Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Lord of the Rings,
” he said.
Maye viewed these high school years through a mother’s eyes and recounted plenty of tales of Musk
performing spectacular academic feats. The video game he wrote, she said, impressed much older, more
experienced techies. He aced math exams well beyond his years. And he had that incredible memory. The
only reason he did not outrank the other boys was a lack of interest in the work prescribed by the school.
As Musk saw it, “I just look at it as ‘What grades do I need to get where I want to go?’ There were
compulsory subjects like Afrikaans, and I just didn’t see the point of learning that. It seemed ridiculous.
I’d get a passing grade and that was fine. Things like physics and computers—I got the highest grade you
can get in those. There needs to be a reason for a grade. I’d rather play video games, write software, and
read books than try and get an A if there’s no point in getting an A. I can remember failing subjects in like
fourth and fifth grade. Then, my mother’s boyfriend told me I’d be held back if I didn’t pass. I didn’t
actually know you had to pass the subjects to move to the next grade. I got the best grades in class after
that.”
At seventeen, Musk left South Africa for Canada. He has recounted this journey quite often in the
press and typically leans on two descriptions of the motivation for his flight. The short version is that
Musk wanted to get to the United States as quickly as possible and could use Canada as a pit stop via his
Canadian ancestry. The second go-to story that Musk relies on has more of a social conscience. South
Africa required military service at the time. Musk wanted to avoid joining the military, he has said,
because it would have forced him to participate in the apartheid regime.
What rarely gets mentioned is that Musk attended the University of Pretoria for five months before
heading off on his grand adventure. He began pursuing physics and engineering but put lackluster effort
into the work and soon dropped out of school. Musk characterized the time at university as just something
to do while he awaited his Canadian documentation. In addition to being an inconsequential part of his
life, Musk lazing through school to avoid South Africa’s required military service rather undermines the
tale of a brooding, adventurous youth that he likes to tell, which is likely why the stint at the University of
Pretoria never seems to come up.
There’s no question, though, that Musk had been pining to get to the United States on a visceral level

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for a long time. Musk’s early inclination toward computers and technology had fostered an intense interest
in Silicon Valley, and his trips overseas had reinforced the idea that America was the place to get things
done. South Africa, by contrast, presented far less opportunity for an entrepreneurial soul. As Kimbal put
it, “South Africa was like a prison for someone like Elon.”
Musk’s opportunity to flee arrived with a change in the law that allowed Maye to pass her Canadian
citizenship to her children. Musk immediately began researching how to complete the paperwork for this
process. It took about a year to receive the approvals from the Canadian government and to secure a
Canadian passport. “That’s when Elon said, ‘I’m leaving for Canada,’” Maye said. In these pre-Internet
days, Musk had to wait three agonizing weeks to get a plane ticket. Once it arrived, and without flinching,
he left home for good.

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CANADA
M
USK’S GREAT ESCAPE TO CANADA WAS NOT WELL THOUGHT OUT. He knew of a great-
uncle in Montreal, hopped on a flight and hoped for the best. Upon landing in June 1988, Musk found a
pay phone and tried to use directory assistance to find his uncle. When that didn’t work, he called his
mother collect. She had bad news. Maye had sent a letter to the uncle before Musk left and received a
reply while her son was in transit. The uncle had gone to Minnesota, meaning Musk had nowhere to stay.
Bags in hand, Musk headed for a youth hostel.
After spending a few days in Montreal exploring the city, Musk tried to come up with a long-term
plan. Maye had family scattered all across Canada, and Musk began reaching out to them. He bought a
countrywide bus ticket that let him hop on and off as he pleased for one hundred dollars, and opted to
head to Saskatchewan, the former home of his grandfather. After a 1,900-mile bus ride, he ended up in
Swift Current, a town of fifteen thousand people. Musk called a second cousin out of the blue from the bus
station and hitched a ride to his house.
Musk spent the next year working a series of odd jobs around Canada. He tended vegetables and
shoveled out grain bins at a cousin’s farm located in the tiny town of Waldeck. Musk celebrated his
eighteenth birthday there, sharing a cake with the family he’d just met and a few strangers from the
neighborhood. After that, he learned to cut logs with a chain saw in Vancouver, British Columbia. The
hardest job Musk took came after a visit to the unemployment office. He inquired about the job with the
best wage, which turned out to be a gig cleaning the boiler room of a lumber mill for eighteen dollars an
hour. “You have to put on this hazmat suit and then shimmy through this little tunnel that you can barely fit
in,” Musk said. “Then, you have a shovel and you take the sand and goop and other residue, which is still
steaming hot, and you have to shovel it through the same hole you came through. There is no escape.
Someone else on the other side has to shovel it into a wheelbarrow. If you stay in there for more than
thirty minutes, you get too hot and die.” Thirty people started out at the beginning of the week. By the third
day, five people were left. At the end of the week, it was just Musk and two other men doing the work.
As Musk made his way around Canada, his brother, sister, and mother were figuring out how to get
there as well.
*
When Kimbal and Elon eventually reunited in Canada, their headstrong, playful natures
bloomed. Elon ended up enrolling at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, in 1989. (He picked
Queen’s over the University of Waterloo because he felt there were more good-looking women at
Queen’s.)
2
 Outside of his studies, Elon would read the newspaper alongside Kimbal, and the two of them
would identify interesting people they would like to meet. They then took turns cold-calling these people
to ask if they were available to have lunch. Among the harassed was the head of marketing for the Toronto
Blue Jays baseball team, a business writer for the