As the founder of Netflix-style streaming service Passionflix, Tosca Musk says her name is both an advantage and a liability.
If your last name is Musk, there’s a fairly good chance you’re related to the billionaire inventor-entrepreneur Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, aka the richest person in the world. Which brings with it a lot of baggage. “I have a very familiar last name,” says Tosca Musk, Elon’s younger sister, a filmmaker and director who runs the streaming platform Passionflix, which adapts romance novels for the screen.
So while Kimbal, 49, solves the obesity crisis and Elon, 51, saves the world, Tosca is dedicated to bringing happiness to humankind – specifically to women, who make up 98 per cent of Passionflix’s audience. “I’m a very strong advocate for positive storytelling,” says Musk. “I think we need more stories about love and hope. We have enough sad and depressing movies out there. I hate violence.
It is not too fanciful to say that her dedication to the genre perhaps springs from the lack of romance in her own life. Her parents’ marriage was worse than miserable, and she says she has never had a truly meaningful romantic relationship herself. She had her two children, twins Isabeau and Grayson, in 2013 via sperm donor and IVF. “I didn’t want to have children with somebody I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with,” she says.
Many people told her Passionflix would be a failure. “They still tell me all the time that it won’t work. And we’re still here.” Like her brothers, she is not easily put off an idea, however ridiculous the rest of the world might deem it. “That’s probably [true of] everybody in our family. If we say we’re going to do something, just believe us, we’re going to do it. A lot of people will say things are not going to work because they aren’t used to taking risks.
Musk says she derives her strength from her mother, Maye. “I think Tosca’s stronger than me,” says Maye, when I speak to her a few days later. “She really says it as it is and takes no nonsense. Whereas I can accept nonsense for a while – and then suffer for it.” She says that Tosca became her receptionist at the age of five. “From the age of eight she was typing my reports for me.”Advertisement
I ask her what her strongest memory is of Elon as a child. She thinks for a while. “I’ll tell you a story of childhood. When we were younger, we went to Sun City [a resort in South Africa], and Elon ate everything in the buffet and on the way back [on the plane], he vomited all over me. And I couldn’t move because we didn’t want to get the vomit on the plane seats. So, I had to hold the vomit until we landed. And then I was washed off. Pineapple chunks,” she says in disgust.
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