Before Elon Musk started mining, built electric cars and bought social media platforms, he was just a guy with big ideas and a constant focus. He was so observant that his mother, Maye Musk, often watched him during college to make sure he was taking care of people’s needs.
In a 2012 Forbes volume titled At Home With Elon Musk: The (Soon-To-Be) Bachelor Billionaire, author Hannah Elliott provided an intimate look at Musk’s life, mixing anecdotes from his family with his own observations.
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One of the personal insights came from Musk’s mother, Maye, who shared how she had to take care of him during his college years at the University of Pennsylvania. Elliott wrote, “Maye felt like checking on him to make sure he got something to eat and wore new socks every day.” It was a small but telling window into a single look that would define Musk’s career.
Elliott visited Musk at his 20,000-square-foot French Nouveau mansion in Bel Air, a place that felt strange despite its size and lifestyle. The author described this house as more functional than a house. The furniture was rented, the shelves in the library were now bare and even her two dogs were left with no explanation – no leash, toys or bowls. Musk himself admitted that the house was not his place at all but a stopover, a way station where he poured his energy into his companies.
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History has shown that Musk’s driving force was around long before he became a billionaire. Maye recalled how, as a child in South Africa, he would disappear into bookshops for hours, devouring the knowledge and energy that set him apart from others. By the age of nine, he had read and memorized most of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
In this article, his sister, Tosca, described him as “brutally honest” but not because of cruelty. “He thought he was doing it [people] grace,” Tosca said, though it often distracted others.
Musk rejected the idea of living in another era. “Life was hard in the old days,” he said. “People knew very little and you could die young from a terrible disease. You probably wouldn’t have any teeth by now. It would be even scarier if you were a woman.”