Elon Musk Childhood is the first episode of my new Series Biography of Elon Musk. In this video, we will see ho Elon Musk Grew up? We will talk about the family of Elon Musk and how Elon spent his childhood. This is a story of a nerdy boy, who was bullied in school, during the violent days of Africa A boy who built a game at the age of 12. A boy who imagined the world beyond the earth and the sky. This is the story of that boy this is the story of Elon Musk.
Look at the person who is crying over here and the bunch of business experts and financial gurus who are giving that person an advice on how to keep his company alive. Who would have thought that one day this person is going to become a revolutionary businessperson and change the world’s perception about the Space?
However, his story does not start here. It starts with a nerdy boy, who was bullied in school, during his childhood A boy who built a game at the age of 12. A boy who imagined the world beyond the earth and the sky. This is the story of that boy this is the story of Elon Musk.
Hi, guys, this is Pratik and You are watching eclectic Elon was born and brought up during the violent days of South Africa. White and black people clashed as did the blacks of different tribes. He was a firstborn of Maye and Errol. Two individuals who grew up in the same neighborhood and spent time with each other as loving couples during their University days.
Elon’s mother Maye is from an amazing adventurous family. Elon’s grandparents were adventurous pilots who spent years to find the lost city in the desert.
His grandparents Joshua and Wayne Haldeman spent most of their lives on Exploration. Elon’s great grandfather was the first person to fly from Africa to Australia. my grandfather moved with all his kids and my mom went to South Africa because he wanted to use it as a base of exploration so he had this little plane that he liked to fly all over the place and he flowed all through Africa and Asia and he was the first person to fly from South Africa to Australia and he did this in a plane with no electronic instruments and in some places they had diesel in some places they had gasoline and he had to rebuild the engine according to wherever whatever fuel they had so it’s a like he survived on that that one but he was sort of an amateur archaeologist, he liked to explore things just for exploration just a quest for
curiosity seems to run in the family So, because of having such adventurous parents Elon mother Maye and her sibling left with the impression that nothing is impossible.
And We can see that same hunger of exploration in Elon musk - solving worlds problem, Building something new something different doing what no one else was ready to do even when everyone called him crazy. No matter what happens Elon Musk is always determined to follow his dreams and goals no matter what people think of him.
After giving birth to Elon in 1971. Maye Musk gave birth to two more children Kimball in 1972 and Tosca in 1974 All of our family members are entrepreneurs in some form yeah I guess I’d probably give credit to our grandfather who was a he was one of the explorers who explored the random parts of Africa for about 20 to 30 years before actually he died in the plane that he that he used for exploring so he really went all the way and inspired my mother generation and my father generation and now us and I think we’re just I think this is something about taking that entrepreneurship energy and coming to North America where it’s the land of opportunity and you can just do incredible things and we’ve just been blessed to be able to be here and do great stuff Elon was 5 years old in 1976 during the Soweto uprising.
An incident, which started with the peaceful march of black students and took a violent turn. Many died at the hands of police. Elon and his brother admit witnessing some rough stuff, themselves while growing up. Throughout his childhood, Elon wanted to escape the place where he lived and wanted to go to a place where his dream can flourish. Elon’s childhood was all about being isolated, wandering around his own brain and his love towards books. In the biography of Musk by Ashlee Vance Elons mother, Maye stated that- ‘He goes into his brain, and then you just see he is in another world, He still does that. Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something’
After all, it is a good thing, that Elon learned a way to block out the whole world and dedicate all of his concentration to a single task. Elon’s father was in engineering business and he was good at it. Their family owned one of the biggest houses in Pretoria. During his childhood, Elon was always different from other kids. He spent more time in libraries rather than playing with his friends. He started reading fictional books and then comics and then nonfiction. Elon liked reading books like the lord of the rings. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, The moon is a harsh mistress and his most favorite the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. All these books are fantasy and science fiction books with having space exploration theories included and so did the Elon’s projects.
Building rockets, trying to send people to Mars, building sustainable energy resources on earth and talking of humans becoming multi-planetary species Elon Musk took fantasy too seriously. Ok, but the best part is at the same time he took the scientific and logical approach to achieve the desired outcomes of his projects. Elon Musk is a rare combination of fantasy logic and science.
By mixing these three, he is building and inventing new technology which an ordinary person could not even imagine. Elon is a knowledgeable person just because of his love for books. Sometimes he spent the whole day reading books, at the age of four Elon read all the available books at his school library and the neighborhood library. According to a psychological study, Reading fiction improves your brain connectivity and function. During childhood because of his reading habit, Elon’s brain started functioning way faster than kids around him.
He started thinking rationally he detected flaws in other people’s thinking and tried to correct them.
Little Elon genuinely thought that people would be happy to hear about the flaws in their thinking.
But, People don’t really like to be corrected. Their ego gets hurt. And for that very same reason, other kids stopped playing with Elon and he became more isolated. On top of all that for some reasons the Musk family started falling apart. Errol and Maye filed for divorce. After the divorce, Elon and his brother Kimball started living with their father. According to Elon Musk and his family, Errol Musk is the most unpleasant man to live with.
So why did Elon choose to live with his Father?
Living with father means a grand life. Elon’s father had plenty of books for Elon and he was financially strong and sufficient. He could buy Computers and other luxury stuff for Elon and his brother. Still, Elon and his brother Kimball had a kind of disturbed relationship with their father, When Ashley Vance the author of Elon’s Biography asked Elon about his father. Elon said- “It would certainly be accurate to say that I did not have a good childhood. It was not absent of good, but it was not a happy childhood. It was like misery my father is good at making life miserable that’s for sure. He can take any situation no matter how good it is and make it bad. He is not a happy man. I don’t know ..fuck I don’t know how someone becomes like that. throughout his school days.
Elon imagined his life in Silicon Valley where one day he would establish himself as a revolutionary businessperson. You Started a software designs when you were a 10 10 years old and got success in 12 years old yeah oh yeah I mean yeah yeah but there you were in southern Africa so how did you decide to leave your hometown and realize your dream in North America so I mean I should say that you know when I was a kid I didn’t really have any grand designs I mean the reason I started programming computers is because I like computer games and I play lots of computer games and I learned that if I wrote software and sold it then I could get more money and buy better computers so it wasn’t really you know with some grand vision or anything when i was growing up and I’ve read lots of books and they were very often set in the United States and it seemed like a lot of new technology was being developed in the United States so I thought okay I really want to work on the new technology so when I get to Silicon Valley you know which when I was growing up Silicon Valley seemed like some sort of mythical place you know like Mount Olympus or something so let’s talk about the So when you thought about Silicon Valley you were still in South Africa right yeah so it was still your teenager time yeah uh-huh I tried at first to convince my parents to move to the US but neither of them would move they were divorced. Entrepreneurship qualities in Elon and his brother can be traced back to their school days.
They were not ordinary teenagers who like talking about movies and girls. They both had productive conversations with each other on the diverse range of topics including Banking, space industry and So on. One of their Schoolmate Mr. Wood tells an incident while remembering their school days, One day during a class break Elon and Kimball were chatting when wood interrupted them and asked what are they talking about They said whether there is a need for branch banking in the financial industry and whether we will move to paperless banking. So that kind productive conversations Elon and his brother had during their childhood and guys do you want to know the result of that productive talk Elon and his Brother had during their school days, Paypal which introduced paperless online Money transfer service in Financial industry.
Elon in his school during a science debate always favored solar power against fossil fuels and the result is his electric car company Tesla and Solar City. Elon also faced serious bullying during his school days
In one incident because of getting beaten by psycho bullies he blacked out and had to stay at home for a week. Elon never cared about his grades he thinks. If you are not interested in a particular subject then studying that subject is a waste of time. In addition, He does not give much importance to college degrees. There is no need even to have a college degree at all not even high school I mean if somebody graduated from a great university that maybe in India that may be an indication that they will be capable of great things but it’s not necessarily the case you know if you look at say people like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison Steve Jobs these guys didn’t graduate from college.
When Elon Musk was 10 years old, he visited Sandton City Mall in Johannesburg and there he saw a computer for the first time. Elon anyhow convinced his father to purchase that computer for him. Commodore VIC-20 that was his first computer in the 1980s. Commodore vic-20 unlike games it has a real computer keyboard with a Commodore vic-20 the whole family can learn computing at home It used to come with 5 kilobytes of memory and a workbook on the basic programming language. It was supposed to take six months to go through all the lessons mentioned in that workbook. However, Ellon stayed up for 3 days without any sleep and finished the entire thing.
In 1984, At the age of 12 Elon designed the source code for a video game called blaster which was published by a south African trade publication. That was the first time Elon was introduced to the public. These were the words of 12 years old Elon while describing the theme of his game. In this game, you have to destroy an alien space freighter which is carrying hydrogen beams and status beam machine Look at the creativity in his writing anyone can notice that this kid has read lots and lots of books. Elon himself stated in his biography by Ashlee Vance that he wanted to write a book like Lord of the rings.
So see Elon was all about innovation and creating his own world. After some years, Elon and his cousin tried to open a video arcade without telling their parents but couldn’t get through the legal process as it needs someone above 18 years of age with them and so Elon, Kimball and his cousins had to wait some more years to start their own businesses. Elon Musk spent later stages of high school at Pretoria boys high school. His high school friend Gideon Fourie said that honestly there were just no signs that Elon was going to be a billionaire. In high school, Elon paid more attention to subjects, which he genuinely liked or felt interested in. He studied remaining subjects just to score passing marks.
Elon used to say, “ I would rather play video games, read books and write software codes than try and get an A grade if there is no point in getting an A. Elon Musk always believed in thinking and making decisions for himself. At the age of 17 finally, the moment arrived where Elon was about to leave Africa behind and start a new journey this was the moment Elon has been waiting for throughout his childhood. But before reaching to his dream destination America Elon will have to face some unexpected challenges in Canada. Elon Musk likes the risks and he makes other people change the way they look at risk as he says You do not grow up thinking getting a job is the hard part. That is just not interesting enough.
