Elon Musk's Childhood in South Africa

Elon Reeve Musk was born in Pretoria on June 28, 1971. His mother, Maye, born in Canada and raised in South Africa, was a model and dietitian; his father, Errol, was an electromechanical engineer and property developer.^{[1][2][14][15]} Elon was followed by a brother, Kimbal, in 1972 and a sister, Tosca, in 1974.^[2][6]

Adventure ran in the family. His maternal grandparents, Joshua and Wyn Haldeman, had moved from Canada to South Africa in 1950 and were known for flying their single-engine plane across Africa and even to Australia. Musk has said their appetite for risk and exploration left a mark on him.^{[1][2][6][7][8]}

His parents divorced around 1980. The children initially lived with their mother, and Elon later chose to move in with his father, a decision he has since described as a mistake; Isaacson's biography portrays that period as emotionally difficult.^[1]

Relatives and biographers describe a child who would drift into deep concentration — so deep that his parents once had his hearing tested because he did not respond when spoken to. In reality he was simply lost in thought.^[2][3][9]

He read constantly, often for ten hours a day. When he ran out of books at the school library and the local bookshop, he read the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and family members learned that he could answer almost any factual question.^[2][3][9] Science fiction and fantasy were favorites, including Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which Musk later said taught him that understanding the right question is often harder than finding the answer.^[1][4][10]

Those books planted ideas that recur throughout his career: that civilization is fragile, that humanity should extend itself beyond Earth, and that technology can make the future dramatically better.^[1][3]

Around the age of 10, Musk saw his first computer in a Johannesburg mall and soon got a Commodore VIC-20. It came with a manual for the BASIC programming language that was meant to take months to work through; he finished it in a few days.^[2][5][16]

At 12 he wrote Blastar, a space-shooter game, and sold its code to the South African magazine PC and Office Technology for about $500.^[2][5][9] With Kimbal and their cousins he also looked for business ideas — including a plan to open a video-game arcade near their school that fell through only because they were too young to obtain the permit.^[2]

Musk attended several schools, including Bryanston High School and Pretoria Boys High School, from which he graduated.^[2][4][12] He was younger and smaller than many classmates and was relentlessly bullied. In one well-documented incident, at Bryanston High School in Johannesburg, he was pushed down a flight of stairs and beaten so badly that he was hospitalized.^[1][2][11]

He also attended a veldskool, a wilderness survival camp, where Isaacson describes children being left to fend for themselves. Musk has reflected that such experiences made him tough and taught him to endure pain and adversity — traits that would later help him survive near-bankruptcy at Tesla and SpaceX.^[1]

A growth spurt in his mid-teens, along with judo and wrestling, eventually ended the bullying.^[1]

By his teens Musk had set his sights on the United States, which he saw as the place where great things could be built. Because his mother was Canadian-born, he was able to obtain a Canadian passport, and in June 1989, at 17, he left South Africa for Canada.^[2][5][13]

He arrived with little money, stayed with relatives and worked a series of odd jobs — including tending vegetables and cleaning out a boiler room at a lumber mill — before enrolling at Queen's University in Ontario. His mother and siblings soon followed him to Canada.^[2][5][13]