Tosca Musk strides onto the red carpet at a Regal Cinemas, statuesque in a white pant suit and glistening burgundy silk top.
A hush comes over a group gathered outside the theater’s doors. Some whip out cell phones and start recording her every move.
It’s a chilly October night in Atlanta, and the fans are here for the premiere of “Torn,” the second in a trilogy of romantic fantasy movies based on books by author Jennifer Armentrout. The group of mostly female fans range in age from their twenties to their seventies, and some flew in from Boston, Detroit and other cities.
This is a big night for Musk and her five-year-old streaming service Passionflix, the backer of the movie. It’s their first public film premiere since the pandemic started.
She floats from one group to another, chatting easily with Passionflix’s superfans, known as Passionistas. Her older brother, Elon Musk, may be the most famous sibling in the family, but he’s not the only one who’s founded a company.
Musk, 48, is the force behind Passionflix, which adapts romance novels into movies and streams them to a devoted niche audience. Romance novels are the most popular genre of books in the United States, and Musk is tapping into that market with stories about sultry, powerful female leads and handsome men with chiseled abs. She directs some of the films herself.
“Passionflix focuses on adapting romance novels exactly as the fan and the author envisioned it,” Musk said in a separate CNN interview. “We focus on connection, communication and compromise — and remove the shame from sexuality, specifically for women, because it empowers women to both acknowledge and ask for pleasure.”
Her passion for romantic movies goes way back
Days earlier, on the set of a Passionflix movie, “The Secret Life of Amy Bensen,” Musk provides a few glimpses into life with her famous family.
Perched on a navy blue couch in a room tucked inside a warehouse in suburban Atlanta, she chose her words carefully when asked about her older brother, who was on the verge of his Twitter acquisition.
The Musk children — Elon, Tosca and another brother, middle child Kimbal — were born in South Africa and spent time in Canada before coming to the United States. Their father, Errol, is an engineer and property developer, while their glamorous mother, Maye, is a model.
Tosca Musk attended film school at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and moved to California after graduation. For three months, she worked for one of Elon Musk’s companies, Zip2.
“I realized every time I stepped out of the film world, I was just not happy,” she says. “It just wasn’t my thing.”
After a brief stint at the Los Angeles office of Canadian media company Alliance Atlantis, she began directing and producing films while still in her twenties.
Musk produced romance films for the Lifetime and Hallmark channels and in 2005 launched a comic web series, Tiki Bar TV, which was hailed by Apple CEO Steve Jobs as ahead of its time in the emerging field of vodcasts — or video podcasting.
She doesn’t ask for advice from Elon — unless she really needs it
Then came Passionflix. Its origin story is a classic tale of when one door closes, another one opens.
About five years ago, Musk received an email from a woman who wanted her to turn her script into a movie. Musk loved the script, but there wasn’t much interest from production companies.
“People weren’t really that interested because it was too risque… It was an adult movie with a little bit of reincarnation, things like that,” she said. “It just wasn’t one of those things that regular network television wanted to do.”
But Musk met the woman, Joany Kane, in Los Angeles, and they bonded over their shared passion for romance novels. During that conversation, Kane brought up the idea of turning romance novels into movies and creating a streaming platform for them.
And with that, Passionflix was born — with Musk at the helm and Kane as a co-founder.
“We had no investors. We had to go out and find every investor. So it was a matter of going out and pitching every single person,” Musk said. “We pitched every friend, every family member, everyone just for that small bit of angel investment. It was hard. The first money in is always the hardest money.”
