Erik Nordeus - The Engineer

Elon was often in a world of his own. “We’ll all be out to dinner with him,” Maye said, “and someone will say, ‘Let’s see a movie after dinner. Elon what movie do you want to see? Elon? We’re talking about a movie.’ But Elon’s not eating. He’s just sitting there. Thinking. ‘Okay, Elon’s not with us for a while, we’ve got to let him be wherever he is. Let’s, the rest of us, talk about the movie.” 49

It went so far Elon’s family thought it was something wrong with him. “His brain was just ahead of everyone else’s and we thought he was deaf, so we took him to the doctor,” Maye said. “But he was just in his own world.” The doctors took out Elon’s adenoids, but it didn’t change anything. “It’s just when I’m concentrating on something I tune everything else out,” Elon said. 50

Elon has always wanted to find out the facts. He has always wanted the reality, so he never made things up and has never had any imaginary friends. 49If his parents told him something, Elon always asked “Why?” When his parents told him the answer, he compared it with what he already knew. If the answer and his knowledge didn’t match each other, he asked “Why?” again. And so it went on until either Elon was happy or his parents gave up. 354

But sometimes he forgot to look up the facts. Elon and his one-year younger brother Kimbal decided to make a 50 miles [80 km] long bike trip from Pretoria to Johannesburg. Thinking they could find their way through the country without any problems, neither of them had a map. They were wrong. Halfway through the trip, they were lost. This was at a time when the South African government had established the apartheid system, so it was not safe for two white boys to bike through dangerous neighborhoods controlled by enraged people who had been discriminated. 51

The word apartheid is Afrikaans and can be translated to separateness. European settlers had always suppressed the natives. In 1910, the Union of South Africa was established and the new government made whites the supreme power. Blacks were forced to live in poor overcrowded townships. 187

When the National Party took over the power in 1948, they extended the segregation. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 prevented whites from marrying someone with another race. No blacks were allowed to vote or own any property, and they had to carry with them a special passport. If they didn’t, they were jailed. In 1960, a large crowd of black protesters decided to not show their passports. “The police can’t arrest everyone!” They were wrong. Outside of the police station in Sharpville, the police opened fire. 69 people were killed. The South African government declared a state of emergency, and arrested more than 18 000 people.

Marjorie Madikoto grew up in South Africa at the same time as Elon, and she was exposed to the discrimination. “We rode different buses if we went to town,” she said. “You need to go to the bathroom; you went to a different bathroom. There was a park for white people, a park for black people. The park for black people didn’t have anything else, not even benches or anything. Then when they made them [the parks for black people], white people complained because they wanted to be everywhere. We could only buy [groceries] from a window and only white people could enter the store.” 187

Not only black people were discriminated. The Indian Mahatma Gandhi was 24 when he arrived to South Africa. Gandhi bought a first-class ticket to travel by train to Pretoria. While on the train, a white European entered his compartment and began complaining that non-whites were not allowed in first-class compartments. But Gandhi refused to change compartment, so they pushed him out of the train. He had to spend the night at the train station. “It was winter, the cold was extremely bitter,” Gandhi said. “My over-coat was in my luggage, but I did not dare to ask for it lest I should be insulted again, so I sat and shivered.” 251

Pretoria became apartheid’s model city. Before the 1950s, there were roughly equal numbers of whites and blacks living in and around Pretoria. They were still segregated, but lived close together around the city center. But after the 1950s, thousands of residents were forced to move. The city would consist of three areas where each area was separated from the other by considerable distances, agricultural land, and political boundaries. 78

The Musk family didn’t support the apartheid system. Kimbal said it was surreal to grow up in South Africa at the same time as all these extraordinary events occurred. 327Like most white people in South Africa, they knew apartheid was wrong, but they couldn’t do much about it. If you spoke out against apartheid, you could be thrown into prison for three years.

As Elon grew up, he began to wonder what he wanted to do with his life. “When I was young, I didn’t really know what I was going to do when I got older,” he said. “People kept asking me. Eventually, I thought the idea of inventing things would be really cool. The reason I thought that was because I read a quote from Arthur C. Clark, ‘A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ That’s really true.” Many years later, Elon held a speech. “Engineers are the magicians of the 21st century, don’t let anything hold you back. Imagination is the limit,” he said. 63

An engineer can perform the same acts as magicians, but the acts by the engineers are no illusions. While a magician can convince an audience it’s possible to fly by creating an illusion, an engineer can build an aircraft making it really possible to fly. “If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle,” Elon said. “These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.” 117

With inspiration from the quote by Arthur C. Clark, Elon performed a series of magical experiments. Attempting to hypnotize his siblings was the first experiment. “He wasn’t very good at it. I’d be like, ‘No, Elon, I’m not going to eat raw bacon.’ But he kept on trying,” Tosca said. 278Elon also showed some magical entrepreneurial skills by experimenting with business ideas. He, his siblings, and their cousins sold Easter eggs in the neighborhood, and they sold homemade chocolate to their classmates. 51

Other magical experiments consisted of homemade, potentially lethal, explosives and rockets. “It is remarkable how many things you can explode,” Elon said. “I’m lucky I have all my fingers.” He had to build everything from scratch because it was impossible to find hobby rockets in South Africa. To find rocket fuel, he visited a chemist to buy the ingredients needed. 56“I had always been interested in space, from the time I was a kid looking at the stars in South Africa,” Elon said. “I was inspired by the Apollo astronauts and wanted to one day set foot on the Moon or even Mars.” 51,60,62

The Apollo program was NASA’s third human spaceflight program with the goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth by the end of the 1960s. Neil Armstrong and his crew achieved this goal in 1969 when he became the first person to walk on the Moon. The other human spaceflight programs were called Mercury and Gemini.

You could suspect Elon found his technical spirit from his father who was an engineer, but that’s not true. He was exposed to technical subjects while growing up, but his father wasn’t a technologist. His grandfather, who could rebuild engines and fly around the world, was a smaller source of inspiration. But the largest role model was Thomas Edison. Many years later, the list of Elon’s personal heroes would include Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney. 354They were all creative people who had taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way.