In a New York room thick with flash and conversation — a party for original supermodels — Maye Musk sits shoulder to shoulder with Jane Thorvaldson. Leather and white shirt, silver bob, glass in hand; beside her, Jane in military black and a sequin clutch that catches every light. The photograph is by Michael de la Force for LIKE® Magazine. It is not a studio myth. It is the calendar Maye still keeps: show up, work the room, stay in the frame.

Maye Musk (née Haldeman), born in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1948, carries Canadian, South African, and American citizenship — and a résumé that refuses a single lane. She is a model, a registered dietitian, and an author. She is also, unavoidably, the mother of Elon, Kimbal, and Tosca Musk. The Leaders page is interested in the first three titles. The fourth is context, not the story.

THE MODEL WHO WOULD NOT EXIT

She began modeling at fifteen in South Africa, worked as a bridal model, and kept working through motherhood and divorce. In an industry that once preferred teenagers, she was already rewriting the brief: one of South Africa’s few plus-size models in the 1970s, and later among the country’s older working faces when the business still treated age as an exit ramp.

The second act is the one fashion magazines now cite on cue. Signed by IMG in her late sixties, she became CoverGirl’s oldest spokesmodel at sixty-nine in 2017. In 2022, at seventy-four, she was the oldest Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover model to date. Along the way: Special K boxes, Revlon, Target, Virgin America, Fila, Ugg, a turn in Beyoncé’s “Haunted” video, Elle Canada, and the kind of New York magazine and Time health-issue covers that treat the body as news.

She stopped dyeing her hair and let the silver do the talking — a practical choice that became a brand. The camera liked it. So did editors who needed proof that longevity could look like ambition, not apology.

DIETITIAN, FIRST

Before the late-career covers, there was the clinic and the classroom. Maye trained in dietetics and nutrition, taught at university level, and built a practice that paid the rent when modeling did not. In Toronto years she has described stacking jobs — modeling, teaching, seminars — while raising three children. In 1996 she published Feel Fantastic – Maye Musk’s Good Health Clinic, a practical guide to habits and healthy aging. In 2023 the University of the Free State in South Africa awarded her an honorary doctorate for her work as a dietitian.

The dietitian’s voice runs under the model’s smile: there is no magic pill; the harder you work, the luckier you get; plan the decade you are in. It is the same voice that ends up on stages from North America to Asia.

A WOMAN MAKES A PLAN

Her 2019 memoir, A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success (Penguin Random House), is part autobiography, part field manual. It moves through the Kalahari winters of a childhood spent with adventurous pilot parents, a difficult marriage and divorce, single motherhood, and the long grind of building a career that could fund a household. It is frank about money, family, and the unglamorous logistics of staying employable.

What the book sells — and what Chinese editions and book-tour crowds have taken up — is agency without sentimentality. You cannot control every turn. You can still make a plan for the life you want at any age. Career, family, health, adventure: each chapter treats choice as a renewable resource. Praise from Karlie Kloss, Diane von Furstenberg, and Christie Brinkley landed on the same point — wisdom earned in public, not invented for a jacket flap.

CHINA AND THE WORLD

In recent years Maye has become a genuine star in China — “silver influencer,” runway guest, magazine cover, state-media friendly traveler. She has told Women’s Wear Daily she moved through a dozen Chinese cities in a single year for speaking and modeling. Brand work there has included Oppo, apparel house JNBY, Fila (via Anta), and mattress brand AISE Baobao; she has spoken at Alibaba fashion events and visited Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory as a public advocate for craft and enthusiasm on the factory floor.

The China chapter matters for Leaders because it is not a cameo. It is a second market that treats aging, motherhood, and professionalism as aspirational together — the same triad Maye has performed in the West since she let the silver show. The passport stamps keep coming: Los Angeles home base, global gigs, book tours, clinics of the speaking kind.

FEATURED & PUBLISHED — A WORKING LIST

Magazine covers and major features (selected): Time (health issue cover); New York magazine (2011); Elle Canada (2012); Sports Illustrated Swimsuit (2022 cover); CoverGirl campaign and beauty press (from 2017).

Campaigns and commercial (selected): Special K; Revlon; Target; Virgin America; Fila; Ugg; Oppo; JNBY; AISE Baobao; additional beauty and lifestyle partnerships across North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Books: Feel Fantastic – Maye Musk’s Good Health Clinic (1996); A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success (2019; Chinese editions and tour events followed).

JANE, IN THE SAME FRAME

Jane Thorvaldson — New York fashion and nightlife figure of the 1970s and 1980s, muse to illustrator Antonio Lopez, contemporary of Jerry Hall — shares the bench in de la Force’s photograph. She is not a footnote to Maye’s résumé; she is proof of the room. Original supermodel nights in New York still assemble the people who taught the city how a party and a profession can look like the same thing. LIKE® Leaders keeps both names on the caption.

(LIKE® Magazine · Leaders · Photograph: Michael de la Force · New York City)