Errol Musk wants the world to know that he and his son Elon are actually on very good terms.

“Always have been,” he said in an interview on Friday, just days after comments that he made calling Elon a bad parent went viral.

On a recent episode of the Wide Awake podcast, Mr. Musk talked about his son Elon, who is the subject of most of his interviews.

“He hasn’t been a good dad,” Errol Musk said on the podcast. “They were too rich, too many nannies. Then he had five children with the same woman, five sons all brought up. Each one had its own nanny.”

Perhaps most punishingly, Errol pointed out the death of Elon’s first son, Nevada, who died of sudden infant death syndrome in 2002. Errol claimed that it had occurred in the presence of a nanny. (In a separate instance of Elon’s parenting being called into question this week, Grimes, the mother of three of his children, posted and then deleted a series of messages on X asking Elon to help with one of their children’s unspecified “medical crisis.”)

Errol said he had not been trying to start a war with his son. “The press takes things out of context,” he said from his hotel in what he described as the “the most beautiful city in the world,” by which he meant Dubai. “I’m here to meet people in business and so on,” he explained.

Although Elon has previously said that his father went “a little crazy later in life,” it so happens that the two men have a fair amount in common. Both talk in lofty terms about their accomplishments. Both have numerous children. (Elon has 12, one of whom died as an infant; Errol has seven.) Both have engineering backgrounds. Both are known for having volatile relationships with people.