How a Tragic Childhood Lifted Elon Musk to the Top - YouTube

When Elon Musk’s first wife Justine  replied to a question on Quora  

about how someone can be as great as Elon  or other super successful people, she wrote:

“These people tend to be freaks and misfits  

who were forced to experience the  world in an unusually challenging way.”

Elon Musk grew up in Pretoria, South Africa and  said he had an unhappy and lonely childhood.

He didn’t spend much time playing with other kids.

Because he has Asperger’s, he struggled to pick  up social cues and to understand that sometimes,  

people didn’t say exactly what they  meant but instead, spoke figuratively.

He only started to figure it out by immersing  himself in books and watching movies.

Musk even mused that perhaps he read too many  comics as a kid, telling Ashlee Vance in his  

2015 book about him, “In the comics, it always  seems like they are trying to save the world.  

It seemed like one should try to make the world a  better place because the inverse makes no sense.”

It’s no coincidence Musk has made it  his mission to make a mark on the world  

with self-driving electric cars  and plans to colonize Mars.

His brilliance shown at an early age.

His father Errol once said that when  Elon was three or four years old,  

his son asked him: “Where is the whole world?”

In other words, where did the world sit  in the grand scheme of the universe?  

He endured years of ruthless bullying  as detailed in Ashlee Vance’s book.

One day in eighth or ninth grade, Musk recalled  how he and his brother Kimbal were sitting on  

the top of a flight of stairs eating when a boy  snuck up behind him, kicked him in the head,  

and shoved him down the stairs before a  bunch of boys beat him until he blacked out.

The beating damaged his nose so  badly it restricted the airflow  

for which he later had surgery.

The bullies even beat up Musk’s best friend  until he agreed to stop hanging out with him.

Musk recalled in Vance’s book: “Moreover, they  got him—they got my best f*cking friend—to  

lure me out of hiding so they could  beat me up. And that f*cking hurt.”

Vance described how: While telling this part of  the story, Musk’s eyes welled up and his voice  

quivered. “For some reason, they decided  that I was it, and they were going to go  

after me nonstop. That’s what made growing  up difficult. For a number of years, there  

was no respite. You get chased around by gangs  at school who tried to beat the sh*t out of me,  

and then I’d come home, and it would just be awful  there as well. It was just like nonstop horrible.”

Elon’s mother Maye and Errol  divorced when he was eight.  

Maye said she left an abusive relationship. She ran away with the three children,  

and it was a struggle raising them as a single  mom. The model and nutritionist saved up what she  

had and when money got tight, she fed the  kids peanut butter sandwiches and bean soup.

Elon eventually chose to live  with his father for a while  

as he felt bad that his dad was living alone.

One has to wonder if Elon regretted that decision,  

as he told Rolling Stone: “He  was such a terrible human being.  

You have no idea. My dad will have a carefully  thought-out plan of evil. He will plan evil.”

I went into detail in another video about  

Elon’s relationship with his father  which I’ll link in the description.

In response to Elon’s portrayal of  him, Errol Musk told Rolling Stone:

“I’ve been accused of being a Gay, a  Misogynist, a Paedophile, a Traitor,  

a Rat, a Sh*t (quite often), a Bastard (by  many women whose attentions I did not return)  

and much more. My own (wonderful) mother  told me I am ‘ruthless’ and should learn to  

be more ‘humane.'” But, he concluded, “I love my  children and would readily do whatever for them.  

Elon found comfort in coding.

By the time he was twelve, he coded a  space-themed video game called Blastar.  

A South African magazine published  the source code and gave him $500.

The game was by no means a  marvel of computer programming,  

but it did hint at the  genius brewing inside of him.

He would turn his science  fiction fantasies into reality  

when he founded SpaceX at  the age of thirty, in 2002.

His enthusiasm to explore space also has roots in  the existential crisis he suffered as a teenager.  

He studied religious texts  to learn the meaning of life.

He ended up embracing the lessons in The  Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams,  

in which Musk says the lesson is  figuring out what questions to ask,  

and then, the answer will be relatively simple.

Musk has said his aim is to increase the scope  and scale of human civilization, so that we’ll  

learn more, become more enlightened, and are  better able to understand what questions to ask.

The boy who fantasized about  space and found solace in coding  

would later learn to fight  back against his bullies.

He went through a growth spurt and by the time  he was 16, he was a towering six feet tall.

He also trained in karate, judo, and  wrestling and as he told Rolling Stone:  

“I started dishing it out as  hard as they’d give it to me.”

When he knocked out the biggest  bully in school with one punch,  

he noticed that the bully  never picked on him again.

He told the magazine: “It taught me a lesson:  

If you’re fighting a bully, you cannot appease  a bully. You punch the bully in the nose.”

And perhaps that mentality shaped Elon Musk as  he had to fight to keep Tesla and SpaceX alive  

even when the odds were heavily against him.

He also had to fight to prove his father wrong.

When Elon decided to move to Canada at  the age of 17, his mother’s birth country,  

and later relocated here to Toronto, he  says his dad didn’t think he could make it,  

and told him he’d be back in South Africa within  months. And that he was an idiot for trying.

He did two years of his undergrad  at Queen’s University in Kingston,  

three hours drive east of Toronto. But  the goal was always to get to America.

After two years at Queen’s, he  transferred to the University  

of Pennsylvania, his ticket to the promised land.

As a young boy growing up in South Africa  when apartheid was in its final years  

but there was still tension  and violence, he saw America  

as the land of opportunity. For  him, it was more than a cliché.

It was the one place where a lonely,  quiet kid with a talent for computers  

could make something of himself.

No one could have predicted that he’d  become one of modern America’s greatest  

industrialists - and perhaps, arguably,  the greatest entrepreneur of all time.

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Thanks for watching. For Newsthink, I’m Cindy Pom.