“We have reason to believe Elon is retarded.”
That was Elon Musk’s elementary school principal. Young Elon stared out the window and ignored his teachers, leading them to assume he could not learn.
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Perhaps Elon found their lessons irrelevant. Or maybe he was tormented by what was going on at home.
A Dark Upbringing
Elon’s father Errol was a tyrant and a bully. Errol beat his mother, Maye, in front of him.
“I remember that Elon, who was five, would hit him on the backs of the knees to try to stop him,” his mother recalls.
The superb new biography Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson tells the story of Elon’s upbringing and business career. I dug into this fascinating book on my recent vacation to Portugal.
Danger at School
For some children living in a violent home, school is a refuge. But there, Elon only found more abuse.
Elon was younger and smaller than the other boys, which made him a target for bullies. They beat him mercilessly with little, if any, provocation.
Once, Elon was pushed down a set of stairs and kicked repeatedly in the head.
He could’ve been killed. The injuries he sustained that day would affect him for much of his life.
“Decades later, he was still getting corrective surgery to try to fix the tissues inside his nose.”
When he was able to leave the hospital, there was no respite from the attacks.
“When Elon finally came home from the hospital, his father berated him. ‘I had to stand for an hour as he yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless.’”
Everywhere Elon went, he found himself surrounded with copies of his father: violent bullies who attacked him for no reason at all.
Escape from South Africa
As Elon grew older, he was able to find outlets away from school and his father. When he was 11, he used his modest savings to buy a Commodore VIC-20, one of the earliest computers.
He played video games like Galaxia and Alpha Blaster, a welcome escape. He also taught himself to program.
As he neared adulthood, Elon wanted nothing more than to get out of South Africa. He settled on Canada, where he had cousins.
When Elon left for Canada, his father said, “You’ll be back in a few months. You’ll never be successful.”
Making a New Life
Elon’s first days in Canada were anything but glamorous. He started out cleaning boilers in a lumber mill.
In time, he made it to Queens University, in Ontario. Finding it pleasant but unchallenging, he later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania.
After graduating from Penn, Elon went where most ambitious young technophiles were going in the 1990’s: Silicon Valley.
We’ll pick up Elon’s story there in the next installment of this series!
Wrap-Up
I sometimes think I didn’t have a lot of advantages growing up. But reading about Elon’s early life, I realize I had more than I thought. A lot more.
Faced with condescending teachers and vicious abuse, many people would’ve given up. But Elon only became more determined.
What have you learned from Elon Musk? Leave a comment and let us know!
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Photo: “Elon Musk” by dmoberhaus is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
