This is a transcript of a YouTube interview (Feb 26, 2021) where Maye Musk discusses resilience, survival, and kindness, illustrated with personal anecdotes from her life and parenting. She describes practical survival choices during hardship (cutting hair, buying a carpet before chairs), emphasizes teaching kindness and consideration to her children, and highlights her children's projects (Elon, Kimbal, Tosca) as efforts to help humanity. The host frames the conversation around Maye's new book, "A Woman Makes a Plan."
Questions this video answers
72 years old.
A Woman Makes a Plan.
Chapters
Yeah. My children don't have fear. Yeah. In the beginning when the rockets were exploding, well, I would just want to curl up and cry in the corner. Whereas Elon would come out and say, now we find out what went wrong and we will do the next one. Right.
Hi, everyone, this is Maye Musk. May's new book, A Woman Makes a Plan, just got released. May is 72 years old. She is the world's greatest, oldest supermodel. She was a born adventurer. Her book is so absorbing. I started reading it today. I'm already at chapter 10 and I'm in the middle of a workday as I'm reading A Woman Makes a Plan. This very intriguing story about May, about how when she got her first paycheck, the first thing you bought was a carpet because you had no chairs in your apartment. So you just got a carpet so your kids could be comfortable. And then the second thing you bought was a computer for Elon and Kimbal to sit in the carpet and play with that computer. The bareness of the upbringing is astonishing to me.
You know, the thing is, when you are trying to survive, then you don't go to the hairdresser. You have to cut your own hair. And I cut my children's hair. You can do without luxuries. And funny enough, when my brothers and my twin sister read my book, they said, we didn't know you were struggling. You never complained. You never asked for money. I said, we. Well, what would I ask for money for? To go to the movies or go out for dinner? Those are luxuries. We didn't have a problem with it. My children never complained. And they even said it was quite fun, you know, and you could get second hand school uniforms. And, you know, you figure out things.
We have a leading question from Irina Chehosov.
My question is, what is the most important trait you want to instill in a child? I like them to be considerate of others. They think, just be kind to others.
Kindness. Right, kindness. Your children aren't just building businesses. Your children are building businesses that are actually, in a way, healing the world. Right.
I mean, they're doing what I consider they're doing good things.
Like, Elon wants to move the world beyond a carbon economy. He wants to back up the human species by colonizing Mars. Kimbal is doing so much good work in terms of organic farming and farm to table. How do you install kindness, kindness and care in a child?
I was in a nurturing profession where I helped people to eat well, but they saw that people would come and see me and then when they eat better they're happier and they're healthier and you could see that you're caring about other people. And then my parents were Canadians. They cared about everybody too. My dad was a chiropractor. He kept people in better health. My kids are the same. They find a goal that will help mankind or help like Tosca with her movies, her Passionflix app where she has romance movies where the men and women get the same pay and the female directors and they romance stories with happy endings so that the women here are not abused, tortured, you know, violated. They are intelligent, successful and but you know, drama. There's drama because it's a love story.
Thank you for ensuring that you raised children who were compassionate and wanted to heal the world and not evil geniuses because imagine if Elon was an evil genius. We'd be freaking screwed.
I would never allow that. No evil do no evil here.
