episode of Scandals Dedicated Elon Musk, in particular, addresses the troubled relationship he always had with his father, creating the flaw of an obscure child behind a facade of undisputed genius.
As is often the case, behind the grand stories of megalomaniacal visions lies a troubled childhood. Elon Musk’s story begins with his parents who think he is deaf because he doesn’t answer when they call him. However, a battery of tests shows that he hears very well. He just doesn’t want to answer… And that already says a lot about Elon Musk’s attitude, the family atmosphere in which he grew up.
“Sir, I know everything.”
Elon Musk grew up in South Africa. At school, you have to imagine that he is already matching lines of codes with the pure appearance of the son of an engineer (his father is an electromagnet), with this “Mr. Know-it-all” side that alienates him already from other children. Even his brother and sister consider him “ridiculous”. In a 2015 biography of him by journalist Ashley Vance (published with Elon Musk’s consent), he recounts the day his cousin admitted he was afraid of the dark. Young Elon’s response, “black is simply the absence of light.”
When he was a kid, Elon Musk thought everyone was like him. The day he realized he was smarter than everyone else, he realized that most people didn’t know how a switch worked, what was going on behind the walls when we turned on the light. “I thought everyone knew that,” she said, a little shocked to find that… no. In college, he is an ideal candidate for school bullying because he is too small, too smart, too good at computers and physics, and therefore too much of a sci-fi fan.
Bad man”
The mood at home is not good. “My father called me an idiot all the time,” Elon Musk once told the magazine Rolling Stones“You have no idea what a bad person my father is.”
In 2022, when Errol Musk, Elon’s father, is asked if he’s proud of his son, he simply says, “No.” And when asked why, he naturally adds that he’s part of a family that has “done a lot for a very long time” and that “it’s not like it’s new.”
With this apparent disdain, one wonders why Elon Musk chose to stay with his father after his parents’ divorce in 1979. Elon was 8 years old at the time and replied that one of the three children should stay with him. At that time, Elon’s mother, May Musk, was far from the person we know today, who was extremely followed on social media; she is still just a mother, a victim of her husband’s violence.
After the divorce, Errol Musk remarried, then divorced again. What was very shocking, and widely reported in the American press, was that he then had a long relationship with his second wife, a daughter forty-two years his junior, with whom he had a child.
Source: Le Figaro
