Errol Musk, the father of Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, claimed he knows the reason why his billionaire son threw his support behind President-elect Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
“Biden did not invite Elon to an electric car summit, and in fact invited everybody else and not Tesla, which had already sold 1 million cars that year,” Errol claimed in a new interview with BBC Two’s Newsnight.
“It would affect anybody,” Errol told Newsnight host Faisal Islam on Thursday. “You know, he’s a normal person. He’s a human being. How must he view that? At first, he couldn’t believe it. And then, he started seeing all the misinformation on Twitter at the time,” the Tesla CEO’s father said.
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Biden hosted the summit in question in August 2021, and invited GM, Ford, Stellantis, and the United Auto Workers. He used the opportunity to sign an executive order setting an ambitious target for American auto manufacturers: 50% of all new vehicles made by the major American manufacturers would be electric or hybrid by 2030.
“Yeah, seems odd that Tesla wasn’t invited,” Elon wrote on Twitter at the time.
It’s unclear how close Errol Musk is to his son, who previously called him a “terrible human being” in a Rolling Stone interview in 2017. “My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil,” Elon told the magazine at the time.
Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography of Elon also portrayed their relationship as strained. Errol has long disputed his son’s accounts and rejected his characterization in Isaacson’s book as “sensationalism.”
The father and son appear to have patched things up, at least according to Errol. Earlier this year, he told The New York Times he traveled to Austin, Texas to visit his son and meet some of his grandchildren.
The elder Musk has now been making rounds on talk shows and radio programs primarily in the U.K., where he has been offering words of support for his son and his rightward shift.
“He’s a nice person, he’s a very nice person. He has a very good heart,” he told Newsnight on Thursday, insisting his son was primarily focused on “making human beings multiplanetary.”
