Уолтер Айзексен (Walter Isaacson)Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
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ELON MUSK
WALTER
ISAACSON
NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY NEW DELHI
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
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 Flzes,” 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.
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.”
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.