Leaving South Africa at 17

The founder of Tesla and SpaceX did not start in Silicon Valley. He started as a seventeen-year-old leaving home alone, flying to a cold country with a couple of bags and a plan to work his way toward America. The leaving is one of the most important decisions Elon Musk ever made, and it happened before he had built anything at all.

Why he left

By his late teens Elon Musk had decided the future he wanted was not in South Africa. The country still had compulsory military service under the apartheid government, which he did not want to serve, and the real action in technology and business was on the other side of the world. His mother, Maye Musk, had been born in Canada, which meant Elon could claim a Canadian passport. In 1989, at seventeen, he used it and left. The idea was to reach Canada first and use it as a stepping stone toward the United States.

The worst job he ever had

Getting there meant doing whatever paid. In Canada he worked a string of rough jobs, including time on a relative's farm and cutting logs with a chainsaw. The one he talks about most was cleaning out the boiler room at a lumber mill. The work meant putting on a hazmat suit, crawling through a narrow tunnel, and shoveling out the hot, steaming residue while sand and muck rained down. It paid better than the other jobs precisely because it was so miserable that most workers walked off after a day or two. He stuck it out.

From a lumber mill to the Ivy League

The odd jobs were a means to an end. Elon Musk enrolled at Queen's University in Ontario, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, where he studied physics and economics. That path, from a boiler tunnel in Canada to an American university, is the bridge between the kid in Pretoria and the founder people know today. He had bet that if he could just get himself to the right country, the rest would follow, and he was willing to do seriously awful work to make the bet pay.

The bottom line

People remember Elon Musk for enormous, expensive bets like reusable rockets. This early one cost him nothing but nerve and sweat. At seventeen he left his home, his family, and his country, and took the worst jobs available, all on the theory that opportunity was somewhere else and worth the pain of reaching. It is the first big example of a pattern he has repeated his whole life.

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