Elon Musk

Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, in a home where affection came mixed with humiliation. His father, Errol Musk, was an engineer and mine owner, brilliant and at the same time cruel to his children. His mother, Maye, a dietitian and former model, raised the three kids on her own after the separation.

School wasn't any easier: skinny and hooked on science fiction, Elon suffered heavy bullying, including a beating so violent it put him in the hospital. Isaacson shows how that harsh childhood became the mold for an adult who learned early not to expect protection from anyone.

It was also during this phase that the boy discovered computers. By age twelve he had already programmed and sold a simple game, his first contact with what would define his whole life: working on a technical problem until it works.

Still a teenager, Musk used his mother's Canadian citizenship to emigrate on his own, with little money, sleeping at the homes of distant relatives. He picked potatoes on a farm and cleaned a boiler at a sawmill, all to scrape together a ticket and survive.

Canada was just a stopover. From there he went to the United States, earned degrees in physics and economics in Pennsylvania, and arrived in California determined to pursue a PhD at Stanford. It lasted two days: the internet boom seemed too urgent to wait for a diploma.

This pattern of dropping a safe path the moment he sees a bigger opportunity repeats throughout the book. For people raised to value a steady paycheck, this kind of bet is hard to understand; for Musk, standing still always seemed like the bigger risk.

The first real startup was Zip2, a service that helped American newspapers put city guides and maps on the internet, something like the app that today shows you the closest restaurant, only without broadband or smartphones, with almost everything coded by hand by the Musk brothers.

Elon slept at the office and programmed all night, a work rhythm that became a lifelong habit. The company was sold in 1999 for more than three hundred million dollars, and he pocketed a share that changed his financial life.

Instead of retiring at twenty-seven, he threw almost all the money into the next bet. Isaacson uses this to mark a central trait of the character: money, for Musk, was never a finish line, but fuel for the next project, riskier than the last.