SimplyAbuDhabi XXXVII

This is a typical Silicon Valley flourish. Musk is a figure of worship on the west coast as probably the only person who has started four billion-dollar companies: Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX and the solar panel manufacturer Solar City. Yet he’s uneasy in tech-bro company. “I don’t actually like to disrupt, that sounds . . . disruptive,” he told me once, having been introduced at a conference as a master of disruption — Valley-speak for new, aggressive companies that destroy older incumbents. His focus was so intense that it made conversation disconcerting. His nervous energy was palpable and he turned quickly away after saying, with a shrug: “I’m much more inclined to say, ‘How can we make things better?’ ” So while almost every Silicon Valley billionaire says they want to make the world a better place, few have backed their dream as quickly, recklessly and ultimately as successfully as Musk. The conventional accounts of his career focus on the goals he’s rushing towards. The truth is that what he’s running away from is more significant. You can flip all of Musk’s achievements into a desire to escape just as fast as he can. 068 | SIMPLY INFLUENTIAL “I’m much more inclined to say ‘How can we make things better? , ’ ” SIMPLY INFLUENTIAL | 069 Musk was born in Pretoria to the model and dietician Maye Musk — who is still a regular on the catwalk, aged 71 – and the South African engineer Errol Musk. For his first eight years he rarely saw either of them. He withdrew so often into his own world that he was thought to be deaf. In fact, he was lonely. “I didn’t really have a primary nanny or anything,” he has said. “I just had a housekeeper who was there to make sure I didn’t break anything. She wasn’t, like, watching me. I was off making explosives and reading books and building rockets and doing things that could have gotten me killed. I’m shocked that I have all my fingers. I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents.” When his parents split up, his younger brother and sister, Kimbal and Tosca, stayed with their mother, but Musk felt sorry for his father, who seemed very sad and lonely, so he moved in with him. “But I didn’t really understand at the time what kind of person he was,” he said recently. “It was not a good idea. He was such a terrible human being.” School was no better than home. His childhood nickname was Genius Boy after he sold his first video game at the age of 12. He was the youngest and smallest in his year and was relentlessly bullied as a result. Leaving South Africa at the age of 17, he used his mother’s Canadian citizenship to secure a place studying physics in Ontario, transferring to Pennsylvania to finish his studies. His college friend Adeo Ressi recalled that “Elon was the biggest dork I’ve ever met. He’s actually de-dorkified by a hundredfold.” After college, he headed to California with Kimbal to launch his first million-dollar company, Zip2, in 1995. It wasn’t easy. “I remember trying to get funding, and most of the venture capitalists we met with in Silicon Valley had never used the internet,” he said recently. “Never, for anything. They’d heard of it, but they didn’t know. Literally, if you said, ‘Tell me something about the internet,’ they were like . . . nothing. I was pretty amazed. But there was quite a big change that occurred right at the end of ’95 when Netscape went public. So the second time my brother and I tried to find funding, everyone we met with was interested.” Compaq eventually paid him $22 million for his 7 per cent stake in Zip2 in 1999. He used it to co-found what would eventually become Paypal. Paypal gave him the money to found SpaceX, then Tesla, then Solar City, then Hyperloop — which proposes to make reduced pressure tubes to carry passenger capsules underground from New York to Washington DC — as well as OpenAI and the telepathy chip start-up Neuralink. At every step people have doubted him — with the exception of his mother, Maye, who claims that she encouraged all of her children to be entrepreneurs. When Musk left South Africa his father told him he would fail in Canada. He was ousted as chief executive from Zip2 in 1996. Paypal was voted one of the ten worst business ideas in 1999. He was ousted from Paypal a year later. His early rockets exploded and early Tesla cars had problems with spontaneous battery combustion. And he takes it all personally. When he heard that Wall Street was shorting Tesla — betting it will fail, in other words — he says it was “hurtful”.