Elon Musk responded to comments made by his own father on a Australian radio station about his weight by telling the 79-year-old to “keep quiet”, a report says.
The SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO allegedly messaged his father Errol Musk in recent days with a simple message: ‘’Dad, the press play you like a fiddle, so please keep quiet.”
Speaking to Daily Mail Australia about his son’s message, Mr Musk said his son messaged him following his appearance on Australia’s KISS radio station, where he was a recent guest on The Kyle and Jackie O Show,earlier this month.
He told the show his son appeared to have been “eating badly” and needed to lose weight in response to pictures of the 51-year-old tech billionaire on holiday in Greece in July appearing on social media.
“Elon is very well-built and he is very, very strongly built, but he’s been eating badly,” the South-African born engineer told Kyle and Jackie O, before suggesting a diet pill, reported The New York Post.
Mr Musk caused further controversy during his radio appearance by responding to a question about being proud of his billionaire. He said “no”.
‘Your offspring is a genius. He’s worth so much money and has created so many things, you can’t take that away from him,” asked radio show host Jackie O, adding: “Are you proud?’
Mr Musk, who surprised many listeners saying “no”, afterwards told the Daily Mail that he did not mean to say he was not proud of his son and explained: “I didn’t actually notice her question about being proud? I thought she asked ‘were you expecting this coming?’”
He continued: “It was only when I listened to the recording afterwards that I realised.”
“It was a bit more confusing because the other chap (Kyle), who was a nice fellow, was laughing a lot so I never quite picked up what she (Jackie O) was saying while I was talking,” Mr Musk said. “If you ask any parent if they are proud of their son, you are proud of them from the day they are born.”
He had responded during the radio show interview by saying that the Musk family had “been doing a lot of things for a long time, it’s not as if we suddenly started doing something”.
Mr Musks’s billionaire son, who is estimated to be the world’s richest man with a net worth of about $258bn, according to Forbes, has recently been criticised for his comments about Democrats and US President Joe Biden and for his attempts to purchase and then pull out of a deal to buy social media platform Twitter.
Speaking with the Full Send podcast last week, the Tesla CEO said he did need to work out more and “be in better shape,”but added: “I actually don’t really like working out, but I gotta do it.”
“I’m gonna switch from looking at my phone first thing when I wake up to working out for at least 20 minutes then looking at my phone,” Musk said in the episode, according to The Post.
It was unclear if the pledge was directly in response to his father’s remarks.
