I have been tracing Elon Musk’s path from South Africa to North America and I realized there is a chapter that most people skip entirely. Between leaving Pretoria and arriving at the University of Pennsylvania – between the teenager who wanted to escape and the young man who would co-found Zip2 – there were two years at a Canadian university that shaped nearly everything that followed.

In 1989, a seventeen-year-old Elon Musk arrived at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He had roughly $2,000, a Canadian passport courtesy of his mother Maye Musk, and the kind of raw ambition that hadn’t yet found a target. What happened at Queen’s didn’t make headlines. There was no startup, no billion-dollar exit. But it was at Queen’s that Musk met the woman he would marry, discovered what kind of thinker he was, and made the decision that would bring him to the United States.

Why does this chapter matter? Because the people we become are often shaped by the places that receive us when we are still figuring ourselves out.

Kingston, Ontario, 1989

Queen’s University sits in Kingston, Ontario, a small city on the northeastern shore of Lake Ontario, roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal. It was, and remains, one of Canada’s most respected universities – a school known for its strong engineering and business programs, its tight-knit campus community, and its stone buildings that give it the feel of a much older institution.

For Musk, Queen’s was the first step of a plan. He had left South Africa in part to avoid mandatory military service under the apartheid government. His Canadian passport – Maye was born in Saskatchewan – gave him an entry point to North America. Queen’s offered admission. And so a teenager who had grown up in Pretoria found himself in a university town in eastern Ontario, surrounded by Canadian students who had no idea what to make of him.

“He was intense,” a former classmate recalled. “Even back then, he had this way of talking about the future as though it were a problem set he was already solving.”

Musk enrolled in the 1989-1990 academic year and would spend two years at Queen’s before transferring. Those two years were formative in ways that only become clear when you look at what happened next.

Meeting Justine Wilson

The most consequential event of Musk’s time at Queen’s had nothing to do with academics. It was meeting Justine Wilson, a fellow student who would become his first wife.

The story of how they met has been told by Justine herself in a 2010 essay for Marie Claire. According to her account, Musk appeared in front of her dormitory and told her they had met at a party. Justine was fairly certain she had not attended the party in question.

“He said we’d met at a party. I knew I hadn’t been to that party,” Justine Wilson wrote. “Years later he confessed he’d noticed me from across the common room and found out my schedule.”

It was, by any standard, a bold approach. Musk had noticed Justine, tracked down information about her, and manufactured a reason to talk to her. Whether you find that romantic or alarming probably depends on your perspective, but it reveals something about Musk that would define his entire career: when he identified something he wanted, he engineered a path to it.

Justine and Elon dated intermittently through their university years. They married in January 2000, by which point Musk had already sold Zip2 and was building X.com. They had six children together – twins in 2004 and triplets in 2006. They divorced in 2008, during one of the most turbulent periods of Musk’s professional life, when both Tesla and SpaceX were on the verge of bankruptcy.

The marriage, the children, the divorce – all of it traces back to a common room at Queen’s University in 1989.

The Academic Musk

What kind of student was Musk at Queen’s? By most accounts, he was good but restless. He took courses in business and physics. He was clearly intelligent, but he was not the type to sit comfortably within an academic structure. He was already reading voraciously – science fiction, physics textbooks, business books – and thinking about problems that extended well beyond the scope of any undergraduate curriculum.

The Musk family has always had a complicated relationship with formal education. Elon’s mother Maye earned multiple degrees while raising three children and working five jobs. His brother Kimbal would later attend the French Culinary Institute. His sister Tosca studied filmmaking. Education was valued, but it was always a means to an end, never an end in itself.

At Queen’s, Musk reportedly told friends that he wanted to work on things that would “affect the future of humanity” – energy, space, the internet. These were not the ambitions of a typical undergraduate in 1990. Most of his classmates were thinking about summer internships. Musk was thinking about species-level problems.

“Even when he was nineteen, he talked about things that most people don’t think about until they’re running companies,” a college friend recalled in Ashlee Vance’s biography. “Solar energy. Electric cars. The internet. He had a list.”

The Transfer to Penn

After two years at Queen’s, Musk made the decision to transfer to the University of Pennsylvania. The move was strategic. Penn offered a dual enrollment in the Wharton School of Business and the School of Arts and Sciences, allowing Musk to pursue both economics and physics. More importantly, Penn was in the United States, and Musk had decided that if he was going to build companies that changed the world, he needed to be in America.

This is a detail that often gets overlooked. Musk did not arrive in the United States as a confident entrepreneur with a plan. He arrived as a transfer student from a Canadian university, with limited resources, no professional network, and a thick South African accent. The mythology around Musk tends to start with Zip2 or PayPal, but the real starting point was a deliberate, calculated decision to leave a comfortable Canadian university and bet on America.

At Penn, Musk completed his Bachelor of Science in Economics from Wharton and his Bachelor of Arts in Physics. He briefly enrolled in a PhD program at Stanford but dropped out after two days to pursue the internet boom. That decision led directly to the founding of Zip2 in 1995, the company that would produce Musk’s first fortune.

What Queen’s Gave Musk

I think Queen’s University gave Elon Musk three things that don’t show up on any transcript.

First, it gave him a bridge. Queen’s was the physical and psychological bridge between South Africa and the United States. It was the place where Musk stopped being a teenager escaping a country and started being a young man building toward something.

Second, it gave him Justine. Whatever one thinks of the marriage and its end, Justine Wilson was a significant figure in Musk’s life during the years when he built his first companies, survived his first failures, and became a father. The relationship that began in a Queen’s common room lasted through Zip2, X.com, PayPal, SpaceX, and the early years of Tesla.

Third, it gave him confidence. Musk had left South Africa uncertain about his place in the world. At Queen’s, he discovered that he could hold his own intellectually, that his ambitions were not absurd, and that the path to the United States was navigable. That confidence – the quiet certainty that he belonged in the rooms where the biggest problems were being discussed – would prove to be one of his most important assets.

The Queen’s years don’t appear in most Elon Musk timelines. There were no startups founded, no billions made, no rockets launched. But the person who did all of those things was formed, in large part, in a stone-clad university building in Kingston, Ontario, between 1989 and 1991.

Sometimes the most important chapters in a person’s story are the ones that happen before the story officially begins. For Musk, Queen’s University was that chapter – the quiet prologue to one of the loudest careers in modern history.

Sources

  • Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Ecco, 2015
  • Justine Musk (Wilson), “I Was a Starter Wife: Inside America’s Messiest Divorce,” Marie Claire, September 2010
  • Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk, Simon & Schuster, 2023
  • Queen’s University Alumni Records
  • The Globe and Mail, “The Canadian Chapter of Elon Musk’s Life,” 2018
  • Bloomberg, “Elon Musk’s College Years,” 2021