15 Facts About Elon Musk That You Will Be Surprised To Read

Dilara Avlupınar

Dilara Avlupınar

Boğaziçi Ekonomi

Elon Musk manages to surprise us with what he does every day. Musk was inspired by many of his passions, and today he runs companies that build projects on electric and driverless vehicles, private space exploration, Mars colonization, solar energy, and artificial intelligence. In this article, apart from the managerial role in Tesla, SpaceX, Solar City and Open AI companies that we frequently come across; I wanted to focus a bit on unknown facts, from his sense of humor to his childhood.

1) His parents suspected that Elon was deaf.

When Elon Musk was a kid, his family often wandered off when he spoke to him. This caused his family to think that Musk might have a hearing problem. The doctors’ removal of the adenoid did not make any difference in his condition. Afterwards, it was understood that Musk was delusional. His mother says the following about the subject:

“It goes into your brain and you see that you are in a different world. Now that I know he’s designing a new rocket or something, I’m releasing him.”




2) He was bullied a lot as a child.

Growing up in South Africa, Musk was given a difficult time by his classmates. So much so that at the age of 41, he had surgery to correct the deviations in his nose.


3) He designed and sold a video game in 1984.

This game, which he called “Blastar”, earned Musk $ 500 with the publication of the source code in the magazine. The object of the game was to destroy an alien ship loaded with weapons of mass destruction. In 2015, Google software engineers made the game code run in HTML5. Musk says the following about this game he wrote at the age of 12:

“Although it’s a trivial and ordinary game, it’s better than Flappy Bird.”




4) When he was at university, he was throwing parties to earn his pocket money.

While studying at the University of Pennsylvania, Musk showed that he had a natural entrepreneurial side, and he was getting his rent by throwing house parties. Staying with only one roommate in a 10-bedroom guild house, Musk stayed sober at parties to keep everything under control. In fact, once her mother Maye worked at the door to control people entering and leaving.


5) Dropped out of Stanford University 2 days after enrollment.

He enrolled at Stanford University in 1995 to study Physics. However, within two days, Musk decided that the internet had a much greater power to change society and dropped out to found Zip2. Continuing until 1999, Zip2 was a company that provided guides and maps to internet newspapers.




6) He has 5 sons.

Musk has 5 sons with his ex-wife Justine Wilson. Twins Griffin and Xavier were born in 2004, and triplets Damian, Saxon and Kai were born in 2006. Their son, Nevada, who was born in 2002, unfortunately passed away when he was 10 weeks old.


7) It wouldn’t be wrong to say the real version of Tony Stark.

Musk was the inspiration for Tony Stark, the character of Robert Downey Jr. in the Iron Man series. Downey Jr, who toured SpaceX headquarters with Musk in 2007, caught on to some of what he described as “accessible eccentricity.” When the first Iron Man movie came out, director Jon Favreau said Musk inspired his interpretation of Downey’s character. Musk even got a small role in Iron Man 2.




8) He was once on the verge of bankruptcy.

Musk began to have a hard time due to the big crisis that came in 2008 and the expensive bill of divorcing his wife, Wilson. Living on debts from his friends, Musk invested all of his last $35 million in Tesla. Fortunately things are good now; Tesla is worth more than $33.4 billion today, according to Forbes.


9) He owns one of the James Bond cars.

In 2013, Musk bought the submarine car from the 1977 James Bond movie “The Spy Who Loved Me” for $866,000 at an auction. Stating that he was disappointed when he learned that it did not really turn into a submarine, Musk says that Tesla is trying to develop and realize the vehicle with electric power transmission.




10) He made a guest appearance in the TV series The Big Bang Theory.

Elon Musk, 9 of The Big Bang Theory in 2015. Season 9. He was a guest actor in the episode. In the scene, Musk and Howard meet while washing dishes at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving. The scene, which lasts about 2 minutes, closes with the duo sharing a half-eaten pumpkin pie.


11) He offered to send an atomic bomb to Mars.

Participating in the Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2015, Musk talked about his ideas about Mars colonization. Mentioning that Mars will eventually be transformed into an earth-like planet, Musk said that the planet needs to be heated a little.

“There are fast and slow ways to do this. On the fast track, thermonuclear weapons are dropped on the planet’s poles. Thus, 2 suns close to Mars can be created by nuclear fusion.”




12) The secret of his success is to be clean.

“What is your daily habit that you believe has made the biggest positive impact in your life?” from one user on Reddit. Elon Musk did not give a cliché answer to his question, such as meditation or getting up early. According to him, the biggest factor behind his success was “taking a shower”.


13) He believes that artificial intelligence is the greatest threat to humanity’s existence.

Elon Musk is incredibly cautious about Artificial Intelligence. He fears that artificial intelligence may be stronger than humans, thereby causing human extinction. Musk is not alone in this regard, names such as Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking have similar fears.




14) He has a pretty bad sense of humor.

Musk can get surprisingly obscene when it comes to humor. For example, when naming the Tesla Model 3, Musk actually wanted to name it Model E. If he did, the models of cars would be S, E, and X.


15) He was consuming 12 glasses of Diet Coke and some coffee a day.

In 2007, Musk says he consumed 8 cans of Diet Coke and a few cups of coffee a day to focus on working out 100 hours a week. Starting to think that everything was going crazy and that he had lost his peripheral vision, Musk luckily said a stop to this trend.



Bonus: If you change your Twitter name to “Elon Musk”, your Twitter account will be locked.

This post is also available in: Türkçe

Kategoriler: Entrepreneurship, Success

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