Elon Musk — Tesla CEO and the world’s richest man — isn’t the only member of the Musk family with an entrepreneurial mindset. Tosca Musk, the eccentric billionaire’s younger sister, is proving that the affinity for business runs in the family. While her older brother has been working hard to acquire Twitter, Tosca has focused her energy on building a platform with a decidedly different audience in mind — women looking for romantic content to stream.
The 47-year-old is the CEO and co-founder of a company called Passionflix, which launched back in 2017. The service offers a range of movie and TV adaptations of popular romance novels and erotic fiction.
Not only does the service offer many licensed titles, but there are plenty of original productions as well — and according to a new profile by The New York Times — many of them are directed by Tosca herself.
“Most of the time people look down at romance – there is apparently something radical in having female desire as a main theme – and they don’t think that romance is intellectual enough,” she told the outlet. “I think that is wrong. Romance is about validating emotions. It’s about removing shame from sexuality. It’s about uplifting stories.”
She added: “Nothing we do is about being a victim or women in jeopardy or the domestication of women.”
Although the Passionflix CEO admits the pandemic presented a huge obstacle for the $ 6-a-month service, which only worsened as the launch of streaming services by Paramount and Disney threatened to oversaturate the mark, subscriptions are growing regardless.
Passionflix subscriptions grew 73 percent in 2021, which helped the platform secure $22 million in early funding, according to the NYT.
When it came to whether her extremely wealthy brother had invested in the platform, Tosca kept her lips sealed, telling the mag: "If I say that he is an investor, then everybody says, 'Oh, she just got her brother to pay for it. And if I say he didn’t invest, then you all say, 'He doesn’t support her.'"
While Tosca’s brother may be worth roughly $200 billion, through her business ventures she’s managed to create a sizeable fortune of her own that’s nothing to scoff at. Reports vary, but the Passionflix CEO is allegedly worth roughly $170 million.
Source: The New York Times, Futurism