Chikere Paul Poloma
Stories (1/0)
ELON MUSK
Chapter one Elon Musk's Early life Childhood and family Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, one of the capital cities of South Africa and was baptized into the Anglican church. Musk has British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. His mother is Maye Musk (née Haldeman), a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised in South Africa. His father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, and property developer, who was a half-owner of a Zambian emerald mine near Lake Tanganyika. Musk has a younger brother, Kimbal, (born 1972) and a younger sister, Tosca, (born 1974). Musk's family was wealthy during his youth. His father was elected to the Pretoria City Council as a representative of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party, with his children sharing their father's dislike of apartheid. His maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was an adventurous American-born Canadian who took his family on record-breaking journeys to Africa and Australia in a single-engine Bellanca airplane. After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk mostly lived with his father. Musk later regretted his decision because he has become estranged from his father. He has a paternal half-sister and a half-brother. Elon Musk was described as an awkward and introverted child. When Musk was age ten, he developed an interest in computing and video games, teaching himself how to program from his Commodore VIC-20 user manual. At age twelve, he sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500. Education Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Bryanston High School, and Pretoria Boys High School, from which he graduated. Musk applied for a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother, knowing that it would be easier to immigrate to the United States this way. While waiting for his application to be processed, he attended the University of Pretoria for five months; this allowed him to avoid mandatory service in the South African Defence Force. Musk arrived in Canada in June 1989 and lived with a second cousin in Saskatchewan for a year, working odd jobs at a farm and lumber-mill. In 1990, he entered Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Two years later, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed studies for a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the Wharton School in 1995. He reportedly hosted large, ticketed house parties to help pay for tuition, and wrote a business plan for an electronic book-scanning service similar to Google Books. In 1994, Musk held two internships in Silicon Valley: one at the energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic ultracapacitors for energy storage, and another at the Palo Alto–based startup Rocket Science Games. In 1995, he was accepted to a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) program in materials science at Stanford University. However, Musk decided to join the Internet boom instead and applied for a job at Netscape, to which he reportedly never received a response.
By Chikere Paul Poloma 11 months ago in Humans