📍Pretoria, South Africa
1971 – 1989“Elon Reeve Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in June 1971, the eldest child of Errol Musk, an engineer, and Maye Musk, a model and dietitian from Canada. He grew up in Pretoria during the apartheid era, an introverted, bookish boy who read voraciously, working through science fiction and the encyclopaedia, and taught himself computer programming. At twelve he sold the code for a simple video game he had written, Blastar, to a computer magazine. His school years were hard: he has described being badly bullied, and on one occasion he was beaten so severely that he needed hospital treatment. His parents divorced when he was young, and he later lived with his father. In 1989, at seventeen, he left South Africa for Canada, and went on to study in the United States, the start of the path that led to PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Sources: Vance, A. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (2015), Ecco Press; Musk, E. various interviews with Wait But Why, Rolling Stone, and others; SpaceX and Tesla corporate histories