And Lon Musk Born June 28, 1971 and raised in Pretoria, South Africa, the son of engineer Errol Musk and his wife, model May Musk (née Haldeman). His parents gave him the name of John Elon Haldeman’s great-grandfather, who was born in 1872 [15]. The Haldemanns, his maternal ancestors, were from Swiss Germans. They immigrated from Europe to New York during the American Revolutionary War, from where they subsequently fled to the Midwest. In 1948, Musk’s grandfather Joshua Norman Haldeman married a Canadian dance teacher Winnifred Josephine Fletcher (Win). In the same year, the couple had twin daughters Kay and Mei, Musk’s mother. Musk’s grandfather was an avid aviator who traveled with his entire family in his own single-engine plane in North America. In 1950, a thirst for adventure forced the family to leave Canada and move to South Africa, where May at the age of 15 entered the school of models and began to go on the catwalk, take pictures for magazines and even became a finalist of the Miss South Africa competition.
May and her future husband Errol Musk, Elon’s father, grew up in the same neighborhood [16]. Errol was a civil engineer and May was a practicing nutritionist.
Ilona has a younger brother, Kimbal, and a younger sister, Tosca.
The boy grew up withdrawn, loved reading and, having a photographic memory and having read two sets of encyclopedias [17], became a know-it-all, which did not add to his popularity. At school, Elon was abused by peers; after one of the beatings he had to repair his broken nose [18]. The parents divorced, the mother left with the children to Durban, but after a couple of years, Ilon decided to live with his father, to whom Kimbal later moved. Errol is a hard, demanding person, and living with him was not easy, but the boys learned a lot from their father. They came to work with their father to lay brickwork, install plumbing fixtures, adjust window frames and lay electrical wiring. [19]
At the age of ten, Elon received his first Commodore VIC-20 computer as a gift and learned to program on it. At the age of twelve, he sold for $ 500 his first program, a Space Invaders-style video game called Blastar [20], in which the player fired a laser cannon at rows of aliens. [21]
Musk invested in shares in a pharmaceutical company that he followed through newspapers. With the proceeds from the sale of shares of several thousand dollars, he, despite the protests of his parents, went to Canada [21]. Before entering university, he lived with relatives in Kingston, Ontario. He entered Queens University in Kingston, where he studied from 1989 to 1991. Then he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania to study business and physics. He received his BA in Economics and BA in Physics [22] [23]. In 1995 he entered Stanford University to obtain a PhD in Applied Physics and Materials Science. However, his arrival coincided with the Internet boom, and he left Stanford just two days later to take part, founding his first company, the Zip2 Corporation [24] [18].