While he was growing up, Musk was a voracious reader. He read almost everything he could get his hands on, and it proved to be an incredibly helpful thing. By the age of twelve, he had taught himself computer programming, and he was even able to make money at it from such an early age.
He wrote a simple video game in a BASIC-based language called “Blastar” and sold the code to the computing magazine “PC and Office Technology” for around five hundred dollars. If you want to see what a twelve-year-old future genius can come up with, a version of the game is still available to play online.
Three Countries to Call Home
While Elon spent the majority of his youth in South Africa, he and his family were already familiar with moving around the world. His mother was from Canada, though she also spent most of her life in South Africa. Musk was able to obtain Canadian citizenship through his mother in 1989. A little more than a decade after , he also became a United States citizen.
Joshua Haldeman, his maternal grandfather, was an American-born Canadian who took his family on out-of-this-world journeys in single-engine airplanes. Musk is also of British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry.
On the Right Side of History
When Musk was a child, his father was elected to the Pretoria City Council as a rep of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party. Elon and his siblings reportedly also shared their father's dislike of apartheid. His siblings were Kimbal, a brother born a year after Elon in 1972, and Tosca, a sister, born in 1974.
Despite aligning with his father on this issue, Elon eventually became estranged from Errol Musk.
The Target of Bullies
We all had our bullies when we were kids, but Musk – reportedly a shy, introverted, nerdy kid – might have had it rougher than all of us. According to his 2015 biography, "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future”, Musk had to be put in hospital after he was seriously bullied and hurt by a group of boys.
Musk has said that the reason for this assault was opposing the unjust discrimination that were part of apartheid. He scolded people who used ethnical slurs, and he paid for it. Still, he was right in the end.
Preparing for the Future
For us, it's easy to see that Musk was a unique kid. His father must have thought so too since he sent Musk to a few special schools. The first was Waterkloof House Preparatory School, a prestigious school for boys that teaches up until middle school.
The second was Bryanston High School, but a change was apparently in order since he eventually graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. The first was state-run, while the second was funded through tuition and is far more prestigious.