Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance Read Free Book Online

outgoing nature with members of his family and eventually took on the role of elder and chief instigator among them.
    For a while, life inside the Musk household was quite good. The family owned one of the biggest houses in Pretoria thanks to the success of Errol’s engineering business. There’s a portrait of the three Musk children taken when Elon was about eight years old that shows three blond, fit children sitting next to each other on a brick porch with Pretoria’s famous purple jacaranda trees in the background. Elon has large, rounded cheeks and a broad smile.
    Then, not long after the photo was taken, the family fell apart. His parents separated and divorced within the year. Maye moved with the kids to the family’s holiday home in Durban, on South Africa’s eastern coast. After a couple of years of this arrangement, Elon decided he wanted to live with his father. “My father seemed sort of sad and lonely, and my mom had three kids, and he didn’t have any,” Musk said. “It seemed unfair.” Some members of Musk’s family have bought into this idea that Elon’s logical nature propelled him, while others claim that his father’s mother, Cora, exerted a lot of pressure on the boy. “I could not understand why he would leave this happy home I made for him—this really happy home,” said Maye. “But Elon is his own person.” Justine Musk, Elon’s ex-wife and the mother of his five boys, theorized that Elon identified more with the alpha male of the house and wasn’t bothered by the emotional aspect of the decision. “I don’t think he was particularly close with either parent,” Justine said, while describing the Musk clan overall as being cool and the opposite of doting. Kimbal later opted to live with Errol as well, saying simply that by nature a son wants to live with his father.
    Whenever the topic of Errol arrives, members of Elon’s family clam up. They’re in agreement that he is not a pleasant man to be around but have declined to elaborate. Errol has since been remarried, and Elon has two, younger half sisters of whom he’s quite protective. Elon and his siblings seem determined not to bad-mouth Errol publicly, so as not to upset the sisters.
    The basics are as follows: Errol’s side of the family has deep South African roots. The Musk clan can trace its presence in the country back about two hundred years and claim an entry in Pretoria’s first phone book. Errol’s father, Walter Henry James Musk, was an army sergeant. “I remember him almost never talking,” Elon said. “He would just drink whiskey and be grumpyand was very good at doing crossword puzzles.” Cora Amelia Musk, Errol’s mother, was born in England to a family famed for its intellectual genes. She embraced both the spotlight and her grandchildren. “Our grandmother had this very dominant personality and was quite an enterprising woman,” said Kimbal. “She was a very big influence in our lives.” Elon considered his relationship with Cora—or Nana, as he called her—particularly tight. “After the divorce, she took care of me quite a lot,” he said. “She would pick me up from school, and I would hang out with her playing Scrabble and that type of thing.”
    On the surface, life at Errol’s house seemed grand. He had plenty of books for Elon to read from cover to cover and money to buy a computer and other objects that Elon desired. Errol took his children on numerous trips overseas. “It was an amazingly fun time,” said Kimbal. “I have a lot of fun memories from that.” Errol also impressed the kids with his intellect and dealt out some practical lessons. “He was a talented engineer,” Elon said. “He knew how every physical object worked.” Both Elon and Kimbal were required to go to the sites of Errol’s engineering jobs and learn