To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?

—Elon Musk, Saturday Night Live, May 8, 2021

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

—Steve Jobs

PROLOGUE

Muse of Fire

The playground

As a kid growing up in South Africa, Elon Musk knew pain and learned how to survive it.

When he was twelve, he was taken by bus to a wilderness survival camp, known as a veldskool. “It was a paramilitary Lord of the Flies,” he recalls. The kids were each given small rations of food and water, and they were allowed—indeed encouraged—to fight over them. “Bullying was considered a virtue,” his younger brother Kimbal says. The big kids quickly learned to punch the little ones in the face and take their stuff. Elon, who was small and emotionally awkward, got beaten up twice. He would end up losing ten pounds.
12 岁时，他被公共汽车带到一个被称为 veldskool 的荒野生存营地。“那是一个准军事的蝇王 ，”他回忆道。孩子们每个人都得到了少量的食物和水，他们被允许——实际上是被鼓励的——为争夺它们而打架。“欺凌被认为是一种美德，”他的弟弟金巴尔说。大孩子很快就学会了打小孩子的脸并拿走他们的东西。身材矮小且情绪尴尬的 Elon 被殴打了两次。他最终会减掉 10 磅。

Near the end of the first week, the boys were divided into two groups and told to attack each other. “It was so insane, mind-blowing,” Musk recalls. Every few years, one of the kids would die. The counselors would recount such stories as warnings. “Don’t be stupid like that dumb fuck who died last year,” they would say. “Don’t be the weak dumb fuck.”
在第一周快结束时，男孩们被分成两组，并被告知要互相攻击。“这太疯狂了，令人兴奋，”马斯克回忆道。每隔几年，就会有一个孩子死去。辅导员会讲述警告等故事。“别像去年死去的那个蠢他妈的一样蠢，”他们会说。“别当那个弱小的蠢蛋。”

The second time Elon went to veldskool, he was about to turn sixteen. He had gotten much bigger, bursting up to six feet with a bearlike frame, and had learned some judo. So veldskool wasn’t so bad. “I realized by then that if someone bullied me, I could punch them very hard in the nose, and then they wouldn’t bully me again. They might beat the shit out of me, but if I had punched them hard in the nose, they wouldn’t come after me again.”
Elon 第二次去 veldskool 时，他快满 16 岁了。他长大了很多，长到六英尺，有着熊一样的身材，还学会了一些柔道。所以 veldskool 并没有那么糟糕。“那时我意识到，如果有人欺负我，我可以狠狠地打他们的鼻子，然后他们就不会再欺负我了。他们可能会把我打得稀里哗啦，但如果我狠狠地打了他们的鼻子，他们就不会再来找我了。

South Africa in the 1980s was a violent place, with machine-gun attacks and knife killings common. Once, when Elon and Kimbal got off a train on their way to an anti-apartheid music concert, they had to wade through a pool of blood next to a dead person with a knife still sticking out of his brain. For the rest of the evening, the blood on the soles of their sneakers made a sticky sound against the pavement.
1980 年代的南非是一个暴力的地方，机枪袭击和持刀杀人事件很常见。有一次，当 Elon 和 Kimbal 在去参加反种族隔离音乐会的路上下火车时，他们不得不涉水穿过血泊，旁边是一个脑子里还插着刀的死人。在晚上剩下的时间里，他们运动鞋鞋底的血在人行道上发出粘稠的声音。

The Musk family kept German Shepherd dogs that were trained to attack anyone running by the house. When he was six, Elon was racing down the driveway and his favorite dog attacked him, taking a massive bite out of his back. In the emergency room, when they were preparing to stitch him up, he resisted being treated until he was promised that the dog would not be punished. “You’re not going to kill him, are you?” Elon asked. They swore that they wouldn’t. In recounting the story, Musk pauses and stares vacantly for a very long time. “Then they damn well shot the dog dead.”
马斯克家族饲养了德国牧羊犬，这些狗受过训练，可以攻击任何路过房子的人。当他六岁时，埃隆在车道上飞驰，他最喜欢的狗袭击了他，从他的背上咬了一大口。在急诊室，当他们准备给他缝合时，他拒绝接受治疗，直到他得到保证不会惩罚这只狗。“你不会杀他吧？”埃隆问道。他们发誓不会。在讲述这个故事时，马斯克停顿了一下，茫然地凝视了很长一段时间。“然后他们他妈的把狗打死了。”

His most searing experiences came at school. For a long time, he was the youngest and smallest student in his class. He had trouble picking up social cues. Empathy did not come naturally, and he had neither the desire nor the instinct to be ingratiating. As a result, he was regularly picked on by bullies, who would come up and punch him in the face. “If you have never been punched in the nose, you have no idea how it affects you the rest of your life,” he says.
他最痛苦的经历是在学校。在很长一段时间里，他是班上最年轻、最小的学生。他很难捕捉到社交线索。同理心不是自然而然的，他既没有讨好自己的欲望，也没有讨好自己的本能。结果，他经常被恶霸挑剔，他们会上来打他的脸。“如果你从来没有被打过鼻子，你就不知道它如何影响你的余生，”他说。

At assembly one morning, a student who was horsing around with a gang of friends bumped into him. Elon pushed him back. Words were exchanged. The boy and his friends hunted Elon down at recess and found him eating a sandwich. They came up from behind, kicked him in the head, and pushed him down a set of concrete steps. “They sat on him and just kept beating the shit out of him and kicking him in the head,” says Kimbal, who had been sitting with him. “When they got finished, I couldn’t even recognize his face. It was such a swollen ball of flesh that you could barely see his eyes.” He was taken to the hospital and was out of school for a week. Decades later, he was still getting corrective surgery to try to fix the tissues inside his nose.
一天早上，在集会上，一个和一群朋友闲逛的学生撞见了他。埃隆把他推了回去。他们交换了话语。男孩和他的朋友们在课间休息时追捕埃隆，发现他在吃三明治。他们从后面上来，踢他的头，把他推下一组混凝土台阶。“他们坐在他身上，不停地打他的狗屎，踢他的头，”一直坐在他身边的金巴尔说。“当他们完成时，我什至认不出他的脸。那是一个肿胀的肉球，你几乎看不到他的眼睛。他被送往医院，休学一周。几十年后，他仍在接受矫正手术，试图修复鼻子内的组织。

But those scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, Errol Musk, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist who to this day bedevils Elon. After the school fight, Errol sided with the kid who pummeled Elon’s face. “The boy had just lost his father to suicide, and Elon had called him stupid,” Errol says. “Elon had this tendency to call people stupid. How could I possibly blame that child?”
但与他的父亲埃罗尔·马斯克 （Errol Musk） 造成的情感创伤相比，这些伤疤是微不足道的，埃罗尔·马斯克 （Errol Musk） 是一位工程师、流氓和有魅力的幻想家，直到今天仍困扰着埃隆。校园斗殴结束后，埃罗尔站在了那个打埃隆脸的孩子一边。“这个男孩的父亲刚刚自杀身亡，埃隆说他很愚蠢，”埃罗尔说。“埃隆有这种说人愚蠢的倾向。我怎么能责怪那个孩子呢？

When Elon finally came home from the hospital, his father berated him. “I had to stand for an hour as he yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless,” Elon recalls. Kimbal, who had to watch the tirade, says it was the worst memory of his life. “My father just lost it, went ballistic, as he often did. He had zero compassion.”

Both Elon and Kimbal, who no longer speak to their father, say his claim that Elon provoked the attack is unhinged and that the perpetrator ended up being sent to juvenile prison for it. They say their father is a volatile fabulist, regularly spinning tales that are larded with fantasies, sometimes calculated and at other times delusional. He has a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature, they say. One minute he would be friendly, the next he would launch into an hour or more of unrelenting abuse. He would end every tirade by telling Elon how pathetic he was. Elon would just have to stand there, not allowed to leave. “It was mental torture,” Elon says, pausing for a long time and choking up slightly. “He sure knew how to make anything terrible.”

When I call Errol, he talks to me for almost three hours and then follows up regularly with calls and texts over the next two years. He is eager to describe and send me photos of the nice things he provided to his kids, at least during the periods when his engineering business was doing well. At one point he drove a Rolls-Royce, built a wilderness lodge with his boys, and got raw emeralds from a mine owner in Zambia, until that business collapsed.

But he admits that he encouraged a physical and emotional toughness. “Their experiences with me would have made veldskool quite tame,” he says, adding that violence was simply part of the learning experience in South Africa. “Two held you down while another pummeled your face with a log and so on. New boys were forced to fight the school thug on their first day at a new school.” He proudly concedes that he exercised “an extremely stern streetwise autocracy” with his boys. Then he makes a point of adding, “Elon would later apply that same stern autocracy to himself and others.”

“Adversity shaped me”

“Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes,” Barack Obama wrote in his memoirs, “and I suppose that may explain my particular malady.” In Elon Musk’s case, his father’s impact on his psyche would linger, despite many attempts to banish him, both physically and psychologically. Elon’s moods would cycle through light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional, with occasional plunges into what those around him dreaded as “demon mode.” Unlike his father, he would be caring with his kids, but in other ways, his behavior would hint at a danger that needed to be constantly battled: the specter that, as his mother put it, “he might become his father.” It’s one of the most resonant tropes in mythology. To what extent does the epic quest of the Star Wars hero require exorcising demons bequeathed by Darth Vader and wrestling with the dark side of the Force?

“With a childhood like his in South Africa, I think you have to shut yourself down emotionally in some ways,” says his first wife Justine, the mother of five of his surviving ten children. “If your father is always calling you a moron and idiot, maybe the only response is to turn off anything inside that would’ve opened up an emotional dimension that he didn’t have tools to deal with.” This emotional shutoff valve could make him callous, but it also made him a risk-seeking innovator. “He learned to shut down fear,” she says. “If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy.”

The PTSD from his childhood also instilled in him an aversion to contentment. “I just don’t think he knows how to savor success and smell the flowers,” says Claire Boucher, the artist known as Grimes, who is the mother of three of his other children. “I think he got conditioned in childhood that life is pain.” Musk agrees. “Adversity shaped me,” he says. “My pain threshold became very high.”

During a particularly hellish period of his life in 2008, after the first three launches of his SpaceX rockets exploded and Tesla was about to go bankrupt, he would wake up thrashing and recount to Talulah Riley, who became his second wife, the horrendous things his father had once said. “I’d heard him use those phrases himself,” she says. “It had a profound effect on how he operates.” When he recalled these memories, he would zone out and seem to disappear behind his steel-colored eyes. “I think he wasn’t conscious of how that still affected him, because he thought of it as something in his childhood,” Riley says. “But he’s retained a childlike, almost stunted side. Inside the man, he’s still there as a child, a child standing in front of his dad.”

Out of this cauldron, Musk developed an aura that made him seem, at times, like an alien, as if his Mars mission were an aspiration to return home and his desire to build humanoid robots were a quest for kinship. You’d not be totally shocked if he ripped off his shirt and you discovered that he had no navel and was not of this planet born. But his childhood also made him all too human, a tough yet vulnerable boy who decided to embark on epic quests.

He developed a fervor that cloaked his goofiness, and a goofiness that cloaked his fervor. Slightly uncomfortable in his own body, like a big man who was never an athlete, he would walk with the stride of a mission-driven bear and dance jigs that seemed taught by a robot. With the conviction of a prophet, he would speak about the need to nurture the flame of human consciousness, fathom the universe, and save our planet. At first I thought this was mainly role-playing, the team-boosting pep talks and podcast fantasies of a man-child who had read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy once too often. But the more I encountered it, the more I came to believe that his sense of mission was part of what drove him. While other entrepreneurs struggled to develop a worldview, he developed a cosmic view.

His heritage and breeding, along with the hardwiring of his brain, made him at times callous and impulsive. It also led to an exceedingly high tolerance for risk. He could calculate it coldly and also embrace it feverishly. “Elon wants risk for its own sake,” says Peter Thiel, who became his partner in the early days of PayPal. “He seems to enjoy it, indeed at times be addicted to it.”

He became one of those people who feels most alive when a hurricane is coming. “I was born for a storm, and a calm does not suit me,” Andrew Jackson once said. Likewise with Musk. He developed a siege mentality that included an attraction, sometimes a craving, for storm and drama, both at work and in the romantic relationships he struggled and failed to maintain. He thrived on crises, deadlines, and wild surges of work. When he faced tortuous challenges, the strain would often keep him awake at night and make him vomit. But it also energized him. “He is a drama magnet,” says Kimbal. “That’s his compulsion, the theme of his life.”

When I was reporting on Steve Jobs, his partner Steve Wozniak said that the big question to ask was Did he have to be so mean? So rough and cruel? So drama-addicted? When I turned the question back to Woz at the end of my reporting, he said that if he had run Apple, he would have been kinder. He would have treated everyone there like family and not summarily fired people. Then he paused and added, “But if I had run Apple, we may never have made the Macintosh.” And thus the question about Elon Musk: Could he have been more chill and still be the one launching us toward Mars and an electric-vehicle future?

At the beginning of 2022—after a year marked by SpaceX making thirty-one successful rocket launches, Tesla selling close to a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on Earth—Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. “I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode,” he told me, “which it has been in for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life.”

It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he made the pledge, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. That April, he snuck away to the Hawaiian house of his mentor Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, accompanied by the actress Natasha Bassett, an occasional girlfriend. He had been offered a board seat at Twitter, but over the weekend he concluded that wasn’t enough. It was in his nature to want total control. So he decided he would make a hostile bid to buy the company outright. Then he flew to Vancouver to meet Grimes. There he stayed up with her until 5 a.m. playing a new war-and-empire-building game, Elden Ring. Right after he finished, he pulled the trigger on his plan and went on Twitter. “I made an offer,” he announced.

Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place or felt threatened, it took him back to the horrors of being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground.

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Adventurers

Winnifred and Joshua Haldeman

Errol, Maye, Elon, Tosca, and Kimbal Musk

Cora and Walter Musk