A CRAZY STORY ABOUT ELON MUSK AND HIS FATHER ERROL... AT ERROL'S 70TH BIRTHDAY, WORLD-FAMOUS STARS ASKED HIM "YOU SUPPORT TRUMP?" HE SAID YES. ELON TOLD HIM SUPPORTING TRUMP IS EVIL... "BUT NOW HE SUPPORTS TRUMP HIMSELF," ERROL RECALLS 2016. cape town. Errol Musk turns 70 Elon and Kimbal fly in and bring about 20 guests from america. Errol says they were all Hollywood. he names Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lawrence, Jon Favreau. plus one of the people behind Google the lunch goes on for hours then Favreau leans over with a big laugh: "we believe you support Trump" "yes. I support Trump" the whole table laughs. "that's stupid." "he's a terrible person" Errol: "no he's not" after the lunch Kimbal is furious. "I've never seen Kimbal so angry." his father embarrassed them in front of their friends and Elon says it straight: "it's evil to support Trump" now fast forward to 2024. Elon endorses Trump, puts a fortune behind the campaign, and jumps on stage at his rallies Errol's take, said with zero modesty: "he had been brainwashed by these Democrats. because now Elon supports Trump" the interviewer asks the obvious question: so did you two not speak for 7 years? not exactly. "we were on bad terms." happy birthday. happy christmas. that's it "he was never very happy. but now he's very happy" "so did he come to you and say: dad, I was wrong, you were right?" this is the part that got me: "no. I'm a dad. I don't want to put my kids through that, where they have to say sorry to me... obviously from what he's doing he should be saying something like that. but I would never put him through that" and then the ending december, after a big rocket launch in florida. a SpaceX party, about 250 people Elon stops the whole room, puts his arm around his father: "everybody. this is my dad. he taught me everything I know about engineering" from "it's evil" to "he taught me everything" in front of 250 SpaceX engineers fair warning: this is Errol's version. Elon has said very harsh things about his father over the years, and the family's history with Errol is far darker than one party story but notice what actually changed Elon's mind it wasn't an argument at a birthday lunch. it wasn't his father it was Trump himself in 2016 a table of Hollywood stars laughed at the idea of supporting him. 8 years later he'd won the white house twice and turned one of his loudest skeptics, the richest man on earth, into his biggest backer whatever you think of him, very few people have ever changed what the world thinks of them that hard, with their own actions in 2016 saying "I support Trump" got you laughed at in Cape Town in 2024 Elon was jumping on stage next to him the old man at the end of the table just saw it 8 years early in markets that's the whole game. being early feels exactly like being laughed at so who was really right at that lunch: the stars, or the guy they were laughing at?

ELON MUSK ON HIS OWN FATHER: "MY FATHER IS A TERRIBLE HUMAN BEING. HE WILL HAVE A CAREFULLY THOUGHT-OUT PLAN OF EVIL. ALMOST EVERY CRIME YOU CAN POSSIBLY THINK OF, HE HAS DONE"... AND HERE'S WHAT ERROL MUSK (ELON'S DAD) THINKS ABOUT IT 2017. Rolling Stone. the richest man on the planet sits down for an interview and ends up crying about his dad "he's good at making life miserable, that's for sure" "I don't know how someone becomes like he is" and one detail most people missed: Elon and his first wife Justine promised each other their kids would never be introduced to him years later Errol sits across from an interviewer who reads every one of those lines back to him he doesn't get angry. he doesn't cry. he folds his arms and says: "they must have caught him on a bad day" "I've never actually planned anything evil that I can think of" "I've met all these kids. when they were small" and about Justine: "the less said the better" then he gives his explanation, and this is the part that stuck with me "it depends how your kids see you" "I didn't suffer fools. if something serious was going to be destroyed by the action of a fool, I would not let it happen" "they were very aware that I was somebody who acted very quickly in the event of things going rotten" read that again and tell me who it sounds like because that's almost word for word how people describe working for Elon the all-nighters. the instant firings. the "demon mode" his own biographer wrote about. 80% of Twitter's staff gone in a few months the son calls it evil when the father does it the world calls it genius when the son does it to be clear: Errol's version is Errol's version. Elon, Kimbal and other family members have described a very different childhood, and the accusations against him are serious but there's an uncomfortable question in this clip that has nothing to do with family drama how much of the most valuable founder on earth was built by the person he says he hates most? some kids spend their whole life running from their father some build a $400B+ fortune using his playbook and still call it evil maybe both are the same kid

ELON MUSK AND HIS BROTHER KIMBAL USED TO FIGHT RIGHT ON THE OFFICE FLOOR OVER COMPANY STRATEGY... AND KIMBAL TELLS THE STORY WITH NOTHING BUT LOVE FOR ELON mid-90s. Zip2, their first startup. two brothers, one tiny office, no money they slept there. showered at the YMCA. and when they disagreed on strategy, they didn't book a meeting "I'm a very strong-willed person. my brother's a very strong-willed person... well of course we should fight it out" one fight went further than the others Elon raised his fist to punch Kimbal in the face Kimbal had no way to defend himself so he grabbed the fist and tore a piece of skin off it Elon had to go get a tetanus shot that's funny for about five seconds. then the interviewer asks about Asperger's, and Kimbal gets honest the upside: "he's the greatest engineer in the world. I don't think anyone comes close, frankly" the downside: "he doesn't really have an empathy gene" you have a life? a marriage? "how is that relevant? we have work to do" and then the line that hit me hardest: "even with him and I, I have to speak out loud: this is how I am feeling. then he can process it. but I can't expect him to feel it" his own brother has to translate his emotions into words, like reporting data, just so Elon can understand them and he still ends with: "I've grown up with him and we love each other, and it works" no bitterness. no "he was a monster". just a guy who knows exactly who his brother is and decided to stay here's why this matters beyond family drama in 1999 Compaq bought Zip2 for ~$307M. the brothers who fought on the floor walked away millionaires, and that money became the seed for everything Elon did next Kimbal later sat on the Tesla board for years most co-founder fights end with a lawyer and a buyout. theirs ended with a tetanus shot and 30 years of working together the lesson isn't "fight your co-founder" it's that the same trait that makes someone impossible to work with can be the one that builds the company. and the people who last next to that kind of person are the ones who stop expecting them to feel, and start telling them what they feel

ELON MUSK: "IF THE FOURTH LAUNCH HADN'T WORKED, I THINK DEATH WOULD HAVE BEEN INEVITABLE"... "FOR ME TO GIVE UP, I'D HAVE TO BE DEAD OR COMPLETELY INCAPACITATED" he's not talking about himself. he's talking about spacex 60 minutes, 2012. scott pelley takes him back to the worst stretch of his life falcon 1, spacex's first rocket: launch 1, 2006: fails launch 2, 2007: fails launch 3, august 2008: fails pelley asks the obvious question. after the third failure in a row, did you think about packing it in? "never" "why not?" "i don't ever give up. i mean, i'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated" the third failure came down to a timing glitch measured in seconds. so 8 weeks later he bets the whole company on one more rocket and here's the part people skip. he didn't have a fifth one "if that fourth launch hadn't worked, that would have been it. we did not have the resources for a fifth launch" "death would have been, i think, inevitable" september 28, 2008. launch 4 reaches orbit. the first privately built liquid-fuel rocket ever to do it now the napkin math: his own money in spacex back then: ~$100M rockets it paid for: 4 rockets that worked: 1 spacex market cap today: ~$2T the most valuable rocket company on earth sits on top of one launch that could have gone the other way and at the end pelley says it's a tricky business. elon just nods: "i wish it wasn't so hard" everyone talks about the $2T. nobody talks about the version of 2008 where rocket #4 blows up and spacex is a footnote the gap between those two worlds was one launch

ELON MUSK'S CHILDHOOD WAS PSYCHOLOGICALLY BRUTAL, BUT HE RODE IN ROLLS-ROYCES AND PRIVATE PLANES... AND THAT'S EXACTLY WHY HE COULD BET EVERYTHING you probably know the dark half of the story bullied at school. beaten so badly he ended up in hospital. a father Elon himself has called "a terrible human being" now here's the half his father tells an interviewer asks Errol Musk: did Elon just never care about money? "yes, yes, yes" then he describes what Elon grew up with: a big house in one of pretoria's best suburbs by age 7, 8, 9, Errol had moved on from Mercedes to Rolls-Royce. "so they only rode in Rolls-Royce cars" want to go somewhere? you get in a twin-engine plane that belongs to you, land on your own airstrip, walk to your lodge learned to ski in europe before they were 10 and then he compares it to his own childhood no bed until he was 10. he slept on a couch. the family lived in two rooms of a boarding house his conclusion is the whole post: "when you start like i did, you get money and you think: i should keep this and spend it as slowly as possible" "but when you grow up like Elon... what the hell, you can make it again. you're never ever gonna go down" and the line that stings: "to them, hardship was when they ran out of fillet steak" now look at 2002 eBay buys PayPal. Elon walks away with ~$180M before tax a guy who grew up poor buys bonds and a house and never works again Elon puts ~$100M into SpaceX and ~$70M into Tesla. by the end of 2008, by his own account, he's borrowing from friends to pay rent that's not courage the way we usually mean it. it's a different relationship with zero your risk tolerance isn't just math. it's memory the people who've been poor feel the floor. the people who haven't don't believe it exists fair warning: this is Errol's version. Elon has publicly pushed back on the "rich kid" story and says he arrived in north america with almost nothing so which one is it: did he bet everything because he was brave, or because he never believed he could actually lose?

HARD TO BELIEVE, BUT ELON MUSK'S SCHOOL THOUGHT HE WAS "RETARDED," SAYS HIS FATHER ERROL MUSK... YEARS LATER EVERYONE REALIZED IT WAS GENIUS pretoria, south africa, around 1979. Elon is 7 or 8, in grade two the headmaster calls his father and says they need to talk Errol drives over sure he knows what it is. Elon had a habit: adults would see him with some huge book and ask if he was just looking at the pictures. Elon would tell them "no, of course not, stupid" so Errol expects to hear his son insulted a teacher instead he walks into the office and finds the headmaster and an older teacher wringing her hands the headmaster says it straight: "we think your son is retarded" the evidence? everyone in class is taking notes. Elon sits and stares out the window the teacher has to walk up and push him on the shoulder before he even notices her she asks what he's doing he says the trees are getting their leaves Errol: "well, that's reasonable. i don't see anything wrong with that" the school: something is wrong with him their fix was a hearing test. his hearing was fine. Errol moved him to a private school and, in his words, "we never had any more problems" now look at what that "problem" actually was a kid who goes so deep into one thing that the rest of the room disappears his father says it never went away. even today, he says, you can be rude to Elon and it doesn't land. it just bounces off the same trait the school flagged as a defect is the one that later taught him to code by himself and sell his first video game at 12 had him reading the encyclopedia when he ran out of books built a rocket company out of nothing but obsession the school wasn't wrong about the data. he really wasn't paying attention to them they were wrong about the price markets do this all the time. the thing that looks broken is just optimized for something you're not measuring the school graded attention. the world ended up paying for focus

THE PAIN IN ELON MUSK'S VOICE WHEN HE TALKS ABOUT THIS... THE COMPANY HAD 4 MONTHS LEFT TO LIVE april 2023. Twitter HQ, San Francisco. a BBC reporter sits across from Elon and asks about his first days as owner he doesn't start with the bots or free speech. he starts with the money "definitely spending money like it's going out of fashion" then he lays out what he walked into: Twitter was tracking to lose over $3 billion a year and it had about $1 billion in the bank "so that's four months to death. so this is your starting position. how would you feel?" the reporter: "pretty intense" here's where the hole came from, in his own rough numbers: before the deal: ~$4.5B revenue, ~$4.5B costs. basically break even after the deal: revenue drops to ~$3B as advertisers pull out costs jump to ~$6B, because the takeover loaded ~$1.5B a year of debt interest onto the company napkin math: $3B burn a year = ~$250M a month $1B in cash / $250M = 4 months 4 months = ~120 days and then the line he says almost quietly: "unless drastic action was taken immediately, this company is going to die" you know what the drastic action was. thousands of people lost their jobs within weeks. by the time of this interview he said it was down to about 1,500 people the part nobody talks about: a big chunk of that $3B hole wasn't Twitter's fault. it was the debt he used to buy it he paid $44 billion for a company, and the purchase itself cut its life to 4 months he didn't buy a company. he bought a countdown

THIS IS INSANE...HOW CLOSE ELON MUSK CAME TO GOING BANKRUPT IN 2008 september 2008. Elon is on stage at the Inc. 5000 conference. brown jacket, legs crossed, totally calm what's going on behind him: SpaceX: 3 Falcon 1 launches, 3 failures Tesla: burning cash, barely any cars delivered Wall Street: the same month Lehman Brothers collapses and rocket #4 is already standing on an island in the middle of the Pacific. it launches that week the host asks him straight: you said every launch is like Russian roulette. so how do you know you're dead? when do you stop? Elon doesn't even pause: "i think if we run out of money" then he adds: "i know this sounds crazy, but we were profitable last year. we're going to be profitable this year" "we have enough funding... to last through the end of next year" now look at what actually happened september 28: rocket #4 reaches orbit. the first privately built liquid-fuel rocket ever to do it it doesn't save him by december he's out of cash. by his own account, he's borrowing money from friends to pay rent "enough funding through the end of next year" lasted about 3 months december 23: NASA calls. a ~$1.6B cargo contract december 24: Tesla closes the round that keeps it alive napkin math: his PayPal money: ~$180M into SpaceX: ~$100M into Tesla: ~$70M runway he announced on stage: ~15 months runway he actually had: ~3 months he wasn't lying on that stage. he was telling you the plan, and the plan assumed nothing would break in 2008 everything broke "if we run out of money" wasn't bravado. it was the only stop rule he had. and he came within days of hitting it the richest man in the world was one phone call away from being a cautionary tale

ERROL MUSK (ELON'S FATHER) SAYS HE WAS STRICT AND RAISED MEN, NOT SISSIES. HE SOLD HIS YACHT FOR 4X LESS AND GAVE THE MONEY TO HIS SONS FOR A BUSINESS. PEOPLE STILL ARGUE IF ERROL WAS A GOOD FATHER he is 79. he lives in a quiet town on the South African coast. his son is the richest man in the world. what happens in this clip: → 0:00 "how important is the role of a father?" "very important" → 0:17 "they'll say i was very strict. but i wasn't that strict" → 0:30 "to raise men, not sissies" → 0:38 he sends Elon to America alone, 2 weeks before he turns 18 → 1:05 the first office. $200 a month. a leaky roof. elon showers at the YMCA → 1:47 Errol sells his yacht. bought for 400,000. sold for 100,000 what actually got me is how he ends it. "i never expected anything to come of it." to be fair, the story isn't that clean. Errol put in about $28,000. Elon says it was ~10% of a $200,000 round, and it came later, when the risk was lower. zip2 sold to compaq in 1999 for $305M. Elon walked away with $22M. Kimbal got $15M. and the other side. Elon has called his father "a terrible human being." Kimbal calls their childhood "psychological torture." today Errol says they talk by email, about once a month. a yacht sold at a 75% loss. a son who doesn't call. money is the easy part of being a father. the hard part never shows up on a bank transfer. was Errol a good father, or just an early investor?

HOW ELON MUSK AND HIS BROTHER KIMBAL ALMOST MISSED THE MOST IMPORTANT MEETING OF THEIR LIVES... IT WAS IN 1996, BUT KIMBAL MUSK (ELON’S BROTHER) STILL REMEMBERS EVERY LITTLE DETAIL january 1996. the brothers are building Zip2 in Palo Alto. no apartment, they sleep in the office and cook on a tiny stove so the employees don’t find out then their mom calls. her computer is broken Kimbal flies from Palo Alto to Toronto just to fix it. “this is how much i love her” on the way back the US border stops him “i still didn’t have a proper visa” “i probably dressed too well. i should have dressed like a tourist” they make him open his luggage. inside: investor decks, plus a business card with his Palo Alto address on it he’s not getting in and the next morning is the meeting. the investor they actually wanted “it was for everything” so he calls his friend Jamie. they drive to another border crossing and tell the guards they’re going to see the David Letterman show the guards wave them through Buffalo airport. flight to San Francisco. a few hours of sleep in the morning Elon and Kimbal take the bus to the venture firm, because neither of their cars works the meeting goes well. the deal gets done that same day at the end they get up: sorry, we have to go, we’ll miss our bus the investors stare at them. “what do you mean you have to catch the bus?” and they give each brother a $30,000 budget to buy a car “we forget the rest of the investment” “we think America is the greatest country in the world” napkin math: the money that day: ~$3M from the VC the cars: $30k each 1999: Compaq buys Zip2 for $307M Elon’s share: ~$22M. it goes into X.com, which becomes PayPal PayPal leaves him ~$180M, and that money becomes SpaceX and Tesla the whole chain started with a guy without a visa lying to a border guard about a late-night talk show one broken computer, one closed border, one bus ride, and the richest man on earth almost never got his first check THAT’S HOW CLOSE IT ALL CAME TO NEVER HAPPENING

HOW ELON MUSK AND HIS BROTHER'S FIRST VACATION ALMOST TURNED INTO A TRAGEDY... AND HOW IS IT CONNECTED TO THE SUCCESS OF SPACEX? december 2000. Elon has just been pushed out as CEO of PayPal. he's 29, rich on paper, and for once he takes a break he flies to South Africa with his brother Kimbal. the bush, a safari, the place they grew up running around in Kimbal laughs about it now: "we'd go to the bush all the time. i don't think we ever took malaria tablets" this time they did. it didn't matter january 2001. Elon is back in California and something is badly wrong. doctors check for malaria. negative Kimbal: "i couldn't figure out what was wrong with him" then their uncle, a doctor in South Africa, says it straight: "he has malaria. check again" he was right. malaria hides in the body. and this was the deadly kind Elon: "i had a severe case of malaria. almost died" "i lost like 50 pounds" "took me over six months to get back to normal" and his lesson from all of it: "no more vacations" now the part that matters six months of recovery. no company to run. a guy who almost died at 29 starts asking one question: what do i do next? he checks NASA's website to see when humans are going to Mars. there's no plan. nothing so he flies to Moscow. to buy ICBMs. "literally" "i can afford to pay under nine million dollars for an ICBM. but not 20" the Russians keep raising the price. he walks out and instead of looking for a cheaper seller, he asks a different question: why are rockets so expensive in the first place? the metal, the fuel, the parts cost a small slice of the price tag. the rest is how the industry builds them so instead of buying a rocket, he decides to build one napkin math: the rocket he was willing to pay for: under $9M where the Russians were pushing: $20M+ his cut from the PayPal sale to eBay in 2002: ~$180M how much of it went into SpaceX: ~$100M SpaceX today: valued at $800B+ the company is now worth ~8,000x the money he put in the first three Falcon 1 launches failed. the fourth reached orbit in 2008. he's said there was money for basically one more try most people come back from almost dying and slow down. Elon came back and bet more than half of everything on the most expensive thing on earth a vacation almost killed him. the comeback built SpaceX

1999. ELON MUSK GETS HIS FIRST MILLIONS AND A $1M SUPERCAR... BUT HIS BIGGEST FEAR THAT DAY WASN'T LOSING THE MONEY 7am. a truck stops outside a small apartment and a 27-year-old Musk watches a McLaren F1 roll off the back "there are 62 McLarens in the world and i will own one of them" "it's a million dollars for a car. it's decadent" he'd just sold Zip2 to Compaq for ~$307M. his cut: ~$22M then he says the line that tells you who he is: "just 3 years ago i was showering at the Y and sleeping on the office floor" his fiancée Justine is standing right next to him. a new millionaire with a new supercar. and this is what he's worried about: "my fear is that we become spoiled brats. that we lose a sense of appreciation and perspective" he knew exactly what the money could buy: "i could go and buy one of the islands in the bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom" "i'm much more interested in trying to build and create a new company" and he meant it. he put "the great majority" of his net worth into x.com, an online bank almost nobody believed in his own words: "it's sort of like a series of poker games" "i haven't gone and taken my winnings... i've just put almost all of it back into the new game" x.com became paypal. paypal turned into ~$180M. the $180M went into spacex and tesla. you know the rest and the car? a year later, Peter Thiel in the passenger seat, on the way to pitch Sequoia. Musk floors it. the F1 spins and goes airborne. no insurance. both walk away napkin math: the toy: $1M in 1999. F1s now sell for $20M+. ~20x the chips he pushed back on the table: ~$22M. today: hundreds of billions. four more zeros the island: still just an island the only time he ever cashed out, he bought a car. everything else went back into the game 26 years later the richest man alive sleeps in an airstream. the 27-year-old who was scared of becoming a spoiled brat never let it happen