As is often the case, behind the great stories of megalomaniac visionaries lies a tormented childhood.
Elon Musk's begins with parents who think he's deaf because he doesn't answer when they call him.
However, a battery of tests reveals that he hears very well.
It's just that he doesn't want to answer... And that already says a lot about Elon Musk's way of being, and the family atmosphere in which he grew up.
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"Mr. I know everything"
Elon Musk grew up in South Africa.
At school, you have to imagine him already aligning lines of codes with the clean look of the son of an engineer (his father is in electromagnetics), with this “Mr. Know-It-All” side which distances him already other children.
Even his brother and sister find him “not funny”.
In the biography devoted to him by journalist Ashlee Vance in 2015 (published with the agreement of Elon Musk), he recounts the day when his cousin admitted to him that he was afraid of the dark.
Response - dehamunized - from young Elon: “Black is simply the absence of light”.
When he was a kid, Elon Musk thought everyone was like him.
The day he realized he was smarter than everyone else was when he realized that most people didn't know how a switch worked, what was going on behind the walls, did, when we turned on the light.
“I thought everyone knew that,” he said, a little shocked to discover that...no.
At college, he is the ideal candidate for school bullying because he is too small, too intelligent, too good at computers and physics, and therefore too much of a science fiction fan.
Also read “Hard”, “uncomfortable”, “apocalyptic”… What is hidden behind the photo of Elon Musk and his mother taken by Annie Leibovitz
A bad person"
At home, the mood is not good.
“My dad called me an idiot all the time,” Elon Musk once told
Rolling Stones
magazine , adding, “You have no idea what a bad person my dad is.”
In 2022, when Errol Musk, Elon's father, is asked if he is proud of his son, he simply answers: "No."
And when asked why, he naturally adds that he is part of a family that has “accomplished a lot for a very long time,” and that “it’s not like it’s new.”
Because of this openly displayed contempt, one might wonder why Elon Musk chose to stay with his father after his parents divorced in 1979. At that time, Elon was 8 years old and replied that he had to one of the three children stays with him.
At the time, Maye Musk, Elon's mother, was far from being the personality we know today, ultra-followed on social networks;
she is still just a mother, victim of her husband's violence.
After the divorce, Errol Musk remarried, then separated again.
What shocked a lot, and which was widely reported in the American press, was that he then had a long relationship with the daughter of his second wife, forty-two years younger than him, with whom he had a child.