Elon Musk’s complicated childhood as told by his biographer

Today he is on the front page of the media, is in demand from all sides, fascinates as much as he worries, and has many fans who dream of being like him. But Elon Musk wasn’t always like that. As explained by her biographer, Ashlee Vance, author ofElon Musk: the man who will change the worldduring a Google Talk in 2015, Errol and Maye Musk’s son had a difficult childhood. At home and at school. “He was a kind of “know-it-all” gentleman,” explains the journalist in an excerpt broadcast in the podcast episode Scandals, “Elon Musk: childhood, loves and excess”. “He didn’t have many friends when he was young.”

At a very young age, Elon Musk revealed an extraordinary intelligence, and at school, he was more the one who aligned lines of codes and displayed the look of the son of an engineer specific to his side at the top of the class. Smaller than his classmates, a fan of science fiction, computers and physics and chemistry, he was definitely not like other children his age. Even his brother and sister didn’t find him “funny,” reports Ashlee Vance, and he had trouble communicating normally with those around him. In Elon Musk: the man who will change the worldhis biographer recounts this time when his cousin confided to him that he was afraid of the dark. “Black is simply the absence of light,” the young Elon would have replied, without showing the slightest emotion.

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A bullied child

As Ashlee Vance recounts, “at school, he was both ignored by everyone and harassed, very violently. (…) One day, some guys pushed him down some stairs, pinned him down and beat him… Elon was hospitalized for a week or two afterward. There are several stories like that.”

The owner of X (formerly Twitter) was living in South Africa with his family at the time. “At the time, but even today, it’s a culture of virile, macho, athletic masculinity… And Elon didn’t play any sports, he was more the guy who read in the corner,” adds the journalist.

The mystery surrounding his father’s violence

If Elon Musk’s life was complicated at school, it was no simpler at home. He has often said it: his father was not kind to him, and was quick to call him an idiot. Even since his son’s successes, Errol Musk, now 79 years old, never hesitates to affirm that he has no pride for his son and what he managed to accomplish. “You have no idea what a bad person my father is,” the billionaire confided in a long interview for Rolling Stone in 2017, the podcast reports Scandals.

Was the father physically abusive to his son? It’s a question that comes up as we look into Elon Musk’s childhood. “He never told us exactly what his father did to him,” Ashlee Vance says during the Google Talk. “When I interviewed him, there were several times where he started to get teary-eyed, where he started talking about it. And suddenly he shut up.” It’s been a long time since Elon Musk talked about his father. Nor the rest of his family, for that matter.