Elon Musk was created in an Afrikaner lab in 1972, the product of Neanderthal semen preserved in amber and spliced with frog DNA. The crystal was found in the mine of Ebenezer Erol Musk, a wealthy businessman and politician in South Africa. Erol, or Sir, as his children called him, bankrolled the experiment in hopes of securing an heir. Up until then, he had sired only daughters and half-servants.

By all accounts, Elon had a childhood. He was raised on the family’s country estate, free to frolic in the fields, lick the windows, and abuse the staff. He was well cared for, and once, on December 25, 1982, his father even went so far as to hug him. It was an experience Elon would later characterize as “kind of gay.” David Brenavich discusses the significance of that fateful evening in his biography of Musk. “There was pre-hug and post-hug. According to accounts from people close to the family, it was an awkward, gangly affair and left everyone in the room feeling uncomfortable.”

When Elon was older, he was enrolled in an elite boarding school whose motto, Pater meus patrem tuum emere potuit, would serve to guide and inspire its students. For the sake of brevity, we will skip ahead.

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Elon landed in Canada with nothing but his wits, a pocket full of emeralds, and a touch of scurvy. This wasn't from the journey over. (Flight time from Johannesburg was only 19 hours, and as Elon loves to joke, when you fly first class, you actually arrive earlier than everyone else.) Instead, it was because of his shitty diet. I mean, look at him. He looks like an actual vampire who’s really into Twilight.

Canada was a foreign country, and his time there had a profound impact on him. It was at Queens College Elon first saw a black student. In one interview, he recalled, “It's not something you'd see in South Africa. It challenged my preconceived notions and opened me to possibilities I previously thought unimaginable. It was a truly upsetting experience.”

After two years at Queens, Elon transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. While there, he attained a bachelor’s degree in physics, thus meeting the minimum requirement for teaching at the high school level. Elon’s next stop was California, where he was to pursue a doctorate in engineering.

The year was 1995, and Musk had dropped out of Stanford. This violated the terms of his visa, but he stayed anyway. Elon’s time as an illegal was spent dreaming of an even better life. He was willing to risk everything to succeed. No sacrifice was too great, no indignity too large. With that mindset, Elon got to work. He found a tiny apartment, a shoebox really, in the best part of town and even took on a roommate to help defer the cost. Musk’s roommate at the time, Tim Jacobs, remembers him as a weird but intelligent guy.

“His room was always damp and sour, like he'd been running a humidifier during an orgy, though he never had any guests. He referred to it as his terrarium. It was gross. However, he was a genius. There’s no arguing that. He was constantly proposing these highly original thought experiments. Like, if the world is really a simulation, the very act of my thinking proves I’m a unique character, but I can’t prove other people can think, so how do I know they’re not NPCs? Or what happens when AI becomes sentient? If humanity and AI were to engage in a conflict, they would likely destroy one another. If one side strikes first, they could win, but at a significant cost. It's in everyone’s best interest to cooperate. So how do you get there? He saw it as a real dilemma.”

Musk was intelligent and committed, and the timing was perfect because the dot-com revolution was underway. There was opportunity everywhere. People were making millions applying the internet to the existing order. It was like settling land in early America, except you didn’t have to wait generations to reap huge dividends. Musk wanted in, but first he needed to figure out how.

Elon considered putting the classifieds online, but someone had already done that. He considered putting personal ads online, but someone had already done that. Finally, he considered putting porn online, but he was shy (he typically exposed himself hidden in a bush or cloaked by night), plus a lot of people had already done that. There must be something he could put online, but what? That is when his brother, Pinball, had the brilliant idea of putting the Yellow Pages on the internet. The company was called Zip2, and it was a localized and searchable online business directory. With a small loan of $200,000 from their father, Zip2 was up and running.

Even then, Elon possessed the characteristics that would later net him billions. For instance, Elon was terrible at coding. Absolutely awful. The worst. Yet he insisted on doing it anyway. The programmers the Musk brothers hired quietly fixed Elon’s code without telling him. Elon had no idea. He figured he must have written it himself. It is this uncompromising belief in his own genius that is his greatest strength. It allows him to plow ahead with little regard for the consequences for anyone else. Eventually, Zip2 was sold to Compaq for $307 million. This would have been sufficient money for a normal person, but not for Elon.

Elon’s next project was an online payment system called X. Peter Thiel had a company with a similar system called PayPal. Rather than compete, Thiel suggested they team up. He even allowed Musk to be CEO to get him on board. It was all part of Theil’s plan to dominate the market. Elon was in charge for less than a month before he was ousted. In 2002, Thiel sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion. Once again, Elon netted millions.

It would be easy to criticize Elon (oh, so easy), but people must remember this: he possesses what they do not, a near-sociopathic drive to succeed.

Brandon Keller highlights this in the only authorized biography on Musk, By His Bootstraps to Mars: The Elon Story. "He understands that to succeed, you must fight. Never back down, never apologize. Life is struggle, and Elon knows this."

In a later chapter, Elon hints at this in his own words.

“It’s like that Bible story about the man swallowed by a giant whale. He lives in the whale, even has his cat with him, and eats the fish the whale feeds on, but he's trapped. Then, one day, his son shows up to rescue him. The man had given up, but not the child. Together, they make a giant fire, and when the whale opens his mouth, they swim out. I always felt a real connection to that boy.”

The following is a timeline of the events that came next: