J.T. Owens - Elon Musk: The Unauthorized Autobiography

Elon Musk

The Unauthorized Autobiography

J.T. Owens

Copyright 2018 J.T. Owens

Dedicated to all our children

Past Present and Future

The Early Years

Hi I'm Elon Musk, I currently run Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, the Boring Company, and I'm co-chairman of OpenAI. I was trying to think what the most useful thing is that I can say to be useful to you in the future. I'm surprised by the whole thing honestly. I certainly didn't expect any of these things to happen, and I often find myself wondering, how did this happen? I guess I'll just tell you the story of how I came to be here, the various things that I did, and maybe why I did them. Maybe there are lessons there, and hopefully, that's a bit helpful.

I was born in 71, in Pretoria, South Africa, and lived in Johannesburg and Durban as well. My father was an engineer, an electromechanical engineer, so I grew up in sort of an engineering household. My mother is a model and nutritionist, and was born in Canada.

I do have some American background, my grandfather actually was an American from Minnesota. In fact a lot of people think my name must be from some exotic location, but I was named after my great grandfather John Elon Haldeman who was from Minneapolis, actually St. Paul I should say. He was like a school superintendent and a part-time sheriff in 1900. So I'm actually from Africa and named after my American ancestor.

My grandfather moved with all his kids and my mom and everyone to South Africa because he wanted to use it as a base of exploration. He was sort of a amateur archaeologist and he liked to explore things. He had this little plane that he liked to fly all over the place, and he flew it all through Africa and Asia. He was the first person to fly from South Africa to Australia. He did this in a plane with no electronic instruments, and in some places they had diesel and some places they had gasoline, so he had to rebuild the engine to whatever fuel they had. It's lucky he survived on that one.

I was able to travel to a few countries growing up, within Africa and around the world. On the first trip that I went out of South Africa, Paris, that was where I went when I was a little kid. My parents brought me there when I was like 6 years old, I've loved Paris ever since.

I was definitely very driven as a kid and very willful. One of the things that I remember from my childhood, I was I think six, or something maybe around that age, so the memory is a little fuzzy at this point. I was just learning to read basically. As I recall I was grounded one afternoon for some reason, I don't know why, and prevented from going to play with my cousins who lived on the other side of town. I felt it was unjust, and I really wanted to go to my cousin's party, who was five - so it was a kid's party. At first I was going to take my bike, and I told my mum this, which was a mistake. She told me some story about how you needed a license for a bike, and the police would stop me. I wasn't 100% sure if that was true or not, but I thought I better walk, just in case. I escaped from my nanny, and just started walking to my cousin's house. I didn't really know the way, I kind of knew the way, and I could barely read the roadsigns. It was 10 or 12 miles away clear across town, it's really quite far. Further than I realized actually. I think it took me about four hours. I was getting to my cousins house just as my mum was leaving that party with my brother and sister. She saw me walking along the sidewalk and she freaked out, because she didn't know how I got there. I saw she saw me, so I then sprinted to my cousin's house and I was just about two blocks away and I climbed a tree and refused to come down until they promised that they wouldn't punish me, and I could play with my cousins. I didn't get punished actually, but they didn't let me play with my cousins either.

In retrospect it was obviously a very foolish thing to do, because something terrible could've happened, I could've been kidnapped, or run over or something like that, but I was so determined to go play with my cousins that I basically walked clear across the capital city.

I got bored easily unless I was doing something like reading or playing a video game or watching TV. We had like very lame TV. I mean South Africa had terrible TV, like really bad. I liked watching but there was just not so much of it. We literally in the early days had one channel and it was only on for half a day. Boredom led to a lot of reading.

I read all the comics I could buy or they let me read at the bookstore before chasing me away. I liked obviously, Batman, Superman and stuff, Green Lantern, Iron Man. Better not say Iron Man first, because then people will think... but I did think that was a pretty cool one. Doctor Strange.. if there was a comic on the rack, I read it. I would read everything that I could get my hands on, from when I woke up to when I went to sleep.

I read the encyclopedia about age 9 or 10. Not that I wanted to read the encyclopedia, but I ran out of things to read so in desperation I read the encyclopedia. You can learn things very quickly just reading books, the information is all there. If your data rate of reading books is much faster, you can read information much faster than you can hear it.

I would just be questioning things, maybe it's sort of built in to question things. When I was a little kid I was really scared of the dark, but then I sort of came to understand that dark really means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength, 400 to 700 nanometer. Then I thought it's really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. I wasnt afraid of the dark anymore after that. I would always think about something, and whether that thing was really true or not and could something else be true, or is there a better conclusion that one could draw that's more probable. I was doing that when I was in elementary school. It would infuriate my parents by the way, that I just wouldn't believe them when they said something, because I would ask them why, then I would consider if that response makes sense given everything else I know.

I hated going to school when I was a kid, it was torture. I was actually for quite a while the youngest and smallest in the class, and my parents moved a lot so I went to six different schools. You'd make friends the one year then you'd be in the new school the next. I got beaten up a lot at school. Yeah it sucked. For no good reason I think. Mostly I ran, or hide in classrooms during recess. Run or hide, those are the two options really, so I just read a lot of books and try to stay out of peoples way during school. Part of it was probably because I was a bit of a smart ass sometimes. Up until tenth grade I was pretty much the smallest kid in my class, and then I kind of grew after that. Being sort of little book wormy kid smart ass was a recipe for disaster.

The best teacher I ever had was my elementary school principal. Our math teacher quit for some reason, and so he decided to sub in himself for math and accelerate the syllabus by a year. We had to work like the house was on fire for the first half of the lesson and do extra homework, but then we got to hear stories of when he was a soldier in WWII. If you didn't do the work, you didn't get to hear the stories. Everybody did the work.

When I was young we did sort of a variety of things. We went selling chocolate door-to-door, we created a little business plan to create a video arcade. We had this brilliant idea to start a video arcade because we really knew what games were popular. That got shut down by our parents. I think we would've actually made money by the way, because we really understood what games were good.

I loved playing video games. I had one of the first video game consoles, that didn't even have cartridges. You had like four games that you could play, and you had to pick one of the four, that was it. I went from there to the original Atari when I was maybe 6 or 7, and then intellivision and other game consoles. My father brought me on a trip to the United States when I was about 10. I remember it was a really awesome experience, because the hotels all had arcades. My number one thing when we went to a new hotel or motel or whatever it was, was go to the arcades.