The electric car billionaire had a troubled 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥hood, was bullied at school, wrote his own games and lived on just one dollar a day.
Over the past two decades, Elon Musk has created several billion-dollar companies, such as PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX. His success is partly due to his mischievous 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥hood. According to CNBC, below are the secrets of this startup-loving billionaire’s 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥hood.
1. Musk once sold candy door to door to rich people
Musk and his younger brother Kimbal as 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren. Photo: Youtube/Bloomberg
Musk grew up in Pretoria, South Africa. As a 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥, he and his younger brother Kimbal and cousins would go to wealthy neighborhoods there to sell homemade chocolate Easter eggs. They would go door-to-door, selling the sweets for 20 times their cost.
“I make them for $0.50 and sell them for $10 each. I always get asked, ‘Why are you charging $10 for this little egg?’” Kimbal said in an interview with CNBC last year. “I say, ‘You’re supporting a young entrepreneur. And the truth is, if you don’t buy it from me, you’re not going to get any. I know you can spend $10.’”
2. Living on $1 a day in college
At age 17, when he moved to Ontario, Canada, to study at university, he wanted to experiment with “how to survive,” Musk told StarTalk Radio. He later realized that “survival in North America is pretty easy.”
At the time, his outlook on life was pretty low. Musk decided to spend just $1 a day on bulk food from the supermarket. “I bought a lot of hot dogs and oranges. After a while, you get really sick of them,” Musk said. Occasionally, he would switch to “spaghetti, green peppers, and gravy.”
3. Musk was bullied
Elon Musk at a Tesla event.
Musk was quite open about his 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥hood bullying in an interview with 60 Minutes last weekend. While studying in Pretoria, Musk was not only the smallest and youngest student in his class, but also more of a nerd than most of his classmates.
In a book about Musk, he said he was thrown down a flight of stairs and beaten unconscious by a group of boys. The bullying continued until he was 15, when he hit puberty and learned karate, judo, and wrestling to protect himself. By 16, Musk was able to “pay them back for what they did to me.”
4. Musk makes his own explosives and rockets
While his parents were away, Musk mostly stayed with a nanny. Musk said her job was mainly to make sure he didn’t break anything. “She didn’t watch me. I was making explosives, reading books, building rockets, and doing other things that could have 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁ed me. I was shocked that I still had my hands,” Musk recalled.
5. Musk loves reading books
As a 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥, books played an important role in entertaining and nurturing Musk’s ambitions. “I was raised on books,” he said.
He reportedly read an entire encyclopedia by the age of nine, and would read science fiction, comic books, and science books for 10 hours a day. Among the books he read were “Lord of the Rings,” “The Way to the Galaxy,” and Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series.
6. He programmed his own video game at age 12 and sold it for $500.
In his early days of learning to program, Musk wrote a game called Blastar. Similar to the classic Space Invaders, the goal of Blastar was to destroy alien planes carrying bombs. Musk later sold it to a computer magazine for $500.
7. He wanted to open a game room at the age of 16.
Musk, along with Kimbal and his cousins, had the idea of opening a game room when they were in high school. They signed a lease for the space and filed all the paperwork with the city. However, the plan fell through because officials said they were too young to get a permit to use the property without an adult’s signature. Kimbal said that neither his father nor his uncle approved the game room plan.
