Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

Decades later, he was still getting corrective surgery to try to fix the tissues inside his nose. But those scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, Errol Musk, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist who to this day bedevils Elon.

Both Elon and Kimbal, who no longer speak to their father, say his claim that Elon provoked the attack is unhinged and that the perpetrator ended up being sent to juvenile prison for it. They say their father is a volatile fabulist, regularly spinning tales that are larded with fantasies, sometimes calculated and at other times delusional. He has a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature, they say. One minute he would be friendly, the next he would launch into an hour or more of unrelenting abuse. He would end every tirade by telling Elon how pathetic he was. Elon would just have to stand there, not allowed to leave. “It was mental torture,” Elon says, pausing for a long time and choking up slightly. “He sure knew how to make anything terrible.”

But he admits that he encouraged a physical and emotional toughness. “Their experiences with me would have made veldskool quite tame,” he says, adding that violence was simply part of the learning experience in South Africa. “Two held you down while another pummeled your face with a log and so on. New boys were forced to fight the school thug on their first day at a new school.” He proudly concedes that he exercised “an extremely stern streetwise autocracy” with his boys. Then he makes a point of adding, “Elon would later apply that same stern autocracy to himself and others.”

Justine, the mother of five of his surviving ten children. “If your father is always calling you a moron and idiot, maybe the only response is to turn off anything inside that would’ve opened up an emotional dimension that he didn’t have tools to deal with.” This emotional shutoff valve could make him callous, but it also made him a risk-seeking innovator. “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.”

While other entrepreneurs struggled to develop a worldview, he developed a cosmic view. 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.

“I was born for a storm, and a calm does not suit me,” Andrew Jackson once said. Likewise with Musk. He developed a siege mentality that included an attraction, sometimes a craving, for storm and drama, both at work and in the romantic relationships he struggled and failed to maintain. He thrived on crises, deadlines, and wild surges of work.

Could he have been more chill and still be the one launching us toward Mars and an electric-vehicle future?

Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place or felt threatened, it took him back to the horrors of being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground.

Elon Musk’s attraction to risk was a family trait.

The family adopted a motto: “Live dangerously—carefully.”

“If you registered it, you would wind up with nothing, because the Blacks would take everything from you,” Errol says. He criticizes Maye’s family for being racist, which he insists he is not. “I don’t have anything against the Blacks, but they are just different from what I am,”

Errol, who never had an ownership stake in the mine, expanded his trade by importing raw emeralds and having them cut in Johannesburg.

Errol and Maye took an inexpensive flight to Europe for their honeymoon. In France, he bought copies of Playboy, which was banned in South Africa, and lay on the small hotel bed looking at them, much to Maye’s annoyance. Their fights turned bitter.

“It was clear that marrying him had been a mistake,” she recalls, “but now it was impossible to undo.”

Compounding his social problems was his unwillingness to suffer politely those he considered fools.

he was lonely, very lonely, and that pain remained seared into his soul. “When I was a child, there’s one thing I said,” he recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone during a tumultuous period in his love life in 2017. “ ‘I never want to be alone.’ That’s what I would say. ‘I don’t want to be alone.’ ”

He was a very determined kid,

Elon also had a tendency to be spacey and wander off on his own, oblivious to what others were doing.

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 were each drawn to dramatic intensity rather than domestic bliss, a trait they would pass on. After her divorce, Maye began dating another abusive man. The children hated him and would occasionally put tiny firecrackers in his cigarettes that would explode when he lit up. Soon after the man proposed marriage, he got another woman pregnant. “She had been a friend of mine,” Maye says. “We had modeled together.”

Elon, still a small boy, chose to live with him. “It turned out to be a really bad idea,” he says. “I didn’t yet know how horrible he was.”

“It’s a big theme for him to never have his decisions guided by fear,” Peter recalls. “That was definitely present even when he was a child.”

When he reached his teens, it began to gnaw at him that something was missing. Both the religious and the scientific explanations of existence, he says, did not address the really big questions, such as Where did the universe come from, and why does it exist?

“I do not recommend reading Nietzsche as a teenager,” he says. Fortunately, he was saved by science fiction, that wellspring of wisdom for game-playing kids with intellects on hyperdrive. He plowed through the entire sci-fi section in his school and local libraries, then pushed the librarians to order more.

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.

program in BASIC that involved sixty hours of lessons. “I did it in three days, barely sleeping,” he remembers. A few months later, he tore out an ad for a conference on personal computers at a university and told his father he wanted to attend.

“This boy must get a new computer,” one of them declared.

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

Elon sometimes has similar mood swings. “When Elon’s in a good mood, it’s like the coolest, funnest thing in the world. And when he’s in a bad mood, he goes really dark, and you’re just walking on eggshells.”

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.

“You’ll be back in a few months,” Elon says his father told him contemptuously. “You’ll never be successful.” As usual, Errol has his own version of the story, in which he was the action hero.

myth has grown that Musk, because his father was on-and-off successful, arrived in North America in 1989 with a lot of money, perhaps pockets filled with emeralds. Errol at times encouraged that perception. But in fact, what Errol got from the Zambian emerald mine had become worthless years earlier. 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.

“Do you ever think about electric cars?” As he later admitted, it was not the world’s best come-on line.

he did not like, nor was he good at, working for other people. It was not in his nature to be deferential or to assume that others might know more than he did.

“He kept talking about making a rocket that could go to Mars,” Ren recalls. “Of course, I didn’t pay much attention, because I thought he was fantasizing.” Musk also focused on electric cars. He and Ren would grab lunch from one of the food trucks and sit on the campus lawn, where Musk would read academic papers on batteries.

At Penn, he developed a third mode of relaxation—a taste for partying—that drew him out of the lonely shell that had surrounded him as a kid.

“He enjoyed being around a party but not fully in it. The only thing he binged on was video games.” Despite all of their partying, he understood that Musk was fundamentally alienated and withdrawn, like an observer from a different planet trying to learn the motions of sociability. “I wish Elon knew how to be a little happier,” he says.

He felt that bankers and lawyers did not contribute much to society. Besides, he disliked the students he met in business classes. Instead, he was drawn to Silicon Valley.

This trend toward closed and sealed devices meant that most techies who came of age in the 1990s gravitated to software more than hardware. They never knew the sweet smell of a soldering iron, but they could code in ways that made circuits sing. Musk was different. He liked hardware as well as software. He could code, but he also had a feel for physical components, such as battery cells and capacitors, valves and combustion chambers, fuel pumps and fan belts.

“Most PhDs are irrelevant. The number that actually move the needle is almost none.” He had conceived by then a life vision that he would repeat like a mantra. “I thought about the things that will truly affect humanity,” he says. “I came up with three: the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel.”

When Kimbal had a meeting at the Toronto Star, which published the Yellow Pages in that city, the president picked up a thick edition of the directory and threw it at him. “Do you honestly think you’re ever going to replace this?” he asked.

Elon spent many nights in the office, crashing under his desk when he was exhausted from coding. “He had no pillow, he had no sleeping bag. I don’t know how he did it,” says Jim Ambras, an early employee.

With his weak empathy gene, he didn’t realize or care that correcting someone publicly—or, as he put it, “fixing their fucking stupid code”—was not a path to endearment.

In one of their worst fights, they wrestled to the floor and Elon seemed ready to punch Kimbal in the face, so Kimbal bit his hand and tore off a hunk of flesh. Elon had to go to the emergency room for stitches and a tetanus shot. “When we had intense stress, we just didn’t notice anyone else around us,” says Kimbal. He later admitted that Elon was right about Zip2. “It was a shitty name.”

“Great things will never happen with VCs or professional managers,” Musk told Inc. Magazine. “They don’t have the creativity or the insight.”

Elon at age twenty-seven walked away with $22 million and Kimbal with $15 million. Elon was astonished when the check arrived at his apartment. “My bank account went from, like, $5,000 to $22,005,000,” he says.

“Some could interpret the purchase of this car as behavior characteristic of an imperialist brat,” he admitted. “My values may have changed, but I’m not consciously aware of my values having changed.” Had they changed? His new wealth allowed his desires and impulses to be subject to fewer restraints, which was not always a pretty sight. But his earnest, mission-driven intensity remained intact.

When Musk asked his mother what she thought of Justine, she was typically blunt: “She has no redeeming feature.”

as they danced, he whispered to her a reminder: “I am the alpha in this relationship.”

“I am by nature obsessive-compulsive,” he wrote Fricker. “What matters to me is winning, and not in a small way. God knows why… it’s probably rooted in some very disturbing psychoanalytical black hole or neural short circuit.”