Winnifred and Joshua Haldeman
Errol, Maye, Elon, Tosca, and Kimbal Musk
Cora and Walter Musk
Joshua and Winnifred Haldeman
Elon Musk’s attraction to risk was a family trait. In that regard, he took after his maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions who was raised on a farm on the barren plains of central Canada. He studied chiropractic techniques in Iowa, then returned to his hometown near Moose Jaw, where he broke in horses and gave chiropractic adjustments in exchange for food and lodging.
He was eventually able to buy his own farm, but he lost it during the depression of the 1930s. For the next few years, he worked as a cowboy, rodeo performer, and construction hand. His one constant was a love for adventure. He married and divorced, traveled as a hobo on freight trains, and was a stowaway on an oceangoing ship.
The loss of his farm instilled in him a populism, and he became active in a movement known as the Social Credit Party, which advocated giving citizens free credit notes they could use like currency. The movement had a conservative fundamentalist streak tinged with anti-Semitism. Its first leader in Canada decried a “perversion of cultural ideals” because “a disproportionate number of Jews occupy positions of control.” Haldeman rose to become chair of the party’s national council.
He also enlisted in a movement called Technocracy, which believed that government should be run by technocrats rather than politicians. It was temporarily outlawed in Canada because of its opposition to the country’s entry into World War II. Haldeman defied the ban by taking out a newspaper ad supporting the movement.
At one point he wanted to learn ballroom dancing, which is how he met Winnifred Fletcher, whose adventurous streak was equal to his. As a sixteen-year-old, she got a job at the Moose Jaw Times Herald, but she dreamed of being a dancer and actress. So she lit out by train to Chicago and then New York City. Upon her return, she opened a dance school in Moose Jaw, which is where Haldeman showed up for lessons. When he asked her to dinner, she replied, “I don’t date my clients.” So he quit the class and asked her out again. A few months later, he asked, “When will you marry me?” She responded, “Tomorrow.”
They had four children, including twin girls, Maye and Kaye, born in 1948. One day on a trip he spotted a For Sale sign on a single-engine Luscombe airplane sitting in a farmer’s field. He had no cash, but he convinced the farmer to take his car in exchange. It was rather impetuous, since Haldeman did not know how to fly. He hired someone to fly him home and teach him how to pilot the plane.
The family came to be known as The Flying Haldemans, and he was described by a chiropractic trade journal as “perhaps the most remarkable figure in the history of flying chiropractors,” a rather narrow, albeit accurate, accolade. They bought a larger single-engine plane, a Bellanca, when Maye and Kaye were three months old, and the toddlers became known as “the flying twins.”
With his quirky conservative populist views, Haldeman came to believe that the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft. So in 1950, he decided to move to South Africa, which was still ruled by a white apartheid regime. They took apart the Bellanca, crated it, and boarded a freighter for Cape Town. Haldeman decided he wanted to live inland, so they took off toward Johannesburg, where most of the white citizens spoke English rather than Afrikaans. But as they flew over nearby Pretoria, the lavender jacaranda flowers were in bloom, and Haldeman announced, “This is where we’ll stay.”
When Joshua and Winnifred were young, a charlatan named William Hunt, known (at least to himself) as “the Great Farini,” came to Moose Jaw and told tales of an ancient “lost city” he had seen when crossing the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. “This fabulist showed my grandfather pictures that were obviously fake, but he became a believer and decided it was his mission to rediscover it,” Musk says. Once in Africa, the Haldemans made a monthlong trek into the Kalahari every year to search for this legendary city. They hunted for their own food and slept with their guns so they could fend off lions.
The family adopted a motto: “Live dangerously—carefully.” They embarked on long-distance flights to places such as Norway, tied for first place in the twelve-thousand-mile Cape Town–to-Algiers motor rally, and became the first to fly a single-engine plane from Africa to Australia. “They had to remove the back seats to put in gas tanks,” Maye later recalled.
Joshua Haldeman’s risk-taking eventually caught up with him. He was killed when a person he was teaching to fly hit a power line, causing the plane to flip and crash. His grandson Elon was three at the time. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” he says. “Risk energized him.”
Haldeman imprinted that spirit onto one of his twin girls, Elon’s mother, Maye. “I know that I can take a risk as long as I’m prepared,” she says. As a young student, she did well in science and math. She was also strikingly good-looking. Tall and blue-eyed, with high cheekbones and sculpted chin, she began working at age fifteen as a model, doing department store runway shows on Saturday mornings.
Around that time, she met a boy in her neighborhood who was also strikingly good-looking, albeit in a smooth and caddish way.
Errol Musk was an adventurer and wheeler-dealer, always on the lookout for the next opportunity. His mother, Cora, was from England, where she finished school at fourteen, worked at a factory making skins for fighter-bombers, then took a refugee ship to South Africa. There she met Walter Musk, a cryptographer and military intelligence officer who worked in Egypt on schemes to fool the Germans by deploying fake weapons and searchlights. After the war, he did little other than sit silently in an armchair, drink, and use his cryptology skills on crossword puzzles. So Cora left him, went back to England with their two sons, bought a Buick, and then returned to Pretoria. “She was the strongest person I ever met,” Errol says.
Errol earned a degree in engineering and worked on building hotels, shopping centers, and factories. On the side, he liked restoring old cars and planes. He also dabbled in politics, defeating an Afrikaner member of the pro-apartheid National Party to become one of the few English-speaking members of the Pretoria City Council. The Pretoria News for March 9, 1972, reported the election under the headline “Reaction against the Establishment.”
Like the Haldemans, he loved flying. He bought a twin-engine Cessna Golden Eagle, which he used to ferry television crews to a lodge he had built in the bush. On one trip in 1986, when he was looking to sell the plane, he landed at an airstrip in Zambia where a Panamanian-Italian entrepreneur offered to buy it. They agreed on a price, and instead of taking a payment in cash, Errol was given a portion of the emeralds produced at three small mines that the entrepreneur owned in Zambia.
Zambia then had a postcolonial Black government, but there was no functioning bureaucracy, so the mine was not registered. “If you registered it, you would wind up with nothing, because the Blacks would take everything from you,” Errol says. He criticizes Maye’s family for being racist, which he insists he is not. “I don’t have anything against the Blacks, but they are just different from what I am,” he says in a rambling phone discourse.
Errol, who never had an ownership stake in the mine, expanded his trade by importing raw emeralds and having them cut in Johannesburg. “Many people came to me with stolen parcels,” he says. “On trips overseas I would sell emeralds to jewelers. It was a cloak-and-dagger thing, because none of it was legal.” After producing profits of roughly $210,000, his emerald business collapsed in the 1980s when the Russians created an artificial emerald in the lab. He lost all of his emerald earnings.
Errol Musk and Maye Haldeman began dating when they were young teenagers. From the start, their relationship was filled with drama. He repeatedly proposed to her, but she didn’t trust him. When she discovered he was cheating on her, she became so upset that she cried for a week and couldn’t eat. “Because of grief, I dropped ten pounds,” she recalls; it helped her win a local beauty contest. She got $150 in cash plus ten tickets to a bowling alley and became a finalist in the Miss South Africa contest.
When Maye graduated from college, she moved to Cape Town to give talks about nutrition. Errol came to visit, brought an engagement ring, and proposed. He promised he would change his ways and be faithful once they were married. Maye had just broken off a relationship with another unfaithful boyfriend, gained a lot of weight, and begun to fear that she would never get married, so she agreed.
The night of the wedding, Errol and Maye took an inexpensive flight to Europe for their honeymoon. In France, he bought copies of Playboy, which was banned in South Africa, and lay on the small hotel bed looking at them, much to Maye’s annoyance. Their fights turned bitter. When they got back to Pretoria, she thought of trying to get out of the marriage. But she soon became nauseated from morning sickness. She had become pregnant on the second night of their honeymoon, in the town of Nice. “It was clear that marrying him had been a mistake,” she recalls, “but now it was impossible to undo.”
A Mind of His Own
Pretoria, the 1970s
Elon and Maye Musk
Elon, Kimbal, and Tosca
Elon ready for school
Lonely and determined
At 7:30 on the morning of June 28, 1971, Maye Musk gave birth to an eight-pound, eight-ounce boy with a very large head.
At first she and Errol were going to name him Nice, after the town in France where he was conceived. History may have been different, or at least amused, if the boy had to go through life with the name Nice Musk. Instead, in the hope of making the Haldemans happy, Errol agreed that the boy would have names from that side of the family: Elon, after Maye’s grandfather J. Elon Haldeman, and Reeve, the maiden name of Maye’s maternal grandmother.
Errol liked the name Elon because it was biblical, and he later claimed that he had been prescient. As a child, he says, he heard about a science fiction book by the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun called Project Mars, which describes a colony on the planet run by an executive known as “the Elon.”
Elon cried a lot, ate a lot, and slept little. At one point Maye decided to just let him cry until he fell asleep, but she changed her mind after neighbors called the police. His moods switched rapidly; when he wasn’t crying, his mother says, he was really sweet.
Over the next two years, Maye had two more children, Kimbal and Tosca. She didn’t coddle them. They were allowed to roam freely. There was no nanny, just a housekeeper who paid little attention when Elon began experimenting with rockets and explosives. He says he’s surprised he made it through childhood with all of his fingers intact.
When he was three, his mother decided that because he was so intellectually curious he should be in nursery school. The principal tried to dissuade her, pointing out that being younger than anyone else in the class would present social challenges. They should wait another year. “I can’t do that,” Maye said. “He needs someone besides me to talk to. I really have this genius child.” She prevailed.
It was a mistake. Elon had no friends, and by the time he was in second grade he was tuning out. “The teacher would come up to me and yell at me, but I would not really see or hear her,” he says. His parents got called in to see the principal, who told them, “We have reason to believe that Elon is retarded.” He spent most of his time in a trance, not listening, one of his teachers explained. “He looks out of the window all the time, and when I tell him to pay attention he says, ‘The leaves are turning brown now.’ ” Errol replied that Elon was right, the leaves were turning brown.
The impasse was broken when his parents agreed that Elon’s hearing should be tested, as if that might be the problem. “They decided it was an ear problem, so they took my adenoids out,” he says. That calmed down the school officials, but it did nothing to change his tendency to zone out and retreat into his own world when thinking. “Ever since I was a kid, if I start to think about something hard, then all of my sensory systems turn off,” he says. “I can’t see or hear or anything. I’m using my brain to compute, not for incoming information.” The other kids would jump up and down and wave their arms in his face to see if they could summon back his attention. But it didn’t work. “It’s best not to try to break through when he has that vacant stare,” his mother says.
Compounding his social problems was his unwillingness to suffer politely those he considered fools. He used the word “stupid” often. “Once he started going to school, he became so lonely and sad,” his mother says. “Kimbal and Tosca would make friends on the first day and bring them home, but Elon never brought friends home. He wanted to have friends, but he just didn’t know how.”
As a result, he was lonely, very lonely, and that pain remained seared into his soul. “When I was a child, there’s one thing I said,” he recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone during a tumultuous period in his love life in 2017. “ ‘I never want to be alone.’ That’s what I would say. ‘I don’t want to be alone.’ ”
One day when he was five, one of his cousins was having a birthday party, but Elon was punished for getting into a fight and told to stay home. He was a very determined kid, and he decided to walk on his own to his cousin’s house. The problem was that it was on the other side of Pretoria, a walk of almost two hours. Plus, he was too young to read the road signs. “I kind of knew what the route looked like because I had seen it from a car, and I was determined to get there, so I just started walking,” he says. He managed to arrive just as the party was ending. When his mother saw him coming down the road, she freaked out. Fearing he would be punished again, he climbed a maple tree and refused to come down. Kimbal remembers standing beneath the tree and staring at his older brother in awe. “He has this fierce determination that blows your mind and was sometimes frightening, and still is.”
When he was eight, he focused his determination on getting a motorcycle. Yes, at age eight. He would stand next to his father’s chair and make his case, over and over. When his father picked up a newspaper and ordered him to be quiet, Elon would continue to stand there. “It just was extraordinary to watch,” Kimbal says. “He would stand there silently, then resume his argument, then stand silent.” This happened every evening for weeks. His father finally caved and got Elon a blue-and-gold 50cc Yamaha.
Elon also had a tendency to be spacey and wander off on his own, oblivious to what others were doing. On a family trip to Liverpool to see some of their relatives when he was eight, his parents left him and his brother in a park to play by themselves. It was not in his nature to stay put, so he started wandering the streets. “Some kid found me crying and took me to his mom, who gave me milk and biscuits and called the police,” he recalls. When he was reunited with his parents at the police station, he was unaware that anything was amiss.
“It was insane to leave me and my brother alone in a park at that age,” he says, “but my parents weren’t overprotective like parents are today.” Years later, I watched him at a solar roof construction site with his two-year-old boy, known as X. It was 10 p.m., and there were forklifts and other moving equipment lit by two spotlights that cast big shadows. Musk put X on the ground so the boy could explore on his own, which he did without fear. As he poked around amid the wires and cables, Musk glanced at him occasionally, but refrained from intervening. Finally, after X started to climb on a moving spotlight, Musk walked over and picked him up. X squirmed and squealed, unhappy about being restrained.
Musk would later talk about—even joke about—having Asperger’s, a common name for a form of autism-spectrum disorder that can affect a person’s social skills, relationships, emotional connectivity, and self-regulation. “He was never actually diagnosed as a kid,” his mother says, “but he says he has Asperger’s, and I’m sure he’s right.” The condition was exacerbated by his childhood traumas. Whenever he would later feel bullied or threatened, his close friend Antonio Gracias says, the PTSD from his childhood would hijack his limbic system, the part of the brain that controls emotional responses.
As a result, he was bad at picking up social cues. “I took people literally when they said something,” he says, “and it was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really meant.” He had a preference for things that were more precise, such as engineering, physics, and coding.
Like all psychological traits, Musk’s were complex and individualized. He could be very emotional, especially about his own children, and he felt acutely the anxiety that comes from being alone. But he didn’t have the emotional receptors that produce everyday kindness and warmth and a desire to be liked. He was not hardwired to have empathy. Or, to put it in less technical terms, he could be an asshole.
Maye and Errol Musk were at an Oktoberfest celebration with three other couples, drinking beer and having fun, when a guy at another table whistled at Maye and called her sexy. Errol was furious, but not at the guy. The way Maye remembers it, he lunged and was about to hit her, and a friend had to restrain him. She fled to her mother’s house. “Over time, he had gotten crazier,” Maye later said. “He would hit me when the kids were around. I remember that Elon, who was five, would hit him on the backs of his knees to try to stop him.”
Errol calls the accusations “absolute rubbish.” He claims he adored Maye, and over the years he tried to win her back. “I’ve never laid a hand on a woman in my life, and certainly none of my wives,” he says. “That’s one of women’s weapons is to cry that the man abused her, to cry and to lie. And a man’s weapons are to buy and to sign.”
On the morning after the Oktoberfest altercation, Errol came over to Maye’s mother’s house, apologized, and asked Maye to come back. “Don’t you dare touch her again,” Winnifred Haldeman said. “If you do, she’s coming to live with me.” Maye said that he never hit her after that, but his verbal abuse continued. He would tell her that she was “boring, stupid, and ugly.” The marriage never recovered. Errol later admitted it was his fault. “I had a very pretty wife, but there were always prettier, younger girls,” he said. “I really loved Maye, but I screwed up.” They divorced when Elon was eight.
Maye and the children moved to a house on the coast near Durban, about 380 miles south of the Pretoria-Johannesburg area, where she juggled jobs as a model and dietician. There was little money. She bought her kids secondhand books and uniforms. On some weekends and holidays the boys (but usually not Tosca) would take the train to see their father in Pretoria. “He would send them back without any clothes or bags, so I had to buy them new clothes every time,” she says. “He said that I would eventually return to him, because I would be so poverty-stricken and wouldn’t be able to feed them.”
Often she would have to travel on a modeling job or to give a nutrition lecture, leaving the kids at home. “I never felt guilty about working full-time, because I didn’t have a choice,” she says. “My children had to be responsible for themselves.” The freedom taught them to be self-reliant. When they faced a problem, she had a stock response: “You’ll figure it out.” As Kimbal recalls, “Mom wasn’t soft and cuddly, and she was always working, but that was a gift for us.”
Elon developed into a night person, staying up until dawn reading books. When he saw his mother’s light go on at 6 a.m., he would crawl into bed and fall asleep. That meant she had trouble getting him up in time for school, and on nights when she was away, he would sometimes not get to class until 10 a.m. After getting calls from the school, Errol launched a custody battle and had subpoenas issued for Elon’s teachers, Maye’s modeling agent, and their neighbors. Right before going to trial, Errol dropped the case. Every few years, he would initiate another court action and then drop it. When Tosca recounts these tales, she begins to cry. “I remember Mom just sitting there, sobbing on the couch. I didn’t know what to do. All I could do was to hold her.”
Maye and Errol were each drawn to dramatic intensity rather than domestic bliss, a trait they would pass on. After her divorce, Maye began dating another abusive man. The children hated him and would occasionally put tiny firecrackers in his cigarettes that would explode when he lit up. Soon after the man proposed marriage, he got another woman pregnant. “She had been a friend of mine,” Maye says. “We had modeled together.”
With broken tooth and scar
Life with Father
Pretoria, the 1980s
Elon pokes a tortoise and Errol watches
Kimbal and Elon with Peter and Russ Rive
The lodge in the Timbavati Game Reserve
The move
At age ten, Musk made a fateful decision, one that he would later regret: he decided to move in with his father. He took the dangerous overnight train from Durban to Johannesburg on his own. When he spotted his father waiting for him at the station, he began “beaming with delight, like the sun,” Errol says. “Hi Dad, let’s get a hamburger!” he shouted. That night, he crawled into his father’s bed and slept there.
Why did he decide to move in with his father? Elon sighs and stays silent for almost a minute when I ask this. “My dad was lonely, so lonely, and I felt I should keep him company,” he finally says. “He used psychological wiles on me.” He also adored his grandmother, Errol’s mother Cora, known as Nana. She convinced him that it was unfair that his mother had all three children and his father had none.
In some ways, the move was not all that mysterious. Elon was ten, socially awkward, and had no friends. His mother was loving, but she was overworked, distracted, and vulnerable. His father, in contrast, was swaggering and manly, a big guy with large hands and a mesmerizing presence. His career had many ups and downs, but at that time he was feeling flush. He owned a gold-colored convertible Rolls-Royce Corniche and, more importantly, two sets of encyclopedias, lots of books, and a variety of engineering tools.
So Elon, still a small boy, chose to live with him. “It turned out to be a really bad idea,” he says. “I didn’t yet know how horrible he was.” Four years later, Kimbal followed. “I didn’t want to leave my brother alone with him,” Kimbal says. “My dad guilted my brother into going to live with him. And then he guilted me.”
“Why did he choose to go live with someone who inflicted pain?” Maye Musk asked forty years later. “Why didn’t he prefer a happy home?” Then she paused for a moment. “Maybe that’s just who he is.”
After the boys moved in, they helped Errol build a lodge that he could rent to tourists in the Timbavati Game Reserve, a pristine stretch of bush about three hundred miles east of Pretoria. During construction, they slept around a fire at night, with Browning rifles to protect them against lions. The bricks were made of river sand and the roof was grass. As an engineer, Errol liked studying the properties of various materials, and he made the floors out of mica because it was a good thermal insulator. Elephants in search of water often uprooted the pipes, and monkeys regularly broke into the pavilions and pooped, so there was a lot of work for the boys to do.
Elon often accompanied visitors on hunts. Although he had only a .22 caliber rifle, it had a good scope and he became an expert shot. He even won a local skeet-shooting contest, though he was too young to accept the prize of a case of whiskey.
When Elon was nine, his father took him, Kimbal, and Tosca on a trip to America, where they drove from New York through the Midwest and then down to Florida. Elon became hooked on the coin-operated video games he found in the motel lobbies. “It was by far the most exciting thing,” he said. “We didn’t have that yet in South Africa.” Errol displayed his mix of flamboyance and frugality: he rented a Thunderbird but they stayed in budget inns. “When we got to Orlando, my father refused to take us to Disney World because it was too expensive,” Musk recalls. “I think we went to some water park instead.” As is often the case, Errol spins a different tale, insisting that they went both to Disney World, where Elon liked the haunted house ride, and to Six Flags over Georgia. “I told them over and over on the trip, ‘America is where you will come live someday.’ ”
Two years later, he took the three children to Hong Kong. “My father had some combination of legitimate business and hucksterism,” Musk recalls. “He left us in the hotel, which was pretty grungy, and just gave us fifty bucks or something, and we didn’t see him for two days.” They watched Samurai movies and cartoons on the hotel TV. Leaving Tosca behind, Elon and Kimbal wandered the streets, going into electronics stores where they could play video games for free. “Nowadays someone would call the child-protection service if someone did what our dad did,” Musk says, “but for us back then it was a wondrous experience.”
After Elon and Kimbal moved in with their father in suburban Pretoria, Maye moved to nearby Johannesburg so the family could be closer together. On Fridays, she would drive to Errol’s house to pick up the boys. They would then go see their grandmother, the indomitable Winnifred Haldeman, who cooked a chicken stew the kids hated so much that Maye would take them out for pizza afterward.
Elon and Kimbal usually spent the night at the house next door to their grandmother’s, where Maye’s sister Kaye Rive and her three boys lived. The five cousins—Elon and Kimbal Musk and Peter, Lyndon, and Russ Rive—became an adventurous and occasionally contentious bevy of bucks. Maye was more indulgent and less protective than her sister, so they would conspire with her when plotting an adventure. “If we wanted to do something like go to a concert in Johannesburg, she would say to her sister, I’m going to go take them to church camp this evening,” says Kimbal. “Then she would drop us off and we would go do our mischief.”
Those trips could be dangerous. “I remember once when the train stopped, there was an immense fight, and we watched a guy get stabbed through the head,” says Peter Rive. “We were hiding inside the car, then the doors closed, and we were like moving on.” Sometimes a gang would board the train to hunt down rivals, rampaging through the cars shooting machine guns. Some of the concerts were anti-apartheid protests, such as one in 1985 in Johannesburg that drew 100,000 people. Often brawls would break out. “We didn’t try to hide from the violence, we became survivors of it,” says Kimbal. “It taught us to not be afraid but also to not do crazy things.”
Elon developed a reputation for being the most fearless. When the cousins went to a movie and people were making noise, he would be the one to go over and tell them to be quiet, even if they were much bigger. “It’s a big theme for him to never have his decisions guided by fear,” Peter recalls. “That was definitely present even when he was a child.”
He was also the most competitive of the cousins. One time when they were riding their bicycles from Pretoria to Johannesburg, Elon was way out in front, pedaling fast. So the others pulled over and hitched a ride in a pickup truck. When Elon rejoined them, he was so angry that he started hitting them. It was a race, he said, and they had cheated.
Such fights were common. Often they would happen in public, the boys oblivious to their surroundings. One of the many that Elon and Kimbal had was at a country fair. “They were wrestling and punching each other in the dust,” Peter recalls. “People were freaking out, and I had to say to the crowd, ‘This is not a big deal. These guys are brothers.’ ” Although the fights were usually over small things, they could get vicious. “The way to win was to be the first person to punch or kick the other guy in the balls,” Kimbal says. “That would end the fight because you can’t continue if you get crunched in the balls.”
Musk was a good student, but not a superstar. When he was nine and ten, he got A’s in English and Math. “He is quick to grasp new mathematical concepts,” his teacher noted. But there was a constant refrain in the report card comments: “He works extremely slowly, either because he dreams or is doing what he should not.” “He seldom finishes anything. Next year he must concentrate on his work and not daydream during class.” “His compositions show a lively imagination, but he doesn’t always finish in time.” His average grade before he got to high school was 83 out of 100.
After he was bullied and beaten in his public high school, his father moved him to a private academy, Pretoria Boys High School. Based on the English model, it featured strict rules, caning, compulsory chapel, and uniforms. There he got excellent grades in all but two subjects: Afrikaans (he got a 61 out of 100 his final year) and religious instruction (“not extending himself,” the teacher noted). “I wasn’t really going to put a lot of effort into things I thought were meaningless,” he says. “I would rather be reading or playing video games.” He got an A in the physics part of his senior certificate exams, but somewhat surprisingly, only a B in the math part.
In his spare time, he liked to make small rockets and experiment with different mixtures—such as swimming-pool chlorine and brake fluid—to see what would make the biggest bang. He also learned magic tricks and how to hypnotize people, once convincing Tosca that she was a dog and getting her to eat raw bacon.
As they would later do in America, the cousins pursued various entrepreneurial ideas. One Easter, they made chocolate eggs, wrapped them in foil, and sold them door-to-door. Kimbal came up with an ingenious scheme. Instead of selling them cheaper than the Easter eggs at the store, they made them more expensive. “Some people would balk at the price,” he says, “but we told them, ‘You’re actually supporting future capitalists.’ ”
Reading remained Musk’s psychological retreat. Sometimes he would immerse himself in books all afternoon and most of the night, nine hours at a stretch. When the family went to someone’s house, he would disappear into their host’s library. When they went into town, he would wander off and later be found at a bookstore, sitting on the floor, in his own world. He was also deeply into comics. The single-minded passion of the superheroes impressed him. “They’re always trying to save the world, with their underpants on the outside or these skin-tight iron suits, which is really pretty strange when you think about it,” he says. “But they are trying to save the world.”
Musk read both sets of his father’s encyclopedias and became, to his doting mother and sister, a “genius boy.” To other kids, however, he was an annoying nerd. “Look at the moon, it must be a million miles away,” a cousin once exclaimed. Replied Elon, “No, it’s like 239,000 miles, depending on the orbit.”
One book that he found in his father’s office described great inventions that would be made in the future. “I would come back from school and go to a side room in my father’s office and read it over and over,” he says. Among the ideas was a rocket propelled by an ion thruster, which would use particles rather than gas for thrust. Late one night at the control room of his rocket base in south Texas, Musk described the book at length to me, including how an ion thruster would work in a vacuum. “That book is what first made me think about going to other planets,” he said.
Russ Rive, Elon, Kimbal, and Peter Rive
The Seeker
Pretoria, the 1980s
Existential crisis
When Musk was young, his mother started taking him to Sunday school at the local Anglican Church, where she was a teacher. It did not go well. She would tell her class stories from the Bible, and he would question them. “What do you mean, the waters parted?” he asked. “That’s not possible.” When she told the story of Jesus feeding the crowd with loaves and fishes, he countered that things cannot materialize out of nothing. Having been baptized, he was expected to take communion, but he began questioning that as well. “I took the blood and body of Christ, which is weird when you’re a kid,” he says. “I said, ‘What the hell is this? Is this a weird metaphor for cannibalism?’ ” Maye decided to let Elon stay home and read on Sunday mornings.
His father, who was more God-fearing, told Elon that there were things that could not be known through our limited senses and minds. “There are no atheist pilots,” he would say, and Elon would add, “There are no atheists at exam time.” But Elon came to believe early on that science could explain things and so there was no need to conjure up a Creator or a deity that would intervene in our lives.
When he reached his teens, it began to gnaw at him that something was missing. Both the religious and the scientific explanations of existence, he says, did not address the really big questions, such as Where did the universe come from, and why does it exist? Physics could teach everything about the universe except why. That led to what he calls his adolescent existential crisis. “I began trying to figure out what the meaning of life and the universe was,” he says. “And I got real depressed about it, like maybe life may have no meaning.”
Like a good bookworm, he addressed these questions through reading. At first, he made the typical mistake of angsty adolescents and read existential philosophers, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schopenhauer. This had the effect of turning confusion into despair. “I do not recommend reading Nietzsche as a teenager,” he says.
Fortunately, he was saved by science fiction, that wellspring of wisdom for game-playing kids with intellects on hyperdrive. He plowed through the entire sci-fi section in his school and local libraries, then pushed the librarians to order more.
One of his favorites was Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, a novel about a lunar penal colony. It is managed by a supercomputer, nicknamed Mike, that is able to acquire self-awareness and a sense of humor. The computer sacrifices its life during a rebellion at the penal colony. The book explores an issue that would become central to Musk’s life: Will artificial intelligence develop in ways that benefit and protect humanity, or will machines develop intentions of their own and become a threat to humans?
That topic is central to what became another of his favorites, Isaac Asimov’s robot stories. The tales formulate laws of robotics that are designed to make sure robots do not get out of control. In the final scene of his 1985 novel Robots and Empire, Asimov expounds the most fundamental of these rules, dubbed the Zeroth Law: “A robot may not harm humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” The heroes of Asimov’s Foundation series of books develop a plan to send settlers to distant regions of the galaxy to preserve human consciousness in the face of an impending dark age.
More than thirty years later, Musk unleashed a random tweet about how these ideas motivated his quest to make humans a space-faring species and to harness artificial intelligence to be at the service of humans: “Foundation Series & Zeroth Law are fundamental to creation of SpaceX.”
The Hitchhiker’s Guide
The science fiction book that most influenced his wonder years was Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The jaunty and wry tale helped shape Musk’s philosophy and added a dollop of droll humor to his serious mien. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” he says, “helped me out of my existential depression, and I soon realized it was amazingly funny in all sorts of subtle ways.”
The story involves a human named Arthur Dent who is rescued by a passing spaceship seconds before the Earth is destroyed by an alien civilization that is building a hyperspace highway. Along with his alien rescuer, Dent explores various nooks and crannies of the galaxy, which is run by a two-headed president who “had turned unfathomability into an art form.” The denizens of the galaxy are trying to figure out the “Answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” They build a supercomputer that after seven million years spouts out the answer: 42. When that provokes a befuddled howl, the computer replies, “That quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.” That lesson stuck with Musk. “I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe,” he says.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide, combined with Musk’s later immersion into video and tabletop simulation games, led to a lifelong fascination with the tantalizing thought that we might merely be pawns in a simulation devised by some higher-order beings. As Douglas Adams writes, “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
Blastar
In the late 1970s, the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons became a popular obsession among the global tribe of geeks. Elon, Kimbal, and their Rive cousins immersed themselves in the game, which involves sitting around a table and, guided by character sheets and the roll of dice, embarking on fantasy adventures. One of the players serves as the Dungeon Master, refereeing the action.
Elon usually played the Dungeon Master and, surprisingly, did it with gentleness. “Even as a kid, Elon had a whole bunch of different demeanors and moods,” says his cousin Peter Rive. “As a Dungeon Master, he was incredibly patient, which is not, in my experience, always his default personality, if you know what I mean. It happens sometimes, and it’s so beautiful when it does.” Instead of pressuring his brother and cousins, he would turn very analytical to describe the options they had in each situation.
Together they entered a tournament in Johannesburg, at which they were the youngest players. The tournament’s Dungeon Master assigned their mission: you have to save this woman by figuring out who in the game is the bad guy and killing him. Elon looked at the Dungeon Master and said, “I think you’re the bad guy.” And so they killed him. Elon was right, and the game, which was supposed to last a few hours, was over. The organizers accused them of somehow cheating and at first tried to deny them the prize. But Musk prevailed. “These guys were idiots,” he says. “It was so obvious.”
Musk saw his first computer around the time he turned eleven. He was in a shopping mall in Johannesburg, and he stood there for minutes just staring at it. “I had read computer magazines,” he says, “but I had never actually seen a computer before.” As with the motorcycle, he hounded his father to get him one. Errol was bizarrely averse to computers, claiming they were good only for time-wasting games, not engineering. So Elon saved his money from odd jobs and bought a Commodore VIC-20, one of the earliest personal computers. It could play games such as Galaxian and Alpha Blaster, in which a player attempts to protect Earth from alien invaders.
The computer came with a course in how to program in BASIC that involved sixty hours of lessons. “I did it in three days, barely sleeping,” he remembers. A few months later, he tore out an ad for a conference on personal computers at a university and told his father he wanted to attend. Again, his father balked. It was an expensive seminar, about $400, and not meant for children. Elon replied that it was “essential” and just stood next to his father staring. Over the next few days, Elon would pull the ad out of his pocket and renew his demand. Finally his father was able to talk the university into giving a discounted price for Elon to stand in the back. When Errol came to pick him up at the end, he found Elon engaging with three of the professors. “This boy must get a new computer,” one of them declared.
After he aced a programming skills test at his school, he got an IBM PC/XT and taught himself to program using Pascal and Turbo C++. At age thirteen, he was able to create a video game, which he named Blastar, using 123 lines of BASIC and some simple assembly language to get the graphics to work. He submitted it to PC and Office Technology magazine, and it appeared in the December 1984 issue with a short introduction explaining, “In this game, you have to destroy an alien space freighter, which is carrying deadly Hydrogen Bombs and Status Beam Machines.” Although it’s unclear what a Status Beam Machine is, the concept sounds cool. The magazine paid him $500, and he proceeded to sell it two other games, one like Donkey Kong and the other simulating roulette and blackjack.
Thus began a lifelong addiction to video games. “If you’re playing with Elon, you play pretty much nonstop until finally you have to eat,” Peter Rive says. On one trip to Durban, Elon figured out how to hack the games in a mall. He was able to hotwire the system so that they could play for hours without using any coins.
He then came up with a grander idea: the cousins could create a video-game arcade of their own. “We knew exactly which games were the most popular, so it seemed like a sure thing,” Elon says. He figured out how the cash flow could finance the machines. But when the boys tried to get the city permits, they were told they needed someone over eighteen to sign the application. Kimbal, who had filled out the thirty pages of forms, decided that they couldn’t ask Errol. “He was just too hard of a human,” Kimbal says. “So we went to Russ and Pete’s dad, and he flipped out. That basically shut the whole thing down.”
Escape Velocity
Leaving South Africa, 1989
Jekyll and Hyde
At age seventeen, after seven years of living with his father, Elon realized that he would have to escape. Life with him had become increasingly unnerving.
There were times when Errol would be jovial and fun, but occasionally he would become dark, verbally abusive, and possessed by fantasies and conspiracies. “His mood could change on a dime,” Tosca says. “Everything could be super, then within a second he would be vicious and spewing abuse.” It was almost as if he had a split personality. “One minute he would be super friendly,” Kimbal says, “and the next he would be screaming at you, lecturing you for hours—literally two or three hours while he forced you to just stand there—calling you worthless, pathetic, making scarring and evil comments, not allowing you to leave.”
Elon’s cousins became reluctant to visit. “You never knew what you were in for,” Peter Rive says. “Sometimes Errol would be like, ‘I just got us some new motorbikes so let’s jump on them.’ At other times he would be angry and threatening and, oh fuck, make you clean the toilets with a toothbrush.” When Peter tells me this, he pauses for a moment and then, a bit hesitantly, notes that Elon sometimes has similar mood swings. “When Elon’s in a good mood, it’s like the coolest, funnest thing in the world. And when he’s in a bad mood, he goes really dark, and you’re just walking on eggshells.”
One day Peter came over to the house and found Errol sitting in his underwear at the kitchen table with a plastic roulette wheel. He was trying to see whether microwaves could affect it. He would spin the wheel, mark down the result, then spin it and put it in a microwave oven and record the result. “It was nuts,” Peter says. Errol had become convinced that he could find a system for beating the game. He dragged Elon to the Pretoria casino many times, dressing him up so that he looked older than sixteen, and had him write down the numbers while Errol used a calculator hidden under a betting card.
Elon went to the library and read a few books on roulette and even wrote a roulette simulation program on his computer. He then tried to convince his father that none of his schemes would work. But Errol believed that he had found a deeper truth about probability and, as he later described it to me, an “almost total solution to what is called randomness.” When I asked him to explain it, he said, “There are no ‘random events’ or ‘chance.’ All events follow the Fibonacci Sequence, like the Mandelbrot Set. I went on to discover the relationship between ‘chance’ and the Fibonacci Sequence. This is the subject for a scientific paper. If I share it, all activities relying on ‘chance’ will be ruined, so I am in doubt as to doing that.”
I’m not quite sure what all that means. Neither is Elon: “I don’t know how he went from being great at engineering to believing in witchcraft. But he somehow made that evolution.” Errol can be very forceful and occasionally convincing. “He changes reality around him,” Kimbal says. “He will literally make up things, but he actually believes his own false reality.”
Sometimes Errol would make sweeping assertions to his kids that were unconnected to facts, such as insisting that in the United States the president is considered divine and cannot be criticized. At other times he would weave fanciful tales that cast himself as either the hero or the victim. All would be asserted with such conviction that Elon and Kimbal would find themselves questioning their own view of reality. “Can you imagine growing up like that?” Kimbal asks. “It was mental torture, and it infects you. You end up asking, ‘What is reality?’ ”
I found myself getting caught up in Errol’s tangled web. In a series of calls and emails over the course of two years, he gave me varying accounts of his relationship with, and his feelings for, his kids, Maye, and his stepdaughter, with whom he would have two children (more on that later). “Elon and Kimbal have developed their own narrative about what I was like, and it doesn’t accord with the facts,” he claims. Their tales about him being psychologically abusive, he insists, are told to please their mother. But when I press him, he tells me to go with their version. “I don’t care if they choose a different narrative, as long as they are happy. I have no desire for it to be my word versus theirs. Let them have the floor.”
When talking about his father, Elon will sometimes let loose a laugh, a somewhat harsh and bitter one. It’s similar to the laugh that his father has. Some of the words Elon uses, the way he stares, his sudden transitions from light to dark to light, remind his family members of the Errol simmering inside of him. “I would see shades of these horrible stories Elon told me surface in his own behavior,” says Justine, Elon’s first wife. “It made me realize how difficult it is not to be shaped by what we grew up with, even when that’s not what we want.” Every now and then, she dared to say something like “You’re turning into your father.” She explains, “It was our code phrase to warn him that he was going into the realm of darkness.”
But Justine says that Elon, who was always emotionally invested in their children, is different from his father in a fundamental way: “With Errol, there was a sense that really bad things could happen around him. Whereas if the zombie apocalypse happened, you’d want to be on Elon’s team, because he would figure out a way to get those zombies in line. He can be very harsh, but at the end of the day, you can trust him to find a way to prevail.”
In order for that to happen, he had to move on. It was time to leave South Africa.
Musk began pushing both his mother and father, trying to convince them to move to the United States and take him and his siblings. Neither was interested. “So then I was like, ‘Well, I’m just going to go by myself,’ ” he says.
He first tried to get U.S. citizenship on the grounds that his mother’s father had been born in Minnesota, but that failed because his mother had been born in Canada and had never claimed U.S. citizenship. So he concluded that getting to Canada might be an easier first step. He went to the Canadian consulate on his own, got application forms for a passport, and filled them out not only for himself but for his mother, brother, and sister (but not father). The approvals came through in late May 1989.
“I would have left the next morning, but airline tickets were cheaper back then if you bought them fourteen days in advance,” he says, “so I had to wait those two weeks.” On June 11, 1989, about two weeks shy of his eighteenth birthday, he had dinner at Pretoria’s finest restaurant, Cynthia’s, with his father and siblings, who then drove him to the Johannesburg airport.
“You’ll be back in a few months,” Elon says his father told him contemptuously. “You’ll never be successful.”
As usual, Errol has his own version of the story, in which he was the action hero. According to him, Elon became seriously depressed during his senior year of high school. His despair reached a head on Republic Day, May 31, 1989. His family was preparing to watch the parade, but Elon refused to get out of bed. His father leaned against the big desk in Elon’s room, with its well-used computer, and asked, “Do you want to go and study in America?” Elon perked up. “Yes,” he answered. Errol claims, “It was my idea. Up until then, he had never said that he wanted to go to America. So I said, ‘Well, tomorrow you should go and see the American cultural attaché,’ who was a friend of mine from Rotary.”
His father’s account, Elon says, was just another of his elaborate fantasies casting him as the hero. In this case, it was provably false. By Republic Day 1989, Elon had already gotten a Canadian passport and purchased his airline ticket.