It’s axiomatic that the mothers of great movers and shakers are themselves formidable characters. Living up to that, and then some, is the indomitable Maye Musk, whose half-century-long career as a fashion model and nutritionist is as remarkable as, well, as the seismic NASDAQ jitters and SEC moves generated by her son, Elon. Not that Maye Musk will be focusing much on her son’s recent settlement of his SEC lawsuit, or his having to step down from the chair of his own board, thank you. One senses that the Musk clan lives by the notion, certainly emanating from the matriarch, that those sorts of setbacks are regarded as the knocks one simply takes on the larger fields of play, worthy of serious attention, surely, but no cause for useless fretting.
Rather, last week, as her most headline-generating child and his car company were negotiating one of the thorniest and yet most swift page-one SEC settlements in history, Maye Musk walked for Dolce and Gabbanna in their SS19 Milan Fashion Week show. She did a similar turn at the beginning of the month during New York Fashion week for Concept Korea’s label. Represented by IMG Models in New York, she’s just landed a Cover Girl campaign. Not bad for a girl legging into her eighth decade.
Less well known about the senior Ms. Musk is that she was a single mom (of three children) when she moved back to Canada from South Africa, and living up to the J.K. Rowling example, has earned two master’s degrees along the way. As a nutritionist, she regularly gives lectures and presentations around the country and around the world. Then again, this is the model who, as she puts it, to “celebrate” her 60th birthday, stopped coloring her hair, preferring instead to let fly her natural silver flag.
That was a decade ago, just as author Anne Kreamer’s clarion anthem to an embrace of the changes of age, Going Gray, was being published. In other words, Maye Musk took the decision before stripping back the layers of female armor and artifice became an established ‘good’ thing to do. For a figure of considerable standing in the business of fashion who traded and still trades on her looks, such as Ms. Musk, the move required admirable steel. In effect, her decision to go gray was a challenge to her industry and the rampant age-ism within it, not unlike some of the past technological challenges engineered in his own fields of automobiles and aerospace by her son, limning the message: I’m doing this now. You figure out whether or not you can take it, but in the meantime, do please get out of the way.
Not that that example of maternal fortitude was specifically or even generally an inspiration for her son’s tweets about taking his company private back in April, which so caught the attentions of Wall Street and its government regulators. By contrast, there is a streak of stoicism at work in the mother. Maye Musk has a weakness for chocolates but keeps none in the house so that she cannot indulge, a fact recently admitted in an interview. She remains an unabashed fan of romance novels and an unstoppable plugger of daughter Tosca’s all-romance-all-the-time streaming service startup, Passionflix.
Fifty-year modeling career or no, the recent Cover Girl anointment is definitely a career high not often seen among the grandmother set (Maye Musk has eleven grandchildren, and counting). She is definitely firing on all thrusters, to employ a space travel metaphor, and key to that, in addition to her twin precepts of good nutrition and good manners, seems to be a kind of relentless optimism. Asked by fashion Bible Harpers Bazaar how she felt about meeting the “milestone” of 70, she replied with dry understatement, and with not a little vinegar directed at her interlocutor for broaching the clearly somewhat tiring question.
“I had been looking forward to it because I feel like things are really going to take off in my seventies,” she said.
The message? Don’t mess with Maye Musk.
