I was on a lunch break walk the other day, listening to a podcast about immigration, and the host said something like “nobody leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” That line stuck with me because I’d been reading about a seventeen-year-old who packed a suitcase of books and flew to a country where he knew almost no one. What drives someone that young to do that?

In June 1988, Elon Musk left South Africa. He was seventeen. He carried roughly $2,000, a backpack, and — as he would later describe it — a suitcase full of books. He was not headed to Silicon Valley. He was not headed to a prestigious internship. He was headed to the flat, frozen prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada, and the story of how he got there tells you more about the man than any earnings report ever could.

Photo by Steve Jurvetson, Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY 2.0.

The Canadian Passport

Musk’s mother, Maye Musk, was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, before her family moved to South Africa when she was a toddler. That Canadian birthright gave her children something invaluable: the right to apply for Canadian citizenship. For Elon, that passport was an escape hatch.

His mother Maye had her own remarkable story of resilience. South Africa in the late 1980s was a country in the final, turbulent years of apartheid. White males faced mandatory military conscription, and the idea of serving in an army that enforced a system he found morally repugnant weighed heavily on the young Musk. Canada was not just a destination — it was a moral decision.

“I arrived in North America at 17 w $2000, a backpack & a suitcase full of books.”

That tweet, years later, would become one of Musk’s most quoted lines. But the reality behind it was far less poetic than a tweet can capture.

Swift Current, Saskatchewan

Musk’s great escape was not well thought out. He knew of a great-uncle in Montreal, hopped on a flight, and hoped for the best. When he landed, he found a pay phone and tried directory assistance to track down his uncle. His mother had sent a letter ahead, but the uncle had moved to Minnesota. Musk had nowhere to stay. After a few days in Montreal, he bought a countrywide bus ticket for about one hundred dollars and rode 1,900 miles to Swift Current, Saskatchewan — a small prairie town of about 15,000 people. He called a second cousin from the bus station and hitched a ride. If you have never been to Swift Current, imagine a town surrounded by wheat fields that stretch to every horizon, where winter temperatures plunge well below minus thirty degrees Celsius. For a teenager from Pretoria, the culture shock must have been total.

What did Musk do in Saskatchewan? He worked. Not in a lab. Not at a computer. He tended vegetables and shoveled out grain bins at a cousin’s farm in the tiny town of Waldeck. He 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 came after a visit to the unemployment office — 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. 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. If you stay in there for more than thirty minutes, you get too hot and die.” — Elon Musk, quoted in Vance, Elon Musk

Thirty people started that job at the beginning of the week. By the third day, five were left. By the end of the week, it was just Musk and two other men doing the work.

I wondered, reading these accounts, whether this period gets overlooked precisely because it does not fit the narrative we want. We want the genius who coded all night. We want the visionary who saw Mars. We do not want the immigrant teenager shoveling grain in the Canadian cold, because that story is too ordinary. And yet that ordinary story is where the resilience was built.

Queen’s University and the Path Forward

By the fall of 1989, Musk enrolled at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Why Queen’s and not the University of Waterloo, which had a stronger engineering reputation? Musk’s answer, as reported by Vance, was disarmingly honest — he picked Queen’s over Waterloo because there were “more good-looking women at Queen’s.” He studied there from 1989 to 1992, immersing himself in physics and economics.

I know exactly what it feels like to be the smartest person in a very small room. At my hosting company, I was the technical expert, and nobody questioned my decisions. That felt good. It also meant nobody ever improved them.

Queen’s was a turning point. Musk was a strong student, but more importantly, he was surrounded by driven peers for the first time since leaving South Africa. He met people who shared his ambition. He began to see that the path from Saskatchewan to something larger was not just possible — it was taking shape.

The years at Queen’s were not glamorous, but they were foundational. Even as a teenager, Musk had already arrived at his life’s mission statement, drawn from one of the books in that suitcase — Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy. I came to the conclusion that really we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment.” — Elon Musk, quoted in Vance, Elon Musk

After two years at Queen’s, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania on a scholarship. At UPenn, he pursued a dual degree in physics and economics from the Wharton School. He was already thinking bigger. He was already looking at Silicon Valley. But he had earned his way there — not through family connections or inherited wealth, but through grain bins and lumber mills and a second cousin’s spare room in a Saskatchewan winter.

The Immigrant Story We Forget

What strikes me most about this chapter is how thoroughly it contradicts the caricature. Musk is often portrayed as someone who was born into privilege — and it is true that his family in South Africa was comfortable. But the moment he stepped off that plane in Canada, he was on his own. Two thousand dollars does not go far, even in 1989. The safety net was thin. The work was physical. The loneliness of being a teenager in a foreign country, far from friends and family, is something that does not show up in any balance sheet.

I find it significant that Musk has returned to this period in interviews and tweets more than almost any other chapter of his life. It seems to matter to him that people understand he did not start at the top. He started shoveling grain.

There is a pattern among people who build exceptional things: the early years are almost always marked by a period of genuine hardship that they chose rather than had imposed on them. Musk chose to leave South Africa. He chose the discomfort of starting over. He chose the lumber mill and the grain bin. And those choices, freely made, seem to have built something that no amount of venture capital can replicate — the absolute certainty that he could survive anything.

From Saskatchewan to the Stars

The distance from Swift Current, Saskatchewan, to the launchpad at Boca Chica, Texas, is roughly 3,000 kilometers. The distance from shoveling grain to launching rockets is immeasurable. But the person who did both is the same person, and the second achievement is incomprehensible without the first.

As I covered in my earlier piece on the Musk family’s backstory, the Musk brothers would go on to pool their savings and build Zip2, the company that made them their first millions. But before Zip2, before PayPal, before Tesla and SpaceX, there was a teenager in a Saskatchewan winter who had bet everything on himself with $2,000 and a suitcase of books.

Every billionaire started somewhere. Musk started with manual labor in the Canadian prairies, and the fact that he made it from there to where he stands today is not just a business story — it is proof that starting with almost nothing is not a disadvantage. It is a forge. And the people who walk through that forge tend to come out harder to break.

Sources

• Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Ecco, 2015 (Chapters 2-3: Africa, Canada)
• Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon, 2021
• Franziska M. Renz and Julian U. N. Vogel, “Elon Musk: Leader or Liability?”, Journal of Case Research and Inquiry, Vol. 6, 2020
• Maye Musk, A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success, Viking, 2019