The Malaria That Nearly Killed Him

Elon Musk is famous for working almost all the time and for being suspicious of rest. Part of that comes from personality, but part of it comes from a specific event. Around the end of 2000, one of the few real vacations he ever took nearly killed him.

A vacation that went wrong

The year 2000 had already been rough. Elon Musk had just been pushed out of the top job at the company that became PayPal. To decompress, he and his first wife, Justine, finally took a delayed honeymoon, traveling abroad, including a trip to South Africa. Somewhere along the way he was bitten by a mosquito carrying falciparum malaria, the kind that can attack the brain and kill quickly. When he got home and started feeling ill, the first doctors did not catch it, and the delay let the illness get dangerous.

How close it got

By the time the malaria was correctly diagnosed, Elon Musk was seriously sick. He ended up in intensive care, close to death, and lost a large amount of weight before he began to recover. Getting his strength back took months, not days. He has said, with his usual dark humor, that he came within a whisker of dying, and that the recovery taught him just how fast a healthy person can be brought down.

The lesson he took from it

Most people who nearly die on a trip come home wanting to slow down. Elon Musk drew the opposite conclusion. His takeaway, delivered as a joke that he clearly half means, was "that's my lesson for taking a vacation: vacations will kill you." It fit neatly with a work ethic that was already extreme, and it gave him a story to point to whenever anyone suggested he ease off. Right around this time he was beginning to think about space, the interest that would soon become SpaceX, and he threw himself into it with a survivor's intensity.

The bottom line

The malaria scare is a small, human chapter in a life full of enormous bets, but it helps explain the man. He treats rest as risky and work as safe, and while that is obviously not true in general, for Elon Musk it is rooted in a real memory of nearly dying on the one big vacation he allowed himself.

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Keep reading: Fired on His Honeymoon, The Year It Almost All Ended. See where the space obsession led with Making Life Multiplanetary.