Elon Musk's Fascinating History With Moose Jaw
Nick Murray
Elon Musk's grandmother is from Moose Jaw. You know how I know this? He said so himself. On Twitter. See? Back in 2017.
Musk, the multi-billionaire industrialist and investor, CEO of Tesla and lead rocket designer at SpaceX, has been on my mind quite a bit lately. Maybe it's because I visited a Tesla store in the Chinook Centre Shopping Mall in Calgary lately, or maybe it's because he made headlines recently for smoking dope on Joe Rogan's podcast while wearing a shirt that read “Occupy Mars”, or maybe it's just because the man has the type of skills and influence that could both save the world and destroy it; depending on how you look at it. Either way, he's been on my mind lately. So much so that I took it upon myself to learn a little bit more about the man; and to follow up on that Moose Jaw connection he spoke about last May.
Elon Musk's link to Saskatchewan has been well documented. In 2017 Mark Melnychuk wrote a tremendously thorough story about Musk's interesting family history in the province that included bits about Elon himself, visiting here as a teenager, and the Huffington Post once published a story about Elon's mother Maye, who was born in Regina and is, to this day, as a septagenarian, a highly successful model.
It's easy to come to the conclusion that Elon's family is the real life Royal Tenebaum's, only without any of the failures; a family of extreme eccentrics, intellectuals and otherworldly successes and a family with a few dark spots as well. A family with deep roots in Saskatchewan and that aforementioned interesting connection to the Friendly City...but more about that "surprisingly unexpected" revelation shortly.
As I said, the family is the living embodiment of the family from Wes Anderson's classic film The Royal Tenenbaums.
Elon, well, we all know of him and most of his exploits. He’s worth around $23 billion dollars; he is a great businessman, known for thinking far outside any box. He builds rockets, designs highways free of fossil fuels, he bores tunnels through the earth to help ease the California traffic and he dates gorgeous celebrities. He is a massive success by every definition of the word.
Maye Musk on the cover of Time Magazine
His parents are a strange lot as well. His mother, Maye, who was born in Regina, was a well regarded beauty in her youth. She was once a finalist for Miss South Africa and made her career as a successful model. She's been featured in New York Magazine, in Revlon ads, on the cover of Time and in a Beyonce video. Now at 70 she is Covergirl's oldest ever spokesmodel.
Her ex-Husband, Elon's father Errol Musk, is, as Elon once put it "a terrible human" and "evil". At 72 he had a baby with his 30 year old stepdaughter whom he'd known since she was a baby.
The family doesn't talk about him much though; it seems out of respect for the stepdaughter and their child, but it's very clear he isn't well liked amongst the rest of the family.
Elon's brother Kimbal is one of his closest friends, he is a successful entrepreneur himself, known as the "King of the Modern Food Movement", whatever that means. He runs community restaurants and he co-founded Big Green, a non-profit that builds outdoor classrooms in school yards. He also sits on the boards of Tesla, SpaceX and Chipotle and is a major Tesla shareholder.
Tosca Musk, Elon's sister, is a filmmaker of some renown. When she was 14, Tosca sold the family home in South Africa while everyone else was out of the country.
But that isn't where the line of interesting and exciting family members ends. It goes back even further and it ends up in Moose Jaw.
Elon's grandfather, Joshua Norman Haldeman has an interesting history in Saskatchewan. He moved to Herbert in 1907. He was a man's man; he rode broncos and took up boxing and wrestling. He broke horses for local farmers, a tough job; extremely dangerous. He also organized one of Canada's first rodeos. The man was a risk-taker and a trail blazer, not much unlike his future grandson.
Haldeman was both a farmer and a Chiropractor (interestingly enough, his mother, Elon's great-grandmother is thought by many to have even Canada's first practicing Chiropractor. PubMed even confirms this. That’s just one more risk-taking trailblazer in the bloodline).
During the Great Depression of the 1930s Grandpa Haldeman fell into harsh financial woes. The Bank loans on his farming equipment became too much for him to handle. The government seized five thousand acres of land from him. The loss caused him to lose trust in banks and he became an estranged nomad of sorts, wandering around Canada working odd jobs, before finally settling down and putting his Chiropractic practice to good use.
He became incensed with the Canadian government and as a result he attempted to create his own political party here. He was a staunch conservative and a populist, strongly opposing both socialism and nazism. He was unsuccessful in running for Parliament and became the Chair of the Social Credit Party. He also once did a stint in jail for his political views.
Oh yeah, Grandpa Haldeman studied at Moose Jaw College; which is what Chateau St. Michael's was between 1913 and 1931. Maybe it was during his time in Moose Jaw that Haldeman met the woman who would become his wife; a dance instructor named Winnifred Josephine Fletcher. "Wyn", as she preferred to be called, was, as we have already been made aware, a Moose Jaw girl herself.
They had five children while living in Sasakatchewan, two of them twin girls, Kaye and Maye. Maye, remember, is Musk's mother. Unfortunately I’m nothing more than a glorified Googler and there isn’t a lot of information to be found online regarding Elon’s Grandma outside of the stories about his Grandpa. I did learn, however, that she passed away in 2012 and was buried in Canmore, Alberta.
Haldeman was an interesting cat. He took up flying and purchased a single-engine plane. It wasn't unheard of for him to show up to political events flying it.
You could say that flight consumed him in his later life. He and his wife co-wrote a book together about their air travels: The Flying Haldeman's: Pity the Poor Private Pilot.
He Libertarian politics and disenfranchisement with his government led him toward leaving Canada. He felt the country was undergoing a moral decline and he wanted no part in it. He uprooted his entire family and moved to South Africa without having been there or even having a place to live. His family disassembled the plane and shipped it to South Africa, where they then rebuilt it and used it to fly around looking for some property to call home.
Elon's mother was a young teenager at the time she moved to South Africa. She stayed there until her own children were nearly adults.
The legendary Saskatchewan Haldeman’s: Joshua and Wyn with four of their five children. From Left to Right: Lynne, Maye, Kaye and Scott.
The stories of Grandpa Haldeman's escapades in flight are arguably more impressive than anything Elon has accomplished in his life. They involve record-setting distances, expeditions to uncover lost cities and ultimately, death. Joshua Norman Haldeman died the way he liked to live. In the sky. His plane caught a wire while he was practicing crash landings. It caused the aircraft to flip, breaking Haldeman's neck.
For more on that read the following: Elon Musk Inherited a Lifetime of Adventure from His Sask Family.
Elon himself came back to Canada when he was seventeen, he spent a few days in Montreal before chartering a bus to Swift Current. He stayed with family in Waldeck, finding work around the family's farm. It was in Waldeck where he celebrated his 18th birthday. From there he went on to study in Kingston, Ontario at Queen's College, and from there he became the man we all know today.
There you have it. Elon Musk's Fascinating Connection to Moose Jaw.
Elon at his cousin’s home in Waldeck, Sask