The bestselling author presents his latest biography, about the billionaire entrepreneur whose visionary projects speak to a traumatic and violent childhood and the abusive father that shaped his psyche.
As a kid growing up in South Africa, Elon Musk knew pain and learned how to survive it.."It was a paramilitary Lord of the Flies," he recalls. The kids were each given small rations of food and water, and they were allowed—indeed encouraged—to fight over them."Bullying was considered a virtue," his younger brother Kimbal says. The big kids quickly learned to punch the little ones in the face and take their stuff.
His most searing experiences came at school. For a long time, he was the youngest and smallest student in his class. He had trouble picking up social cues. Empathy did not come naturally, and he had neither the desire nor the instinct to be ingratiating. As a result, he was regularly picked on by bullies, who would come up and punch him in the face."If you have never been punched in the nose, you have no idea how it affects you the rest of your life," he says.
When Elon finally came home from the hospital, his father berated him."I had to stand for an hour as he yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless," Elon recalls. Kimbal, who had to watch the tirade, says it was the worst memory of his life."My father just lost it, went ballistic, as he often did. He had zero compassion."
But he admits that he encouraged a physical and emotional toughness."Their experiences with me would have madequite tame," he says, adding that violence was simply part of the learning experience in South Africa."Two held you down while another pummeled your face with a log and so on. New boys were forced to fight the school thug on their first day at a new school." He proudly concedes that he exercised"an extremely stern streetwise autocracy" with his boys.
During a particularly hellish period of his life in 2008, after the first three launches of his SpaceX rockets exploded and Tesla was about to go bankrupt, he would wake up thrashing and recount to Talulah Riley, who became his second wife, the things his father had once said."I'd heard him use those phrases himself," she says."It had a profound effect on how he operates.
His heritage and breeding made him at times callous and impulsive. It also led to an exceedingly high tolerance for risk. He could calculate it coldly and also embrace it feverishly."Elon wants risk for its own sake," says Peter Thiel, who became his partner in the early days of PayPal."He seems to enjoy it, indeed at times be addicted to it."
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