The South Africans who sold their solar power company to Elon Musk

Elon Musk is not the only member of his extended South African family to find business success in the United States.

Musk’s maternal cousins, Lyndon, Peter, and Russel “Russ” Rive, all born in South Africa, have founded, grown, and sold several tech businesses in the United States.

Lyndon and Peter sold SolarCity to Musk’s Tesla in 2016 for a reported $2.6 billion in stock (then worth around R38 billion).

The Rive boys are the sons of Kaye (neé Haldeman), the twin sister of Maye Musk, Elon’s mother.

In a 2016 interview published shortly after SolarCity and Tesla announced the merger of the two companies, Lyndon said his mother not only supported his entrepreneurial dreams — she fuelled them.

“She was an entrepreneur herself. She had multiple businesses and encouraged me to start my first company at the age of 17,” Lyndon said.

In a separate interview, Lyndon explained that he distributed homoeopathic remedies that his mother was using in her Pretoria-based businesses.

“Distributing the product across South Africa was my job. It worked out well. It didn’t take long before that business was earning more than all her other businesses combined in the first year,” he said.

“I’m very grateful. Most parents would not encourage their kids to start a company while they’re in high school. In fact, she was totally fine with me not going to high school and working on the business.”

Lyndon said that running a business caused him to be frequently absent from school, and the principal wanted to expel him.

“I showed him my financial statements. I said, ‘Look, it makes no sense for me to leave this and come back to school, so that I can go to university with the hope of earning one-third of that.'”

The principal apparently agreed with Lyndon.

“So then he allowed me to come and write the exams. If I passed, I passed. If I failed, I failed,” he said.

“I passed.”

In 1998, when Lyndon was 21, he travelled to San Jose to represent South Africa in the Underwater Hockey World Championship.

He liked San Jose so much that he decided to move permanently to the United States with his wife, Madeleine, who is also an avid underwater hockey player.

Lyndon and Madeleine were high school sweethearts. He met her when he was 14, and they started dating two years later.

He recalled that he could not get his green card despite starting two companies in the United States.

However, Madeleine got hers through the “exceptional ability” category thanks to her underwater hockey skills, allowing Lyndon to get his through marriage.

After emigrating, Lyndon co-founded an IT company called Everdream with his eldest brother, Russ.

Russ had been working with his cousins on a little company called Zip2, where he was webmaster.

Elon and Kimbal Musk would go on to sell Zip2 to Compaq for $305 million in 1999. Elon would roll his $22 million take into X.com, which would become PayPal before eBay acquired it for $1.5 billion.

Lyndon said that Russel had an idea to create a company that managed PCs remotely, but he didn’t have the capital to start the company.

“I had the capital from my other company and I liked the idea,” Lyndon said. “I wasn’t super-passionate about computers, but I saw the business opportunity, and the idea of working with my brother sounded like a lot of fun, too.”

Dell acquired Everdream in 2007 for an undisclosed sum.

That same year, Lyndon launched SolarCity with Peter.

SolarCity introduced a product in 2008 that allowed residential customers to lease their rooftop solar installation rather than purchase it up-front.

In exchange, customers agreed to pay for 20 years for the power generated by those panels.

This quickly became the dominant rooftop solar business model, and SolarCity grew into the largest residential solar installer.

However, it caused SolarCity to have over $1.5 billion in debt by the time Tesla acquired it in 2016.

Lyndon and Peter both left Tesla in 2017 to go their own ways. Peter currently serves on the board of SolarCycle, a solar panel recycling firm.

Elon Musk would later face a lawsuit over the Tesla-SolarCity deal. Several Tesla shareholders alleged that he overpaid for SolarCity and pushed the deal through to bail out his investment in the rooftop solar company.

Musk was the biggest shareholder in both companies at the time.

However, the Delaware Supreme Court found in favour of Musk in 2023, upholding two previous rulings handed down in 2022 and 2021.