Elon Musk

Isaacson briefly describes Elon’s grandparents. He characterizes Elon’s maternal grandparents, Joshua and Winnifred Haldeman, as daredevils known for risk-taking and adventure. He notes that Joshua Haldeman was part of the Social Credit Party and that “[t]he movement had a conservative fundamentalist streak tinged with anti-Semitism” (10). Joshua Haldeman moved the family from Canada to South Africa because he believed that the Canadian government was taking too much control from individuals.

Errol Musk was born to Cora and Walter Musk. Walter was a cryptographer in World War II. Cora left him after the war, taking the kids with her. As an adult, Errol found out about the emerald mining industry in Zambia, a country which, at the time, had no bureaucracy, meaning that the mining industry wasn’t regulated. He decided to get into the industry himself.

Isaacson recounts the marriage between Errol Musk and Maye Haldeman, Elon’s mother. The two started dating as young teenagers, and their relationship was marked with drama from the start. Errol cheated on Maye when they were dating. After Maye graduated from college, Errol claimed that he had changed his ways and he proposed to her. On their honeymoon, which Errol spent reading Playboy magazines, the couple started fighting again. On the second night of the honeymoon, Maye found out that she was pregnant.

Maye gave birth to Elon on June 28, 1971. When Elon was three years old, Maye decided that Elon should attend nursery school because he was intellectually curious. At school, Elon tended to space out and was reprimanded by teachers. Many teachers at his school believed that Elon was intellectually challenged.

Elon had no friends and he often offended others by calling them stupid. Isaacson notes that Elon had social difficulties and that, later in life, Elon talked about having Asperger’s. While Elon was never diagnosed, his mother believes that this is correct. Isaacson associates this with Elon’s lack of empathy and kindness and the fact that Elon does not care about being liked by others.

Maye and Errol divorced when Elon was eight. Maye worked constantly at multiple jobs to get by. Isaacson notes that her kids remember her as a mother who didn’t coddle them and who worked all the time. After divorcing Errol, Maye started dating another abusive man. Soon after this man proposed to Maye, Maye found out that one of her friends was pregnant with his child.

At age 10, Elon made a decision to live with his father, a decision that he later came to regret. As an adult, Elon claimed that his father guilted him into the decision, telling Elon that he was lonely and it wasn’t fair for his mother to have all the kids. A few years after Elon moved in with his father, Errol guilt-tripped Kimbal into joining, too.

Errol was an erratic, impulsive, and neglectful father. He once flew the children to Hong Kong with him and left them in the hotel room for two days straight.

Elon and Kimbal often spent time with their two cousins, Peter and Russ Rive. The boys physically fought each other in public when they were angry with each other. Elon was known as the most competitive and the most fearless of the group.

After Elon was bullied and beaten at his public school, Errol moved him to a private school. As a child, Elon liked to experiment with rockets and concoct different mixtures of explosive substances. He used reading as a form of escape and also enjoyed comics. He liked to read his father’s encyclopedias over and over again, as well as a book that described inventions that would be created in the future.

As an adolescent, Elon experienced an existential crisis when he realized that neither science nor religion could explain why the universe existed.

Isaacson describes how Elon, Kimbal, and their cousins loved playing the game Dungeons and Dragons. Elon was also fascinated with computers and video games and he saved his money to buy a Commodore VIC-20, one of the earliest personal computers.

Elon programmed video games and sold them to the magazine PC and Office Technology Magazine. Elon convinced the other boys that they should start a video game arcade of their own, and they started scheming to make this happen, but Elon’s uncle quickly shut it down.

At age 17, Elon realized that he needed to escape his father, since Errol was often verbally abusive and delusional.

Isaacson quotes Justine, Elon’s first wife, who notes that Elon’s behavior as an adult often mirrored his father’s.

As a teenager, Elon tried to convince his parents to move them to the United States. When that failed, he applied at the Canadian consulate for passports for himself and his mother, brother, and sister. He bought a one-way ticket for Canada and left just before his 18th birthday.

Isaacson notes that many people believe that Musk was the beneficiary of inherited wealth and that he arrived in Canada with money from his father’s success in the emerald mining industry. He disputes this characterization, instead arguing that Musk merely arrived with several thousand dollars that were given to him from his parents. When Musk arrived in Canada, he was armed only with this and a list of his mother’s relatives. He traveled through Canada, staying with different relatives. At one point, he got off the bus at a rest stop and, after getting lunch, the bus took off without him, taking all his luggage—including his traveler’s checks—and leaving him stranded with his backpack of books and some loose change in his pocket.

Maye flew from South Africa to Canada; she had decided to move as well. She traveled through Canada, scouting out the cities, and keeping Elon’s sister, Tosca, posted back home. Maye settled on Toronto. Tosca sold the house and furniture in South Africa and joined her mother in Toronto. Elon moved to join them. They started out renting a one-bedroom apartment. They each got hired in various jobs and managed to get a run-down, rent-controlled, three-bedroom apartment.

Musk was put on the international floor of his college dorm at Queen’s University. There, he met Navaid Farooq, a fellow student who became his first close friend.

Isaacson notes that Musk only received a B in his classes on Industrial Relations, business classes which had to do with the dynamics between workers and management. He foreshadows events in the rest of the book, commenting that this was a skill “that future colleagues would notice had been only partly honed” (45).

Elon enjoyed playing strategy games with Farooq. They would play for hours and Elon would become intensely competitive.

Kimbal and Elon would sometimes pick out an impressive person from the newspaper, call the person, and ask them to have lunch. One person they picked was Peter Nicholson of Scotiabank. Nicholson offered Elon and Kimbal summer jobs.

When Elon worked for Scotiabank, he thought he came up with a clever trading decision involving Latin American debt. The bank turned down his strategy, which he did not like. He took this as a sign that he should not work for other people.

Elon transferred to the University of Pennsylvania at the beginning of his junior year and decided to major in physics and business. He had decided that he didn’t want to work for someone else and figured that a degree in business would be useful.

At Penn, Elon spent time with other geeks who enjoyed computers and games. He became friends with another physics student named Robin Ren. While at Penn, he also became interested in solar power; his senior paper was titled “The Importance of Being Solar” (51).

Elon and his roommate threw wild parties, though his roommate noted that Elon remained emotionally detached even while participating in these parties.

In the summer of 1994, Musk secured two summer internships. During the day he worked for Pinnacle Research Institute, a group that was developing a supercapacitor that they believed could be used in electric cars and space-based weapons. At night, he worked for a video game company. While the company wanted him to work for them full-time, Elon decided that he wanted to have a bigger impact on the world than just working as a video game developer.

Elon planned to enroll in Stanford’s graduate program to study material science. He had come up with an idea for an internet company while enrolled at Penn. He requested a deferral at Stanford, saying that he was going to try to start a company but that he would likely fail and return to Stanford to begin the graduate program. His material science professor, however, predicted that Musk would never come back.

Elon and Kimbal centered their startup around the idea of creating a searchable directory of business that would give users directions to the business listed in it. They called it Zip2.

Farooq came to work with him, but they started getting into fights, and Farooq decided to quit the company to preserve their friendship.

At first, Elon and Kimbal were met with skepticism, but once word started to spread throughout Silicon Valley, they started attracting interest from venture capital (VC) investors. They received an offer for a $3 million investment. Eventually, though, the VC partners pushed Elon aside, making him the chief technology officer (CTO) and appointing a more seasoned professional as the company’s chief executive officer (CEO). While at Zip2, Musk was a demanding manager who had an extreme work ethic.

About four years after founding the company, Elon and Kimbal sold Zip2 and split the profits, leaving Elon with $22 million and Kimbal with $15 million.

In college, Musk started dating a woman named Justine. They met at Queen’s when she was a freshman and he was a sophomore. Isaacson claims that “[b]oth of them were energized by drama, and they thrived by fighting” (70).

The two got engaged. They fought throughout their wedding. Even though Elon’s friends and family tried to dissuade him from marrying Justine, he did so anyway.