Elon Musk was ‘like an observer from a different planet’ said his uni friend

While researching a piece on Trump’s men, especially Elon Musk, I was struck by some observations offered by the tech billionaire’s authorised biographer as well as his inner circle on the man and his mindset. They indicated a brilliant, creative, very focussed and possibly damaged man.

Not all of what I read made it into the piece, so here are some fragments from my notes. All quotes are from Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography, which has the simple title Elon Musk.

The biographer notes that Elon, who was very nearly named ‘Nice’ after the town in France where he was conceived, was finally given the name of his maternal granddad J Elon Haldeman.

Granddad can be described as controversial. He was active in a movement called the Social Credit Party, which was said to be tinged with anti-Semitism. He was also part of a movement called Technocracy, which was temporarily outlawed in Canada. Technocracy believed government should be run by technocrats not politicians. Granddad Haldeman started to believe Canada was usurping control over individual lives and the country was going soft, so he moved to South Africa in 1950, then ruled by a white apartheid regime. Elon’s father Errol, divorced from his mother when the boy was eight, “criticizes Maye’s family for being racist, which he insists he is not,” writes the biographer. Errol is quoted to say: “I don’t have anything against the Blacks, but they are just different from what I am”.

Errol also claims credit for naming his son. The biography says: “Errol liked the name Elon because it was biblical, and he later claimed that he had been prescient. As a child, he says, he heard about a science fiction book by the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun called Project Mars, which describes a colony on the planet run by an executive known as ‘the Elon’.”

Elon, writes Mr Isaacson, saw his first computer when he was 11 in a shopping mall in Johannesburg.

He developed a very focussed way of thinking from the time he was a small boy. Elon describes this as follows: “’Ever since I was a kid, if I start to think about something hard, then all of my sensory systems turn off’, he says. ‘I can’t see or hear or anything. I’m using my brain to compute, not for incoming information’.”

The biographer writes of Elon: “While other entrepreneurs struggled to develop a worldview, he developed a cosmic view”.

Even as a child he was entranced by superheroes who saved the world. In the biography, Elon says: “’They’re always trying to save the world, with their underpants on the outside or these skin-tight iron suits, which is really pretty strange when you think about it’, he says. ‘But they are trying to save the world’.”

Later, he would tweet about making humans a space-faring species and harness artificial intelligence to be at their service: “Foundation Series & Zeroth Law are fundamental to creation of SpaceX.”

Elon was creative, writing a program that was unique at a time that Google maps didn’t exist. Zip2, for which he was granted a patent, merged city maps with a listing of businesses in the area.

Elon made his first real friend outside his family at Queen’s University in Canada. It was Pakistani-Canadian Navaid Farooq. He was socially awkward. When Elon took Christie Nicholson, daughter of Scotiabank executive Peter to a nightclub while he was at Penn University, his conversation to his date started like this: “Do you ever think about electric cars?”

Adeo Ressi, an Italian–American friend at Penn Uni is quoted to say “he understood that Musk was fundamentally alienated and withdrawn, like an observer from a different planet trying to learn the motions of sociability. ‘I wish Elon knew how to be a little happier’.”

As it stands, within hours of marrying his first wife Justine, Elon whispered into her ear as they danced that she should never forget “I am the alpha in this relationship”.