Growing Up in Pretoria

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on June 28, 1971. Much of the man who talks about saving humanity and settling Mars traces back to a lonely, often painful childhood 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 Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Those books gave 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

His parents, Errol and Maye Musk, divorced when he was about nine, 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 bullies targeted him. In the most serious incident he was beaten badly enough to be hospitalized. He got through it by retreating into books and machines and waiting for a way out.

The through-line to his companies

The reading turned into a lifelong habit of teaching himself hard subjects from scratch, from programming at 10 to rocket engineering at 30. When Elon Musk says the point of SpaceX is to make humanity a multiplanet species so that one disaster cannot end us, he is repeating the questions he first met in the pages of Asimov and Douglas Adams.

The bottom line

Elon Musk left South Africa at 17 on a passport claimed through his mother. He did not go back until a vacation at the end of 2000, the trip on which he caught malaria.