I have read dozens of articles about Elon Musk the CEO, the rocket engineer, the provocateur. But I kept circling back to a question that most coverage skips entirely: what was he like as a kid? Not the mythology — the actual details. What kind of child reads the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica for fun? What kind of twelve-year-old writes a video game and sells it to a magazine? And what does it do to a person to be beaten so badly at school that he ends up in the hospital?

I went looking for answers in the most detailed source available — Ashlee Vance’s 2015 biography — and what I found was a childhood defined by books, code, and an almost unbelievable amount of pain.

The Boy Who Read Everything

Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. From an early age, he was consumed by reading. Not casually, not recreationally — consumed. According to Vance’s reporting, the young Musk read for ten hours a day. On weekends, he tore through two books a day. When he ran out of books at the local library, he started on the Encyclopaedia Britannica and read the entire thing.

Elon Musk in 2015 Photo by Steve Jurvetson, Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY 2.0.

His favorites tell you a lot about where his mind was heading. He devoured Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Asimov’s Foundation series, Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. These were not random picks. Every one of those books is about someone — or some civilization — facing an impossible challenge and finding a way through it. The Foundation series, in particular, is about preserving human knowledge across the collapse of a galactic empire. It is hard to look at Musk’s later obsession with making humanity a multi-planetary species and not see the seeds of that idea planted right here, in a kid’s reading list in Pretoria.

Around age fourteen, Musk went through what he later described as an existential crisis. He read the philosophers — Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger — and found them depressing. Then he picked up The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and something clicked.

“I almost had an existential crisis trying to figure out ‘What does it all mean? What’s the purpose of things?’” Musk later recalled. “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.”

That is a remarkable philosophical position for a teenager. Most fourteen-year-olds who read Nietzsche come away confused or pretentious. Musk came away with a framework he would use for the rest of his life: the purpose of existence is to expand consciousness so we can ask better questions. Every major bet he has made since — electric cars, solar energy, space colonization — maps back to that single idea.

The Machine That Changed Everything

At nearly ten years old, Musk saw his first computer at a mall in Sandton City, Johannesburg. The encounter was electric.

“It was like, ‘Whoa. Holy shit!’ — by this machine that could be programmed to do a person’s bidding,” Musk told Vance.

Shortly after, around 1980, he got a Commodore VIC-20 — a home computer with just 5 kilobytes of memory. The machine came with a programming workbook designed to take six months to complete. Musk finished it in three days, staying up with virtually no sleep.

“It seemed like the most super-compelling thing I had ever seen,” Musk said of the computer.

His father, Errol Musk, was unimpressed. Errol was an engineer himself, but he dismissed the Commodore, telling his son that it was “just for games” and that “you’d never be able to do real engineering on it.” Elon ignored him and kept coding.

Elon Musk in 2015 Photo by Steve Jurvetson, Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY 2.0.

By 1984, the twelve-year-old had written a space-themed shoot-em-up game called Blastar. It was 167 lines of BASIC code. He sold it to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500. That was his first business transaction — not a lemonade stand, not mowing lawns, but a piece of original software sold to a publisher.

Years later, reflecting on that period, Musk put it simply:

“I didn’t aspire to create companies as a kid. I just liked computers.”

That line is worth pausing on. The instinct was not entrepreneurial. It was creative. He saw a machine that could be bent to his will, and he bent it. The money was incidental. The compulsion to build was the point.

The Bullying That Almost Broke Him

For all the reading and coding, Musk’s childhood in South Africa had a dark chapter that he has spoken about only reluctantly. He was bullied severely for years — not teased, not picked on, but subjected to sustained, violent attacks.

At Bryanston High School, a group of boys targeted him relentlessly. In one incident, a boy crept up behind Musk, kicked him in the head, and shoved him down a flight of stairs. Musk blacked out. His brother Kimbal, who witnessed the aftermath, later described what he saw: “He looked like someone who had just been in the boxing ring.” Elon was hospitalized for a week. He later needed surgery on his nose, a fact he did not disclose publicly until 2013.

The bullying lasted three to four years. Musk has described it with a rawness that is unusual for someone who generally projects control and detachment:

“For some reason, they decided that I was it, and they were going to go after me nonstop. That’s what made growing up difficult.”

He eventually transferred to Pretoria Boys High School, where life improved. Classmates there remember him as likable, quiet, and — surprisingly — not obviously destined for anything spectacular. Gideon Fourie, a classmate, told Vance: “Honestly, there were just no signs that he was going to be a billionaire.” Another classmate, Deon Prinsloo, recalled that “there were four or five boys that were considered the very brightest. Elon was not one of them.”

But there were hints, if you knew where to look. Ted Wood remembered Musk bringing model rockets to school and blasting them off during breaks. In a science class debate, Musk advocated for solar power — which was “almost sacrilegious” in a country whose economy depended on mining. And with his cousins Russ, Lyndon, and Peter Rive, he was constantly scheming: they tried to open a video arcade, sold Easter eggs door-to-door, and built homemade explosives and rockets. As Musk later put it with a grin: “It is remarkable how many things you can get to explode.”

Elon Musk in 2015 Photo by Steve Jurvetson, Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY 2.0.

The Kid Is Still in the Room

What strikes me most about Musk’s childhood is how clearly it maps to the adult. The voracious reader became the CEO who reportedly processes information faster than most of his engineers. The kid who taught himself BASIC in three days became the founder who taught himself rocket propulsion from textbooks. The boy who was beaten on a staircase became the man who seems genuinely indifferent to public criticism — because nothing anyone says to him on the internet could possibly compare to what happened at Bryanston High.

And the existential crisis at fourteen? That became the mission statement for his entire career. “The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment,” he told Vance. Every rocket launch, every battery factory, every satellite constellation is, in Musk’s framing, an attempt to expand the scope of human consciousness.

You do not have to admire everything Musk does to recognize that his childhood gave him something most founders lack: a philosophical framework built before he turned fifteen, tested by real suffering, and reinforced by thousands of hours of reading. The twelve-year-old who sold Blastar for $500 was not starting a business. He was doing the only thing that made sense to him — building something, and then showing it to the world.

Fellow techies, the next time someone tells you that the things you build as a kid do not matter, remember that the richest person on the planet started with 167 lines of BASIC and a $500 check from a magazine.

Sources

  • Vance, Ashlee. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. Chapter 2: “Africa.” Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015.
  • Jorgenson, Eric. The Book of Elon. Scribe Media. Compilation of Musk’s public statements.
  • Musk, Elon. Interviews and public remarks as cited in Vance (2015), including childhood recollections about the Commodore VIC-20, Blastar, and bullying incidents.
  • Classmate recollections (Gideon Fourie, Deon Prinsloo, Ted Wood) as reported in Vance (2015).