How was Elon Musk’s Childhood?

Love him or hate him, everyone has struggles and failures.

Elon Musk had been a lot on the news lately. But ever wonder what his early life was like? Was he born into a rich family or did he have to struggle like many of us to become wealthy? Did he do well in school or he got to where he is by being street smart? How many siblings did he have? Did he come from a loving intact family, or was he from a broken home? That is why, I decided to look into his early life.

Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa. His mother Maye Musk, was from Canada and his father Errol Musk, from South Africa. He has two whole siblings. A brother named Kimbal Musk and a sister named Tosca who is a director and filmmaker. Maye Musk’s family moved to South Africa in 1950 from Canada, and she is a dietician and model. His childhood was hard as he was bullied and beaten by his classmates for a number of years and also by gangs of students, who always picked on him, until he grew up during his teenage years and now is 187 cms tall. His parents divorced in 1980 and he ended up living with his father, which wasn’t pleasant and he would later label him as ‘a terrible human being.’ However, Elon credits his father for his own engineering skills. Through his father, Elon also has half siblings. A brother and a sister (Alexander and Asha Rose) from his father’s marriage to Heide Bezuidenhout and another brother and sister through his step daughter Jana Bezuidenhout (Heidi’s daughter), named Elliot Rush or “Rushi” and a daughter born in 2019.

His father Errol Musk was elected to the Pretoria City Council in 1972 as a member of the Progressive Party. Errol blames himself for the breakup of his marriage to Maye due to his infidelity and treating her badly. They still don’t talk even if they are in the same room. Also, Maye claims that people would call him ‘The Pig; because of the way he used to treat her in public and when the three kids would go to their father, he would throw everything out they came with, and she would have to buy new clothes. Then he would sue her and say she was an unfit parent. He would repeatedly tell her that she was stupid, ugly and boring.

From a young age, Elon was involved in technology and at the age of ten, he learned programming using a Commodore VIC-20. He even created his own video game called Blastar and sold it for $500 to a PC magazine.

In 1988, Elon moved to Canada to attend Queen’s University in Kingston at the age of seventeen and also to avoid being drafted compulsorily into the South African military. He obtained Canadian citizenship through his mother. After spending two years there, he then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, and went on to obtain two majors, a BS in Physics and the other a BA in economics from the Wharton School. Together with another student, Elon bought a 10-bedroom frat house and turned it into a nightclub.

Since Physics was what impressed him the most, he decided to obtain a PhD in applied physics. Therefore, he moved to Stanford University in California at the age of twenty-four. While there, he realized that the future was the internet and he left the PhD program after two days.

With his younger brother Kimball Musk, he relocated to Silicon Valley and developed a company, which they named Zip2. It was an internet business directory featuring maps. It grew into a profitable firm after they recruited Angel Investors and they finally in 1999, sold it to Compaq for $307million. After that, Elon created his online financial service company called X.com. Another company called Confinity formed by Peter Thiel and two of his associates, which was competing against Elon’s company ended up merging in March 2000, and became PayPal. Two years later, in October 2002, eBay purchased PayPal for 1.5 billion in eBay stock and Elon got $165 million of the stock. In 2002, Elon became an American citizen at the age of 31.

After he left PayPal, he founded and cofounded three companies, two of which are Space X, Tesla Motors. It wasn’t easy to start those companies, and it came at a very high price by Elon having to risk his entire wealth to start them. He then started Tesla Motors in 2004 with engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning and helped develop the first electric vehicle in the world. His company Space X has been involved with NASA and the US Air Force to manufacture military weapons. Elon also wants to send an astronaut to Mars by 2025 with the help of NASA.

Elon’s father claims that he was the owner of half an emerald mine in Zambia and to have bought it on a whim. He also states that Elon and Kimbal went to Tiffany & Co in NYC and sold some emeralds to make some money. But Elon claims that Errol never owned an emerald mine and all his successes are through hard work. He also says that he paid more than $100,000 in student debt by working his way through college with two jobs and scholarships. Elson also says that his father never helped him with money to start his own company, but funding came from a tiny group in Silicon Valley of random angel investors.

Elon has a very large family of his own — ten kids in total. His first marriage to Canadian author Justine Wilson in 2000 whom he met in Queen’s College produced 6 sons. The oldest Nevada Alexander Musk died at 10 weeks of SIDS in 2002. They then used IVF to get twins Vivian and Griffin in 2004. Vivian’s original name was Xavier Alexander Musk, but has changed genders and is now Vivian Jenna Wilson.

Once again using IVF they welcomed Kai, Saxon and Damian in 2006. He also had two children with singer Grimes. In May 2018 she had a son X AE A-XII and X in May 2020. Musk also has twins with Shivon Ellis, Neuralink director of operations and special projects in November 2021.

In conclusion, it took a lot of intelligence and hard work to get to where he is. Elon has also said that for him engineering comes very easily and as we can see, he used his passion to get to where he is. This goes back to my other article about Confucius saying (I’m paraphrasing), you work a job you like and you will never have to work a day in your life. You can read that here.

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