Elon Musk: From Bullied Kid to Billionaire Disruptor

Introduction

Welcome to Success Decoded, a new in-depth article and podcast series about the remarkably successful: the entrepreneurs, the ultra-achievers, the game-changers. I share with you their stories, attempt to decode the factors that made them successful, and what practical lessons we can learn from them to find our own success, in our startups, careers, and lives. 

This first series is about a man who has been making headlines and, recently, not for all the right reasons. He's the ultra outlier, the man who has completely baffled the rest of humanity with his seemingly superhuman accomplishments. The alien. The robot. The genius that is: Elon Musk.

“I hope to die on Mars… just not on impact” — Elon Musk on his dream to colonise Mars to create a ‘backup’ of the human race.

I know that sounds a bit over the top, and I wasn't a huge fan of him before I started researching him for this series. I thought what he was doing with Tesla was cool. But I can now say that if we can apply the phrase visionary genius to anyone, it would be to Elon—despite his flaws.

Elon Musk is the self-made billionaire founder and CEO of SpaceX, co-founder and CEO of Tesla, founder of The Boring Company, co-founder of Neuralink, OpenAI and SolarCity, in addition to conceptualising Hyperloop, and Starlink, and also to founding his own school for his children, Ad Astra.

Before this, he was also one of the founders of early fintech behemoth PayPal (plus, he had become a self-made multimillionaire even before that). He is now one of the top 20 richest people in the world, with a rabid fanbase and also a very sizeable ‘hater-base’ as well, which isn’t surprising with all the industries he’s disrupting.

He is often compared to other world-changing industry titans and mavericks like Steve Jobs, Howard Hughes, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison.

He is one of the most successful, provocative, and meme-able people in tech. With his achievements so vast, innovations so mind-blowing, and ability to prove the naysayers wrong so relentless, he’s often accused, half-jokingly, of being an alien or robot.

But, assuming he is a mere mortal, how on earth did Elon Musk become Elon Musk?

Elon becoming the man he is today — gif source: Empire Flippers?

What was his background? What was his upbringing like? What role, if any, did luck play in his success?

Is there anything we can learn from him? Or is he just a one-in-a-billion outlier — a superhero figure?

(I mean, he actually was the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man.)

Find out how, after becoming a hundred-millionaire in his 20s, his life went downhill so badly that he was broke, so broke that he had to borrow money to pay for rent in 2008. How was he able to crawl back up from the brink, from the edge of the abyss to his now meteoric rise to the top, in the process of disrupting multiple legacy trillion-dollar industries?

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Chapter 1—The Boy Who Changed The World

Baby Elon with his mother Maye in Pretoria, South Africa

Elon Reeve Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa on the 28th of June 1971 to Errol Musk, an electromechanical engineer, and Maye Musk, a model and dietician.

Elon was a gifted child who buried himself in books for hours on end from a very young age. He had an extraordinary ability to spit out facts and figures perfectly like a computer. He was a classic know-it-all, his mother Maye recounts how she’d overhear 5-year-old Elon telling another child who was afraid of the dark that darkness “is just the absence of photons in the visible wavelength, between 400–700nm”. Yes, he really was that nerdy. If anybody had any questions in the family, they’d say: ‘ask genius boy’.

His parents were worried about him, however, as it was difficult to get his attention and he was often unresponsive when they called his name. They suspected hearing issues and were so concerned they had his adenoids removed, on their doctor’s recommendation, in the hope that it would improve his hearing. But it was to no avail, as it turned out that his hearing was completely fine, it was just that he would often be lost so deep in thought as to be in a trance-like state.

Elon would often be lost deep in his thoughts from a very young age.

Elon grew up well off. His father, Errol, was a very successful engineer, and Elon grew up in one of the largest houses in Pretoria. His parents sent him to a private preparatory school, they had plenty of domestic help, and they would travel abroad quite frequently.

He particularly loved his trips to America, where there were arcades at every hotel they stayed at. He was completely taken by them. This was the late ’70s, and they weren’t common in South Africa at the time. So, when he was back home and saw a computer, a Commodore Vic-20, in stores and actually available to buy, he absolutely had to have one.

Elon’s first computer — a Commodore Vic-20

He was excited to be able to create games himself, just like the ones he played on arcade machines. The VIC-20 came with a workbook, which was designed to teach BASIC, the programming language, to adults over the course of six months. When Elon got his, aged 9, he “just got super OCD on it and stayed up for three days with no sleep and did the entire thing. It seemed like the most super-compelling thing I had ever seen” he says.

A few years later, aged 12, he sold the rights to one of the games he’d created, Blastar — a space shooting game, for $500. He then invested this $500 into a pharmaceutical stock he’d been tracking in the newspaper and soon made a few thousand dollars in profit.

Elon coded this game, Blastar, and sold it for $500 when he was 12.

But despite these remarkable early achievements and good fortune to grow up white and wealthy in apartheid South Africa, Elon’s childhood was far from idyllic. He describes his time at school as ‘hell’. As the shortest, smallest, and smartest kid in the class, he was relentlessly bullied until the age of 15. “Gangs would hunt me down, literally hunt me down,” Elon recalled, his eyes shining with tears at the memory. In one particularly appalling incident, a gang of boys threw him down a flight of stairs and proceeded to beat him unconscious — an attack so vicious he spent a week in hospital. His face was so swollen and bloodied that his father didn’t even recognise him at first. The bullies were so cruel they’d even beat up Elon’s best friend to stop him from hanging out with Elon. “They were a bunch of f*cking psychos,” he said.

Elon had a difficult childhood.

His misery didn’t end at school unfortunately — home wasn’t a happy place for him either. Elon’s father, Errol Musk, had long been abusive and manipulative. Maye, Elon’s mother, describes his abuse in her autobiography: “I remember that Tosca and Kimbal, who were two and four, respectively, would cry in the corner, and Elon, who was five, would hit him on the backs of his knees to try to stop him,” she wrote. They don’t divulge much on the nature of the abuse, only to bluntly call him ‘evil’.

To escape the relentless bullying at school and the ongoing abuse from his father, and the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, Elon took refuge in books. He was a classic nerd, loving sci-fi, fantasy and comic books in particular. When given the chance, he literally read from when he woke up till he went to sleep. With very few friends to speak of, and with his parents’ hands-off child rearing approach, he spent every single day after school, by himself, sitting in the aisles of bookshops and libraries reading. He read every single book he could get his hands on, even getting chased away regularly at the bookshop for spending hours there reading comics without buying them.

These books had an enormous impact on his worldview. He was heavily influenced by Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. The latter instilled in him the idea that ‘you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one’. This became his lifelong philosophy and mission.

Elon’s favourite sci-fi books influenced him deeply

Elon was always a loner, with very few friends to speak of. Other children would find him unrelatable, and his know-it-all nature didn’t help. He did, however, spend a lot of time with his younger brother and cousins, with whom he was the ringleader and they went on all sorts of exploits including making home-made rockets and explosives, and selling easter eggs door-to-door in their wealthy neighbourhood for a very marked-up price. When he was around 15 years old, they even decided to start an arcade. They managed to do everything from finding a location, negotiating a lease, and even speaking to arcade machine suppliers. The only thing that stopped them was when they needed the signature of an adult and, to their dismay, none of their parents obliged.

Elon and his younger brother Kimbal

During this time, Elon had taken up martial arts to fight back against his bullies, plus he finally had his growth spurt. So the bullying at school stopped, but unfortunately the bullying at home from his father kept him miserable.

He yearned to escape. Not only was he miserable living with his dad, he was also due for compulsory military service, something he did not want to take part in during South Africa’s apartheid regime.

He yearned for the ‘land of opportunity’, where his favourite comic book superheroes were based and where most cutting-edge scientific discoveries and technologies seemed to be coming from.

He wanted to get to the United States. He wanted to get to Silicon Valley.

His parents tried to talk him out of it. His father belittled him: “He said rather contentiously that I’d be back in three months, that I’m never going to make it, that I’m never going to make anything of myself. He called me an idiot all the time. That’s the tip of the iceberg, by the way,” said Elon.

Luck was on Elon’s side, however, as there was a change in the law that had just come about which allowed Elon’s mother, Maye, to pass her Canadian citizenship to her children. Elon immediately began researching how to complete the paperwork for this process. He got his Canadian citizenship and left for Canada — one step closer to the United States and Silicon Valley.

Originally published on: successdecoded.substack.com

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