Five years after becoming CoverGirl’s oldest spokesperson, at 74, she is now the oldest rookie to grace the cover of SI Swimsuit. She was one of the four cover models revealed on Monday for the SI Swim 2022 issue, Having worked in the industry for almost 60 years, Musk shows no signs of slowing down, neither as a model or a dietitian. The best-selling author of A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty and Successstarted modeling at age 15 when her mother’s friend offered her free classes to her modeling school. When she was told that model’s careers were done by age 18, she thought nothing of it, knowing she was off to university. But she told Sports Illustrated Swimsuit that, to her own surprise, her modeling days were far from over. “I didn’t take off university at all. It was weekends and holidays that I could model, and then it just kept going,” she said. “At 20, a friend of mine took me to a beauty competition, and then I won it! And I thought, well, it’s my final year of university, I better get down to my studies and get my degree. And I got my degree but people kept on wanting me to model, and I thought that was weird.” The Canadian-South African multihyphenate did put her modeling career on hold after getting married to Errol Musk and having three kids in three years (yes, one of her children is thatElon Musk), but returned as an “older model” after getting divorced and moving to a smaller town. Musk considered modeling a part-time gig, continuing to work as a dietitian (her nutrition business is now in eight cities and three countries). She never told her clients that she was a model—until she had to. “I got all these calls, ‘Maye, are you on a billboard in Times Square?’ ‘Yes, yes, that’s what I do part-time,’” she recalled to SI Swimsuit about the amazing career highlight when she was in her sixties. “And sometimes they’d bring in a magazine and say, ‘This looks like you,’ and I’d say, ‘Yes, that’s me,’ because they don’t put your name with it.” “Who knew that in my late sixties and seventies I would be booked because I’m Maye Musk and a model!” she added. It’s pretty easy to see why Musk lives by the motto, #ItsGreatToBe74." For even more on Musk’s incredible career, watch the video below. You can view more on the complete edition of the 2022 Sports Illustrated here.
