Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

“The boy had just lost his father to suicide, and Elon had called him stupid,” Errol says. “Elon had this tendency to call people stupid.

violence was simply part of the learning experience in South Africa.

“Elon would later apply that same stern autocracy to himself and others.”

“He learned to shut down fear,” she says. “If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy.”

His heritage and breeding, along with the hardwiring of his brain, made him at times callous and impulsive. It also led to an exceedingly high tolerance for risk. He could calculate it coldly and also embrace it feverishly.

“Elon wants risk for its own sake,” says Peter Thiel, who became his partner in the early days of PayPal. “He seems to enjoy it, indeed at times be addicted to it.”

He had been offered a board seat at Twitter, but over the weekend he concluded that wasn’t enough. It was in his nature to want total control. So he decided he would make a hostile bid to buy the company outright. Then he flew to Vancouver to meet Grimes. There he stayed up with her until 5 a.m. playing an action role-playing game, Elden Ring. Right after he finished, he pulled the trigger on his plan and went on Twitter. “I made an offer,” he announced.

With his quirky conservative populist views, Haldeman came to believe that the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft. So in 1950, he decided to move to South Africa, which was still ruled by a white apartheid regime.

How Musk's Canadian grandparents immigrated to South Africa. His grandfather had also previously spent time in Iowa (and was born in MN) and his grandmother in Chicago and NYC.

Errol Musk was an adventurer and wheeler-dealer, always on the lookout for the next opportunity. His mother, Cora, was from England, where she finished school at fourteen, worked at a factory making skins for fighter-bombers, then took a refugee ship to South Africa.

Elon Musk's dad is Errol. Errol's mom Cora immigrated to South Africa from England.

Errol earned a degree in engineering and worked on building hotels, shopping centers, and factories. On the side, he liked restoring old cars and planes. He also dabbled in politics, defeating an Afrikaner member of the pro-apartheid National Party to become one of the few English-speaking members of the Pretoria City Council.

Errol, Elon Musk's dad, dabbled in politics.

When they got back to Pretoria, she thought of trying to get out of the marriage. But she soon became nauseated from morning sickness. She had become pregnant on the second night of their honeymoon, in the town of Nice. “It was clear that marrying him had been a mistake,” she recalls, “but now it was impossible to undo.”

Elon's dad cheated a lot.

At first she and Errol were going to name him Nice, after the town in France where he was conceived. History may have been different, or at least amused, if the boy had to go through life with the name Nice Musk.

Compounding his social problems was his unwillingness to suffer politely those he considered fools. He used the word “stupid” often. “Once he started going to school, he became so lonely and sad,” his mother says. “Kimbal and Tosca would make friends on the first day and bring them home, but Elon never brought friends home. He wanted to have friends, but he just didn’t know how.”

“He was never actually diagnosed as a kid,” his mother says, “but he says he has Asperger’s, and I’m sure he’s right.” The condition was exacerbated by his childhood traumas.

“I took people literally when they said something,” he says, “and it was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really meant.” He had a preference for things that were more precise, such as engineering, physics, and coding.

He could be very emotional, especially about his own children, and he felt acutely the anxiety that comes from being alone. But he didn’t have the emotional receptors that produce everyday kindness and warmth and a desire to be liked. He was not hardwired to have empathy. Or, to put it in less technical terms, he could be an asshole.

Maye and Errol Musk were at an Oktoberfest celebration with three other couples, drinking beer and having fun, when a guy at another table whistled at Maye and called her sexy. Errol was furious, but not at the guy. The way Maye remembers it, he lunged and was about to hit her, and a friend had to restrain him. She fled to her mother’s house. “Over time, he had gotten crazier,” Maye later said. “He would hit me when the kids were around.

Elon's parents, pre-divorce.

Errol later admitted it was his fault. “I had a very pretty wife, but there were always prettier, younger girls,” he said. “I really loved Maye, but I screwed up.” They divorced when Elon was eight.

Errol launched a custody battle and had subpoenas issued for Elon’s teachers, Maye’s modeling agent, and their neighbors. Right before going to trial, Errol dropped the case. Every few years, he would initiate another court action and then drop it. When Tosca recounts these tales, she begins to cry. “I remember Mom just sitting there, sobbing on the couch. I didn’t know what to do. All I could do was to hold her.”

Tosca - Elon's younger sister

When Elon was nine, his father took him, Kimbal, and Tosca on a trip to America, where they drove from New York through the Midwest and then down to Florida.

First trip to the US

As is often the case, Errol spins a different tale, insisting that they went both to Disney World, where Elon liked the haunted house ride, and to Six Flags over Georgia. “I told them over and over on the trip, ‘America is where you will come live someday.’ ”

Two years later, he took the three children to Hong Kong. “My father had some combination of legitimate business and hucksterism,” Musk recalls.

Those trips could be dangerous. “I remember once when the train stopped, there was an immense fight, and we watched a guy get stabbed through the head,” says Peter Rive.

Cousin Peter recounts growing up in a dangerous time in South Africa.

he got excellent grades in all but two subjects: Afrikaans (he got a 61 out of 100 his final year) and religious instruction (“not extending himself,” the teacher noted). “I wasn’t really going to put a lot of effort into things I thought were meaningless,” he says. “I would rather be reading or playing video games.” He got an A in the physics part of his senior certificate exams, but somewhat surprisingly, only a B in the math part.

Reading remained Musk’s psychological retreat. Sometimes he would immerse himself in books all afternoon and most of the night, nine hours at a stretch. When the family went to someone’s house, he would disappear into their host’s library. When they went into town, he would wander off and later be found at a bookstore, sitting on the floor, in his own world.

He was also deeply into comics. The single-minded passion of the superheroes impressed him. “They’re always trying to save the world, with their underpants on the outside or these skin-tight iron suits, which is really pretty strange when you think about it,” he says. “But they are trying to save the world.”

One book that he found in his father’s office described great inventions that would be made in the future. “I would come back from school and go to a side room in my father’s office and read it over and over,” he says.

Physics could teach everything about the universe except why. That led to what he calls his adolescent existential crisis. “I began trying to figure out what the meaning of life and the universe was,” he says. “And I got real depressed about it, like maybe life may have no meaning.”

The science fiction book that most influenced his wonder years was Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The jaunty and wry tale helped shape Musk’s philosophy and added a dollop of droll humor to his serious mien. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” he says, “helped me out of my existential depression, and I soon realized it was amazingly funny in all sorts of subtle ways.”

In the late 1970s, the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons became a popular obsession among the global tribe of geeks. Elon, Kimbal, and their Rive cousins immersed themselves in the game,

Elon usually played the Dungeon Master and, surprisingly, did it with gentleness. “Even as a kid, Elon had a whole bunch of different demeanors and moods,” says his cousin Peter Rive. “As a Dungeon Master, he was incredibly patient, which is not, in my experience, always his default personality, if you know what I mean. It happens sometimes, and it’s so beautiful when it does.” Instead of pressuring his brother and cousins, he would turn very analytical to describe the options they had in each situation.

Together they entered a tournament in Johannesburg, at which they were the youngest players. The tournament’s Dungeon Master assigned their mission: you have to save this woman by figuring out who in the game is the bad guy and killing him. Elon looked at the Dungeon Master and said, “I think you’re the bad guy.” And so they killed him. Elon was right, and the game, which was supposed to last a few hours, was over. The organizers accused them of somehow cheating and at first tried to deny them the prize. But Musk prevailed. “These guys were idiots,” he says. “It was so obvious.”

Musk saw his first computer around the time he turned eleven. He was in a shopping mall in Johannesburg, and he stood there for minutes just staring at it. “I had read computer magazines,” he says, “but I had never actually seen a computer before.”

The computer came with a course in how to program in BASIC that involved sixty hours of lessons. “I did it in three days, barely sleeping,” he remembers.

Elon would pull the ad out of his pocket and renew his demand. Finally his father was able to talk the university into giving a discounted price for Elon to stand in the back. When Errol came to pick him up at the end, he found Elon engaging with three of the professors. “This boy must get a new computer,” one of them declared.

At age thirteen, he was able to create a video game, which he named Blastar, using 123 lines of BASIC and some simple assembly language to get the graphics to work. He submitted it to PC and Office Technology magazine, and it appeared in the December 1984 issue with a short introduction explaining, “In this game, you have to destroy an alien space freighter, which is carrying deadly Hydrogen Bombs and Status Beam Machines.” Although it’s unclear what a Status Beam Machine is, the concept sounds cool. The magazine paid him $500,

Thus began a lifelong addiction to video games. “If you’re playing with Elon, you play pretty much nonstop until finally you have to eat,” Peter Rive says.

Elon’s cousins became reluctant to visit. “You never knew what you were in for,” Peter Rive says. “Sometimes Errol would be like, ‘I just got us some new motorbikes so let’s jump on them.’ At other times he would be angry and threatening and, oh fuck, make you clean the toilets with a toothbrush.” When Peter tells me this, he pauses for a moment and then, a bit hesitantly, notes that Elon sometimes has similar mood swings.

I found myself getting caught up in Errol’s tangled web. In a series of calls and emails over the course of two years, he gave me varying accounts of his relationship with, and his feelings for, his kids, Maye, and his stepdaughter, with whom he would have two children

Some of the words Elon uses, the way he stares, his sudden transitions from light to dark to light, remind his family members of the Errol simmering inside of him. “I would see shades of these horrible stories Elon told me surface in his own behavior,” says Justine, Elon’s first wife.

Musk began pushing both his mother and father, trying to convince them to move to the United States and take him and his siblings. Neither was interested. “So then I was like, ‘Well, I’m just going to go by myself,’ ” he says.

He first tried to get U.S. citizenship on the grounds that his mother’s father had been born in Minnesota, but that failed because his mother had been born in Canada and had never claimed U.S. citizenship. So he concluded that getting to Canada might be an easier first step.

On June 11, 1989, about two weeks shy of his eighteenth birthday, he had dinner at Pretoria’s finest restaurant, Cynthia’s, with his father and siblings, who then drove him to the Johannesburg airport. “You’ll be back in a few months,” Elon says his father told him contemptuously. “You’ll never be successful.”

When Elon left South Africa, his father gave him $2,000 in traveler’s checks and his mother provided him with another $2,000 by cashing out a stock account she had opened with the money she won in a beauty contest as a teenager. Otherwise, what he mainly had with him when he arrived in Montreal was a list of his mother’s relatives he had never met.

Musk’s college-admissions test scores were not especially notable. On his second round of the SAT tests, he got a 670 out of 800 on his verbal exam and a 730 on math.

He narrowed his choices to two universities that were an easy drive from Toronto: Waterloo and Queen’s. “Waterloo was definitely better for engineering, but it didn’t seem great from a social standpoint,” he says. “There were few girls there.” He felt he knew computer science and engineering as well as any of the professors at both places, but he desperately desired a social life.

He was placed on the “international floor” of one of the dorms, where, on the first day, he met a student named Navaid Farooq, who became his first real and lasting friend outside of his family. Farooq’s father was Pakistani and his mother Canadian, and he was raised in Nigeria and Switzerland, where his parents worked for United Nations organizations.

He later told the Queen’s alumni magazine that the most important thing he learned during his two years there was “how to work collaboratively with smart people and make use of the Socratic method to achieve commonality of purpose,” a skill, like those of industrial relations, that future colleagues would notice had been only partly honed.

Musk had enjoyed all types of video games as a teenager in South Africa, including first-person shooters and adventure quests, but at college he became more focused on the genre known as strategy games, ones that involve two or more players competing to build an empire using high-level strategy, resource management, supply-chain logistics, and tactical thinking.

He also decided to pursue a joint degree in business. “I was concerned that if I didn’t study business, I would be forced to work for someone who did,” he says. “My goal was to engineer products by having a feel for the physics and never have to work for a boss with a business degree.”