The Nine-Year Marriage of Errol X and Maye Haldeman

A Brief History of Family X

The following is the final chapter in a series about the evolution of the famed family X.

It is hard to put lipstick on a pig. Errol X and Maye Haldeman’s marriage dissolved after nine tumultuous years. Maye was high-spirited, physically attractive, and intelligent. Errol was her equal, but his ego and boundaries seemed to have no limits. The pair had three children in South Africa: two sons and a daughter. They were all born in Pretoria in the early 1970s, within a three-year period.

Errol’s life is so bizarre that it is hard to write about without drifting into National Enquirer territory. The most salacious elements of his life are that he killed three men, he had children with his second wife’s daughter, and family members roundly called him a “bad man.”

Both freedom and anxiety marked the childhoods of Errol and Maye’s children, Elon, Kimbal, and Tosca X. Younger brother, Kimbal, recalls the violence of his childhood during the 1970s and 1980s. It occurred in their home, schools, and public places. It was reported that Maye routinely endured physical and mental abuse from her husband.

Despite Errol’s abusive and erratic behavior, his oldest son, Elon X, eventually chose to live with him instead of his mother. It appears that Elon accepted the Faustian bargain, trading his emotional well-being for access to his father’s Encyclopedia Britannica and computer. Although Elon would say he regretted his decision to stay with his father, it is clear that he was psychologically conditioned to replicate many of his father’s authoritarian, abusive, and manipulative traits. However, as a slender bookworm, he was relentlessly bullied by his classmates in Pretoria. He was bullied in school and manipulated by a bullying father. Elon’s childhood was filled with abuse and probably neglect by his father.

Elon’s mother, Maye, played a supportive role during his time living with his father. Still, she moved to Canada six months after her divorce, where she was also busy raising the other two children and working multiple jobs as a single mother.

Errol was a moderately successful engineer with a good income. Therefore, Elon’s childhood was relatively privileged. However, his father was not nurturing and left him to his own devices. As a survival mechanism, Elon tended to be a loner who escaped to science fiction and technology books. He was captivated by computers. High school classmates recall that Elon had no friends.

In 1950, South Africa was a comfortable place for whites, but not so for blacks. Apartheid was at its zenith, and the oppressive measures against the larger black population were increasing in severity. Growing up twenty years later as white children in apartheid South Africa, the Musk siblings lived in segregated neighborhoods, largely insulated from the direct effects of the regime’s brutality but still confronted by its daily realities and contradictions.

The Haldeman and X families both migrated to South Africa during the Apartheid Era and its precursors. Although grandfather Joshua Haldeman accepted and even championed Apartheid, it appears that Errol X came to be against it. He was a member of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party in Pretoria. Likewise, Elon, Kimbal, and Tosca X became opponents of Apartheid. Elon was said to have emigrated from South Africa in 1988 to avoid mandatory military service and to be complicit in Apartheid.

There is no need to elaborate on Elon, Kimbal, and Tosca X. There are countless magazines, newspapers, and even biographies about them.

However, Elon X, like his father, has had multiple romantic partners. Elon has recently become associated with pronatalism for those with higher IQs. Interestingly, the name of Elon’s favorite son is X. So, in the context of this article, his son’s name would be X X. This lad is the five-year-old son that Elon has been bringing to all his meetings lately. He liked X so much that he allowed him to punch him, resulting in a black eye. One of Elon’s former partners, Claire Boucher (also known as Grimes), is X X’s mother, and she has begun to fight over him. Unlike Elon’s other 13 or 14 children, Elon seems to be extremely attached to little X X.

Errol X continued his career as a businessman and engineer in South Africa after his divorce from Maye. Some of his businesses were shady, and he admitted some of them to be “under the table.” In the early 1990s, he married Heide Bezuidenhout, with whom he had two daughters. After this marriage ended in divorce in 2004, Errol became romantically involved with Heide’s daughter from an earlier marriage. Errol later had two children with his step-daughter, Jana Bezuidenhout.

Errol was also charged with but acquitted of manslaughter after shooting intruders in his Johannesburg home. He has also engaged in controversial issues, including his public support for Vladimir Putin.

After her divorce from Errol, Maye Haldeman Musk rebuilt her life as a single mother via her successful modeling and nutrition careers. She even wrote a book about her experiences, A Woman Makes a Plan. Her return to Canada paved the way to her success. She earned degrees in nutrition in Canada and launched a private practice as a dietitian. She never remarried. She later moved to the USA to be with her children and their careers.

This is the final chapter in the saga that began in England and Switzerland. The X family came from a poor area of Suffolk County, England. Eliza X, an unmarried mother, had a son named Harry X, who left his wife in England and immigrated to South Africa. Maye’s Swiss family was Mennonite, having immigrated to the Pennsylvania Colony, Minnesota, Canada, and finally to South Africa. The nexus for the two families was a brief marriage in South Africa.

In the final analysis, it isn’t easy to separate the effects of genetics, family culture, geography, and other circumstances on individuals and families. I leave it to the reader to discern any cause-and-effect relationships between the actors and circumstances of the 1970-79 marriage between Maye Haldeman and Errol Musk.

You may refer back to earlier chapters to connect any confusing dots.

The End