“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,” Musk said. “I think that is wrong. Romance is about validating emotions. It’s about removing shame from sexuality. It’s about uplifting stories.
“Nothing we do is about being a victim or women in jeopardy or the domestication of women,” she continued. “Whether second-chance romance or Cinderella story, at the end of the day, it’s two people who connect, communicate and compromise.”
Passionflix was rolled out in September 2017 and is now available in 150 countries; content is subtitled in nine languages. But the going has been slow. Passionflix has only six employees. The pandemic brought production to a standstill for a time. The number of subscribers is a mystery, with Musk declining to provide specific data and analysts saying the service is still too tiny to track. (Subscriptions grew 73 per cent in 2021 from a year earlier, a Passionflix spokesperson said.)
But Musk is not about to give up.
“It’s just not in my genes,” she said, with a broad smile. “Our family motto could be: Keep trying, keep trying, keep trying.”
Elon Musk, of course, is the founder of SpaceX, CEO of Tesla and the planet’s wealthiest person; he struck a $US44 billion deal in April to buy Twitter. Tosca Musk’s other older brother, Kimbal Musk, is a restaurant entrepreneur and farm-to-table food activist who sits on the boards of SpaceX and Tesla. Their force-of-nature mother, Maye Musk, is a model who recently published the memoir A Woman Makes a Plan. (For a time, Maye Musk ran the Passionflix Instagram account.)
Passionflix was rolled out in September 2017 and is now available in 150 countries.
Tosca Musk described the typical Passionflix subscriber as “voraciously engaged” with the site, and that may be an understatement if Jan Edwards is any indication. Widowed in 2015 and retired from her human resources job in January, Edwards, 65, lives in Tuckerton, New Jersey, and has been a Passionflix subscriber since 2018. “I’m just putting laundry in the dryer — it’s an exciting day over here, let me tell you — so it’s a fine time to talk,” she said when a reporter phoned.
Why does she subscribe? “Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “Most of the time, I am overlooked by the rest of the media.”
Edwards said she had become hooked on romantic fiction in 2009 when a friend “bullied” her into reading the sadomasochistic love story Fifty Shades of Grey. It was the bookworm equivalent of a gateway drug: Edwards now reads up to three romance novels a week.
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“People look down their noses at romance, but it makes me feel good — and a lot of women agree, although they usually keep it a little quiet,” she said.
It is not just women: Romance Writers of America, a trade organisation, estimates that 18 per cent of romance readers are male. Thousands of new romance titles appear annually. About 48 million copies were sold in 2021, including e-books, a 10 per cent increase from the previous year, according to NPD BookScan.
Early financial backers for Passionflix included television producer Norman Lear and his wife, Lyn, who is also a producer; Jason Calacanis, an internet entrepreneur and angel investor; and Kimbal Musk.
And Elon Musk?
“It is difficult for me to answer that question,” Tosca Musk said. “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.’”
Elon Musk did not respond to inquiries.
First Look Media is the biggest Passionflix investor, although that company’s CEO, Michael Bloom, declined to disclose the size of its stake. (Tosca Musk remains Passionflix’s majority owner.) First Look, founded by Pierre Omidyar, the eBay billionaire, is made up of several unconnected entities. There is a nonprofit arm focused on investigative journalism and documentary filmmaking. An entertainment studio, Topic, specialises in prestige films like Spencer, Spotlight and The Mauritanian. A relatively new division houses niche streaming services, including Topic.com, which focuses on crime, and Passionflix.
Passionflix just held its annual PassionCon fan conference in Los Angeles.Credit:Mark Abramson/The New York Times
Passionflix was not conceived as a cynical way to cash in on the streaming boom, Musk said. Rather, she and two friends, Jina Panebianco and Joany Kane, wanted to make spicy romance television and could not find buyers in Hollywood.
“So we had to create a distribution solution,” Musk said.
Musk, named after Puccini’s opera, studied film at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. After graduating in 1997, she worked for Alliance, a Canadian production company, before moving to Los Angeles, where she directed, wrote and produced a movie, Puzzled (2001), with backing from Elon Musk. She ultimately began producing and directing TV movies for Hallmark, Lifetime and ION Television.
But she was frustrated. “I kept getting into conflicts with network executives, who were not interested in stories about empowered women embracing their sexuality.”
Musk speaks at a breakneck pace and with an accent that reflects time lived in Canada, the United States and South Africa, where she grew up. She is tall, energetic and frank. At the start of an interview at the Ritz-Carlton, Marina del Rey, near Los Angeles International Airport last month, she announced that her daughter, Isabeau, 9, was in an adjoining room playing a video game and that she had conceived her and her twin brother, Grayson, through an anonymous sperm donor and in vitro fertilisation.
Musk moved to Georgia during the pandemic to take advantage of the state’s generous tax credits for movie and television production. But she had taken over much of the Ritz-Carlton for an inaugural Passionflix fan convention: PassionCon. Packages for two cost $US1,000 and included lodging for two nights, meals, alcohol, a hair and makeup session, panels with Passionflix stars and a pyjama party for the third-season premiere of “Driven,” about a kindhearted woman who falls for a bad-boy race car driver. About 200 people attended, Musk said, some from as far away as Australia and Germany. (Yes, she wore pyjamas.)
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“It was like a dream,” said Edwards, who flew in from New Jersey. “This community really means something to me.”
Finding ways to extend Passionflix’s business beyond the screen is a new effort for Musk. She also used PassionCon to introduce Passionflix-branded wine. Bottles cost $US35 and carry a slogan: “Toe Curling Yumminess.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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