Elon Musk’s Sister Is a Hopeless Romantic

It’s late January, and Tosca Musk is settling into an editing session in the suburban Atlanta headquarters of Passionflix, the romance movie streaming service she founded in 2017 and runs as CEO. A vanilla-scented candle burns in the reception area, an upbeat song from German pop band Milky Chance plays on the sound system, and a man with a chiseled jawline and piercing blue eyes looms on a giant screen in the mixing room. “He could literally have chemistry with a paper bag,” Musk says of the actor, Michael Roark, who plays a half-breed vampire named Butch in her newest adaptation — a best-selling paranormal erotica series called The Black Dagger Brotherhood.

The modest office, located in a converted pharmacy, has a horny-yet-professional vibe that befits a modern romance mogul — mildly Not Safe for Work, yet totally safe for work. But there also is a palpable air of unease at Passionflix, a $6.99-a-month streaming service that makes mostly less than $1 million adaptations of steamy novels, where Musk, 50, is the director of most of the content. “It’s definitely been a hard week,” she says. Seven days before this interview, Tosca’s oldest brother, Elon Musk, spoke at Donald Trump’s inauguration and gestured in a way that many people, including some of Passionflix’s predominantly female audience, interpreted as a Nazi salute. Elon’s rapid ascent as a polarizing political figure is starting to affect his little sister’s business, causing some Passionflix subscribers to cancel — hundreds, according to a post on X from Tosca and Elon’s mother, model and dietitian Maye Musk. When Tosca defended Elon on X by sharing pictures of other political leaders making a similar gesture, a fan on Passionflix’s Facebook page screenshotted the post, commenting, “So disappointed in Passionflix.” Multiple others chimed in. “Disgusting,” said one.

“It’s unfathomable to me to think that anybody would think such negative things about my family,” says Tosca of allegations that Elon intended the gesture as a white supremacist signal. “That’s not who we are.” Tosca is protective of Elon, but having the last name Musk is getting increasingly complicated. As a person whose business model is predicated upon female fantasy fulfillment, it’s not ideal when your big brother becomes the face of a big tech government bromance that is actively terrifying half the country.

Tosca herself has historically been a Democratic donor — she gave money to the Democratic U.S. senators from Georgia, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, and she helped host a fundraiser for Stacey Abrams when Abrams was running as the Democratic gubernatorial candidate for Georgia in 2022. She also attended some Trump inauguration-week parties in Washington in January with Maye and posed for photographs with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services. “I love my family dearly, and I will always be there and always support them, but sometimes their beliefs and their structures can be placed on me as if they’re the same as mine,” Tosca says. “And they aren’t. Everybody is their own person with their own belief system and priorities.”

Since 2017, Tosca’s professional priority has been building Passionflix. Despite the fact that print sales of romance books have more than doubled since 2020, and screen adaptations like Universal’s Fifty Shades of Grey franchise and Netflix’s Bridgerton series have reliably delivered audiences, romances don’t get mainstream Hollywood attention the way the comic book and toy industries do. “Where are our Notting Hills and our Harry Met Sallys?” says Tosca of the question that sparked a business model. “Those are the movies that I loved growing up, and I would love to see now, but they weren’t being made, and I’m not sure why.”

That disinterest left an opportunity open for Tosca to adapt popular romance novels. With just nine full-time employees including its CEO, Passionflix streams via an app available in 150 countries and holds a fan convention called PassionCon, where authors and stars participate in panels and the “Passionista Choice Awards” and fans attend pajama party-themed premieres. “As a woman, I just want to be in my pajamas,” Tosca says. “No one wants to be in Spanx. No one.” Tosca won’t say how many subscribers Passionflix has but notes she makes enough from the subscriptions to finance six new movies a year, and she’d like to make more. “We’re almost to the point of where we don’t need any more [seed] money,” she says. “We’re not there yet. We might have to do another fundraise this year.” Tosca’s largest investors are First Look Media’s Topic Studios, backer of such prestige films as Spotlight and Spencer, and AMC Networks, in addition to multiple smaller investors. She declines to say whether one of those smaller investors is Elon. This June, in what is Passionflix’s most ambitious production to date, the service will drop the first episode of The Black Dagger Brotherhood, from author J.R. Ward’s best-selling, 23-book series about vampire warriors and the women who love them.

“The joy of Passionflix is how small we are,” Tosca says. “I don’t think the decisions for romance content should be made by male accountants in studios. I love being able to make the books that I want to make, that the people at Passionflix want to make.”

Those projects include adaptations of three books from Sylvain Reynard’s best-selling Gabriel series, a Fifty Shades-esque saga about a graduate student who gets involved with her tortured Dante professor. “I burn for you, but it’s more than just a physical hunger,” Gabriel says to his virginal student, who bites her lip, in a representative scene from the movie that has been shared more than 7,800 times on TikTok. Most of the comments on the video fall under the category, “Why can’t men be like this for real?” The content on Passionflix is saucier than Hallmark but much tamer than porn, tamer even than some R-rated movies — there’s no nudity below the waist, for instance.

There’s also lighter fare, like Amy Daws’ Wait With Me, about a romance novelist with writer’s block who starts writing in a tire store waiting room for the free coffee and falls for a hunky mechanic. “One thing I’ve heard from fans is that they like that Passionflix movies stick so closely to the dialogue and the story of the books, down to literally what the characters are wearing,” says Andrew Biernat, who plays the hot mechanic in Wait With Me and has a role as a vampire in Black Dagger Brotherhood. “Tosca’s attention to detail is down to a single thread.” Reynard, the pen name of the Canadian author of the Gabriel series (whose real identity is a closely guarded secret), noted that during the filming of a lecture scene at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Tosca asked the author to review the slides in the background of the character’s PowerPoint presentation for accuracy. “Tosca’s goal is to create film adaptations that are faithful to the books and that prioritize readers and their experience,” Reynard says, answering questions by email. “She offered me involvement at every stage of the production, which meant I had a tremendous amount of input into everything from the script to the casting, locations and sets.”

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For a woman who is the sister of the richest man in the world, Tosca, a single mother of two, leads a comfortable but not extravagant lifestyle. She lives in a tree-lined community about 30 minutes outside Atlanta, where she moved from Los Angeles in 2021 due to Georgia’s tax incentives for film production, the low cost of living for her employees and the good schools, she says. Her home is decorated in creams and blues, with a spiral wooden staircase, plush sofas and giant windows that look out on stands of birch trees. In her downtime, she runs a children’s theater club — current production: Mean Girls Junior, The Musical — and does jigsaw puzzles while listening to audiobooks and drinking red wine. She’s tall, with her model mother’s bright blue eyes and high cheekbones, but most comfortable, she says, wearing a puffer jacket on a set or curled up with a book.

At 39, Tosca had twins, a boy and girl, now 11, via in vitro fertilization with an anonymous sperm donor. “I was getting older, I was not in a relationship, but I really wanted to have children,” she says. “So I decided to have them by myself. Best decision I ever made.” Tosca describes herself as “happily single” and jokes about waiting for Alexander Skarsgard. Her crush on the tall Swedish actor is so well known among her staff that they bought her a Skarsgard photo calendar for her desk. Tosca’s real loves, she says, are her children and Passionflix. “If I had a romantic partner, my time would be pulled away from either one of those two.”

Tosca comes to the romance genre first and foremost as a fan. As a girl growing up in South Africa during the 1980s, she would spend Sunday afternoons with Maye watching VHS tapes of novel adaptations, broadcast TV-friendly miniseries like I’ll Take Manhattan and Mistral’s Daughter, based on Judith Krantz’s best-selling Cinderella-story novels. Krantz’s specialty was fulfilled longing, her books snapshots of her era’s idea of glamour, with occasional real-world players. In one now-surreal example from 1987’s I’ll Take Manhattan, Valerie Bertinelli plays a plucky, thrice-divorced 29-year-old woman who must protect her father’s fashion magazine empire after his death and gets a loan from then New York real estate tycoon Donald Trump to help.

Watching the Krantz romances as a girl, Tosca says, provided a kind of model for contentment. “Almost every time, it’s about a very strong female lead and the woman is not, ‘Oh, woe is me. Things aren’t going well for me,’ ” she says. “They’re normally quite feisty and they have their own opinions. They may not put their best foot forward, but then they learn. And at the end, it’s happy.” (Krantz’s son recently contacted Tosca and asked if Passionflix wanted to license some of those movies, which she says she plans to do under a “Retro Romance” banner on the service.) Tosca’s parents divorced when she was 5, with Elon going to live with their father, Errol, while Tosca and her other brother, Kimbal, stayed with their mom. While Tosca is effusive about Maye, she is terse about Errol: “We didn’t really have much of a relationship,” she says of her father. In a 2019 memoir, Maye characterized the marriage as abusive and alleged that Errol had been violent; Errol denied the abuse in a video posted on YouTube titled “Errol Musk — Dad of a Genius.”

Maye is Tosca’s most vocal cheerleader, posting photos from Passionflix premieres and conventions on her Instagram and X accounts. She even played a background role, along with Tosca’s children, in the Passionflix movie Driven, which was shot during the pandemic when casts were kept small.

Maye, who recently walked in New York Fashion Week at age 76, might as well be a Judith Krantz character for her tenacity and fondness for sparkly dresses. She divorced Errol in 1979 — the first year that divorce was legal in South Africa — and began studying to become a dietitian. During Maye’s studies, Tosca and brother Kimbal, who today owns a restaurant business in Denver, moved with her into the hospital where she was training, sleeping in the doctors’ quarters and eating cafeteria food. When Tosca was 15, the family moved to Canada, and Tosca, urged by Maye, began pursuing her interest in the arts, getting an after-school job as a stagehand for a Shakespearean theater company and working her way up to stage manager. She went on to study film at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and made a 15-minute movie there called Tied Apart, about the 1976 Soweto Uprising in South Africa, in which Black schoolchildren protested the introduction of the Afrikaans language as the medium of instruction. “It was a story about a white girl and a Black boy who were friends,” Tosca says. “She finds out that he’s going to go and protest, and she was trying very hard to convince him not to go because a lot of those kids were killed. So it was quite sad.” Tosca fought her professors to be able to shoot the film in South Africa and went on to win the school’s “most promising graduate award.”

Tosca briefly worked with Elon and Kimbal in Silicon Valley at Zip2, a city guide software company they founded in 1995 and sold to Compaq Computer in 1999 for $305 million (Tosca didn’t receive any proceeds from the sale). “I realized this whole internet thing was not really my thing,” she says of the career detour. At 25, she wrote and began to direct her first feature, a romance titled Puzzled, with financing from Elon, but the film was never released. “While making that movie, I didn’t raise all of the money that was needed,” Tosca says. “And what I realized after that is that if you don’t raise all the money, you’re not going to finish the movie.” One assumption people tend to make about Tosca is that her brother writes the check for anything she needs — that is not the case, she says.

Tosca ended up returning to Canada and producing, predominantly working on TV movies. In her late 30s, she got another crack at directing, on the project that ultimately would lead her to Passionflix: a TV movie for ION Television called You Cast a Spell on Me, about a psychiatrist and a warlock. “They have one kiss, and suddenly all his power transfers to her,” Tosca says. “To me, it was just a story about how love is magic.” Writer Joany Kane saw the movie and approached Tosca about directing a script of hers. That project never got off the ground, but their shared enthusiasm for romance novels inspired the company that would become Passionflix. In 2017, with one original movie made and some licensed content, they attended the now-defunct Romantic Times Booklovers convention and began pitching potential members on perks, including the fact that they would be able to visit sets. Within months, she says, they had 4,000 founding members prepaying $100 for a two-year subscription. (Shortly after the launch, Kane and another founding partner, Jina Panebianco, left the company.)

Tosca says her biggest challenge now is retaining subscribers as other streaming services have launched and begun keeping their catalogs for themselves. Early on, Passionflix licensed romance movies from studios like Paramount and MGM, but that content has become either much more expensive or entirely unavailable since Paramount launched Paramount+ in 2021 and Amazon bought MGM in 2022. “The hardest part is keeping people from canceling,” Tosca says. “It is the way of all streaming services. It’s not just ours.” Asked if her eventual goal is to sell Passionflix, Tosca says she has considered it but that she would have a hard time letting go of creative control. “In conversations I’ve had with people who have looked at buying Passionflix, one of the very first things they say to me is, ‘You have to get used to the fact that you will not be making the decisions on what content will be made anymore,’ ” she says. “But there is a joy to being able to go, ‘OK, let’s make this one into a movie.’ Do I want to sell it? No. Do I think that it could benefit from a huge influx of cash? Yes.”

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As adults, the three Musk siblings remain “close,” notes Tosca, but lead separate lives. “We don’t really see each other very much,” she says, adding in a bit of understatement that “my brother [Elon] is very busy.” Since the time of this interview, Elon has been extraordinarily busy, working toward aggressively dismantling arms of the federal government for Trump, including USAID and the Department of Education via his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

At a time when some women, like RFK Jr.’s cousin Caroline and Trump’s niece Mary, have publicly renounced the politics of their male relatives, Tosca is quieter about any differences she may have with Elon. “There are so many people who have differing opinions to some of their family members, and it’s creating such a divide within families, and it shouldn’t,” Tosca says. “Family is number one. You need to find a way of communicating with your family. You have to find a way of engaging with people that you don’t necessarily agree with.” Asked later by email about the increasing scope of Elon’s involvement in the Trump administration, Tosca declined to comment.

Perhaps the biggest danger is that Elon could affect Tosca’s relationship with the real stars of Passionflix — the romance authors. After the inauguration, one angry fan shared on Facebook that she had canceled and was “Encouraging authors to look for other ways to get their work on screen.” But Reynard, the author of the Gabriel series, is standing firm with the company. “I won’t tell readers how to spend their hard-earned money,” Reynard says. “It used to be that in politics, one didn’t go after someone’s family. Tosca did an excellent job with the adaptation of the first three [Gabriel] books and I’m hopeful that one day, she will adapt the fourth.”

The loss of a few hundred subscribers after Elon’s inauguration speech was meaningful, but Tosca says she also heard from some subscribers who were “very supportive and understanding that a sister could have that kind of reaction to anybody calling her brother such horrendous names.”

Going forward, Tosca says she envisions adding to the types of relationships Passionflix depicts. “My hopes are that we skyrocket,” she says. “That we are able to make all sorts of stories about love. We have male/female love relationships. We want male/male, female/female. We want sisterly love, brotherly love, family love, friendships, all of it. I would like us to be the place to go to for love.”

This idea is really another kind of fantasy that Tosca is conjuring, like the happy endings to the Judith Krantz miniseries that made her childhood not so scary. It’s the notion that love — or at least the softly lit, washboard abs, bitten-bottom-lip kind of love that Passionflix trades in — can conquer all.

This story appeared in the Feb. 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.