As the founder and CEO of the private space company SpaceX and the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Inc. (TSLA), entrepreneur Elon Musk has gained international recognition. Musk was an early investor in several tech businesses, co-founded PayPal (PYPL), and concluded a deal to take Twitter Inc. private in October 2022.
He has been compared to other eccentric businessmen from American history, such as Steve Jobs, Howard Hughes, and Henry Ford, because of his success and sense of style. With an estimated net worth of $212 billion as of October 2022, he was ranked as the richest person in the world. In 2021, Musk became the first person to have the title, surpassing Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN).
Let’s take a quick look at the life of the man who has reached the top of the business world. And why and to whom he received assassination threats!
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Early Life and Education
In Pretoria, South Africa, Elon Reeve Musk was born in 1971 as the oldest of three kids. He was born to a Canadian model and nutritionist and a South African engineer for a father. Musk lived largely with his father after his parents separated in 1980. He would describe his father as « a terrible human being…almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done » in a later statement.
Must statement be “I had a terrible upbringing. I had a lot of adversity growing up. One thing I worry about with my kids is they don’t face enough adversity.”
Childhood bullying
Musk completed his high school education at Pretoria Boys High School after enrolling at the prestigious, English-speaking Waterkloof House Preparatory School a year early. Being a self-described bookworm, he didn’t make many acquaintances there.
“They got my best friend to lure me out of hiding so they could beat me up. And that hurt,” Musk stated. “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 out of me, and then I’d come home, and it would just be awful there as well.”
Early Achievements
Musk used technology as a way to escape. Using a Commodore VIC-20, an early and reasonably priced home computer, he learned how to program when he was ten years old. Musk quickly advanced to the point that he was able to design Blastar, a video game in the Space Invaders vein. For $500, he provided a PC magazine with the game’s BASIC code.
Musk and his brother had plans to open a video game arcade close to their school in one memorable childhood episode. But the idea was rejected by their parents.
Musk’s College Years
He left South Africa in his late teens to escape serving in the military, which was a requirement for white men in that country. He then moved to Canada. It was still the time of apartheid, when the majority-black native population of South Africa was denied political and economic rights by the country’s legal system. Musk had no desire to join the army, which at the time was fighting to put an end to the black nationalist movement. He was able to enroll at Queen’s University in Kingston, one of Ontario’s best universities, thanks to his mother’s connections to Canada.
