government employee with the Department of Government Efficiency in the Trump administration in 2025.
Kimbal moved into the food industry, cofounding The Kitchen Restaurant Group, the urban farming startup Square Roots, and the nonprofit Big Green. He sits on Tesla’s board and served on SpaceX’s board from its founding until January 2022.
Tosca, a filmmaker, cofounded Passionflix, a streaming service for movies adapted from romance novels.
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