He Became a Father. Exactly Like His Own. — Elon Musk Part 5
He Became a Father. Exactly Like His Own.
What happens when a child who was never protected tries to build a family.
The rockets succeeded. The companies grew. The money reached a scale that's almost impossible to comprehend.
Now we look at the family. Everything from Parts 1 through 4 shows up again, in a different form. The same pattern that ran through every company he built ran through every relationship he entered. Same operating system. Same wound. Same result.
What He Wanted — And Couldn't Give
Part of him genuinely wanted a healthy family. The warmth of it. A mother who stayed, a safe home, children who felt loved — everything he never had. He tried to build it. Three marriages. Fourteen children. He kept trying.
But underneath the conscious wanting, the unconscious operating system was always running.
You can't build a safe home with an operating system that was built inside an unsafe one.
You repeat what you know. Even when you hate what you know.
Justine — "I Am Your Wife, Not Your Employee"
Justine Wilson was a Canadian novelist he met at Queen's University. They married in 2000. On their wedding day, on the reception dance floor, he told her: "I am the alpha in this relationship."
She later wrote that she should have taken that more seriously.
Their first child, Nevada, died of SIDS at ten weeks old. According to Justine, Musk's response was to move forward quickly — to not stay in it. Something had happened, and the next thing needed to happen. This looks less like coldness and more like someone who learned very early that stopping to process pain isn't a luxury survivors get to have.
They went on to have five more children through IVF — twins, then triplets.
Throughout the marriage, whenever Justine said, "I am your wife, not your employee," Musk would answer: "If you were my employee, I would fire you."
He meant it as a statement about how seriously he took performance. She heard it as his actual framework for the relationship. They were both right.
They started couples therapy. After three sessions over a month, Musk issued an ultimatum: fix the marriage today, or he'd file for divorce tomorrow. The next morning, he filed.
He didn't end the relationship because love faded. He ended it because she'd become a variable that stopped performing to spec. That isn't a husband's logic. That's the same OS that fired employees by text and rewrote engineers' code every night, running here too.
Talulah — The Woman He Married Twice
He met British actress Talulah Riley shortly after divorcing Justine. Married in 2010. Divorced in 2012. Remarried in 2013. Divorced again in 2016.
The same woman, twice. Both times ending the same way.
Surprisingly, Talulah still speaks warmly about him today. She's called him "the perfect ex-husband." She's said a third marriage isn't out of the question.
Why does Talulah speak well of him, while Justine doesn't?
My read is — she may not have needed him to be a real partner the way Justine did. Her expectations of emotional depth in the relationship were lower to begin with. And when you lower expectations for someone whose actual capacity for relationship is genuinely limited, you may end up feeling that limitation less.
The people most hurt by Musk were the people who got closest to him. The ones who kept their distance survived better. This is true in business and true in love. The closer you get to the center of his world, the more completely the rules become his.
The Pattern — From Errol to Elon
In Part 1, I showed you what Errol Musk installed inside his son. Now let's see how that installation ran, unchanged, through every relationship Elon built.
Abuse isn't inherited. It's learned. And he learned it completely. The words changed. The structure didn't. Errol is still in the room. Errol was always in the room.
The Day His Daughter Turned Away
In 2022, one of his children filed a name-change petition in a California court. The petition stated: "I no longer wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form." She dropped her father's last name and took her mother's.
In a 2025 interview, she called her father "a pathetic man-child." She said he hadn't supported her when she revealed who she really was. She described him yelling for an entire car ride because he didn't like her tone of voice. She said she found out about her younger siblings from news articles, at the same time as everyone else.
Musk's response was to go on a podcast and say his "son" had been "killed" by some ideology. He still calls her by the name she's legally left behind.
This is the most painful scene in the entire story. Not because of what his daughter said. Because of what Musk couldn't do.
His daughter told the world she wanted no relationship with her father, in any form. His response was to reframe it — blame the world, blame ideology, blame anyone but himself.
What his daughter wanted wasn't an apology. It was simply acknowledgment. The one thing he could never quite give.
A World That Keeps Getting Filled
Even after three marriages, he kept trying to build a family. Fourteen children. Four women. He kept trying.
He wanted a family. At the same time, he couldn't tolerate a partner who existed outside his control. The boy who read encyclopedias and science fiction at ten — the boy who built an inner world out of books because the outside world wasn't safe — may still, even now, be building that inner world into reality.
He isn't looking for a wife. He's looking for the mother who should have been there and wasn't. He's never found her. He's still looking. And every woman who tries to become real inside his world discovers there's no room in that world for who she actually is.
The most painful part of this chapter isn't the divorces. It isn't what happened with his daughter.
It's that he genuinely wanted this to work. Every time. The marriages weren't cynical. The children weren't an ego project. He wanted warmth. He wanted safety. He wanted the thing he'd never had.
He just couldn't get there. The operating system installed before he had language for it — women can't be trusted, people make each other fail, you get destroyed if you aren't the alpha — kept running. Underneath every marriage. Underneath every attempt.
A genius who can redesign a rocket can't redesign himself. This isn't a moral failure. In the theatrical sense, it's an exact tragedy — a figure undone by the very thing that made him great.
Honestly, Musk isn't the exception. He's just a case. Everyone carries some version of the same problem. The only real difference is how much you're willing to look at your own thinking, examine it, and let that — bit by bit — actually change what you do.
Writing this was, for me too, a process of turning myself over and looking honestly at what was underneath. It wasn't easy, if I'm honest. If you're reading this, I hope you'll take a moment somewhere to look at yourself too.
I had to be a little girl who smiled even when things were hard, even when I was angry. That was how I showed the world our family was happy, that nothing was wrong. But underneath, I was unbearably lonely. My mother worked to keep the family surviving. My father kept to his own time. We were together, and each of us was still alone. From the outside, a happy family. Underneath, something never quite landed.
Back then, like Musk, I went to the library and read everything I could get my hands on. That was my universe. It felt like what being inside my mother's womb must have felt like — that kind of ease.
When I crossed over from England to the US, I was three months pregnant. The baby was sick inside me, and I couldn't get to Korea or back to England — I ended up having to give birth in the US. For a while after she was born, immigration paperwork kept me on edge.
In those years, we were living on my husband's salary alone, and it barely covered rent. I couldn't work — a babysitter would have cost more than I could have earned. But honestly, that wasn't the whole reason. I couldn't bring myself to hand this baby, who couldn't even speak yet, over to someone else. I knew that particular loneliness — the universe of it.
When I held her, I'd sometimes catch myself in her eyes. She couldn't talk yet, but her face said everything. I didn't want that face made in a stranger's arms.
So I wanted to be the one right there with her.
I used what I'd trained in — reading people's emotions and psychology, from years of acting and directing. Meeting her right at her eye level, everything shaped like play, wrapped in feelings that felt like fun, so curiosity had a reason to show up in her every single moment.
So I put the directing work I wanted to do on hold, and spent seven years with my oldest, fully present. The children's museum, the science museum, the aquarium whenever we were bored — watching the giant tortoises that had been alive for seventy years, laughing together at the sea lions clowning around. Playing shopkeeper and customer at the mini grocery store inside the children's museum, teaching her a small piece of how life works. Going to see the old tall ships that docked in Boston sometimes, playing pirates. At the science museum, pedaling a bike as hard as we could because pedaling made electricity. Instead of the lonely universe I grew up in, I wanted to fill her days with the fun of the real world.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, my husband quit his job and wanted to try running a dumpling factory. We put in what savings we had, plus help we asked my parents for, and opened it. Way too early, looking back. Haha. It didn't go the way we'd planned, and the rent-money worry started all over again.
When the business struggled and I had a dollar to my name, there were nights I stayed up crying because I couldn't cover rent. I was afraid. And in that fear, I understood something — my mother lived through this same blood-draining fear, the fear of ending up on the street with her kids, and just kept going. She survived. That was it. That was how she protected me and my sibling — and that was her love.
My husband must have felt bad. He wanted to give me something, but money was too tight for that. Near our house there was a tree that had been struck by lightning, and people said wood from a tree like that brings luck. He carved a small piece of it into a cross, strung it on a leather cord, and put it around my neck. He was probably praying for our family's luck, over and over, without saying so.
Money and success tend to sit on the same line, a lot of the time. Happiness and freedom don't seem to sit on that same line with money — not the way you'd think. Even in the moments money made things hard, looking back, there were far more happy ones.
My happiness matters. So does everyone else's. Haha.
What the Richest Man in the World Does Every Day
"About 20 pills a day. On X at 3am. A $35M compound. The man in the present." →
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