Growing Up in Pretoria

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on June 28, 1971. The version of him the world knows, the one who talks about saving humanity and colonizing Mars, did not come from nowhere. A lot of it traces back to a childhood that was lonely and often painful, and to the thousands of pages he read to get through it.

A childhood spent inside books

As a boy, Elon Musk read constantly, often two books in a day, and when he ran out of books he started working through the family's set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He loved science fiction and fantasy, especially Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Those books were not just entertainment. They handed him a way of thinking about big questions, about civilizations rising and falling and about the long-term survival of intelligent life. Years later he would describe the mission of his companies in almost exactly those terms.

The hard parts

The harder parts of the story deserve to be told plainly and without drama. His parents, Errol and Maye Musk, divorced when he was young, and Elon Musk spent years living with a demanding father in a home he has described as difficult. School was worse. He was a small, awkward, intensely bookish kid, and he was targeted by bullies. In the most serious incident he was beaten badly enough to be hospitalized. He got through it the way he got through most things, by retreating into books and machines and waiting for a way out.

The through-line to his companies

It is easy to draw a straight line from that childhood to the adult. The reading became a lifelong habit of teaching himself hard subjects from scratch. The pain became an unusual willingness to keep going when things hurt, which shows up again and again when his companies are near death. And the science fiction became a worldview. When Elon Musk says the point of SpaceX is to make humanity a multiplanet species so that a single disaster cannot end us, he is repeating, in grown-up form, the questions a bullied boy first met in the pages of Asimov and Douglas Adams.

The bottom line

A difficult childhood does not explain everything about a person, and it does not excuse anything either. But in Elon Musk's case the roots are unusually visible. The self-teaching, the high pain tolerance, and the save-humanity framing that runs through his companies all showed up first in a lonely, well-read, badly bullied kid in Pretoria.

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Keep reading: Blastar, His First Sale at 12, Leaving South Africa at 17. See how the mission grew up in Making Life Multiplanetary.