Maya Musk was still working as a model at 74, and in 2022 she reached the kind of mainstream visibility most models never get in a lifetime: a cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. The milestone put her late-career run in front of a far wider audience and turned an already unusual modeling path into a headline.
That is why her name keeps surfacing now. Musk had already built a public profile long before that cover, but the timing made the image stand out: a model born in Canada, who moved with her family to Pretoria at seven years old, was still landing major attention decades later. She had also appeared in one of Beyoncé's music videos in 2013, released A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success in 2019, and had been CoverGirl's oldest spokesperson.
The cover mattered because it was not framed as a nostalgia play. It was a fresh statement about age and visibility in an industry that usually treats both as liabilities. Musk had said she brought up her children to be independent, kind, honest, considerate and polite, and that she never told them what to study or checked their homework. That same self-directed streak defined her own career, which kept going when many models would have been pushed out of view.
Her public life has also carried a harder edge. Musk married Errol Musk in 1970, and they split in 1979. She later alleged abuse in that marriage, saying he made sure she had nothing and describing how he would discard the children's belongings after weekend visits; Errol denied that he was abusive during their marriage. That history sits underneath the polished fashion image, and it is part of why her story reads as more than a celebrity profile.
There is still one unanswered piece that matters: how much the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover changed Musk's reach beyond the fashion world. The cover gave her a larger stage, but the source does not show the next turn in her modeling career. For now, the fact that she was still working at 74 is the point, and the cover made it impossible to miss.
