Dimension X from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story

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Elon Musk is the richest person on the planet. Long before Donald Trump appointed him to run DOGE, a department of government efficiency, Musk had plans. Plans to save the world from climate catastrophe with electric cars and solar panels and underground tunnels, Plans to colonize Mars, Plans to build chips to put in people's brains. He is followed by

But what's the real story, the actual history behind the comic book. Welcome to X Man, the Elon.

Musk origin Story.

I'm Jill Lapour.

I'm a professor of history and law at Harvard. For a long time, I've been studying the relationship between technological and political change. I'm fascinated by visions of the future in political discourse, in literature, in science fiction, and even comic books. This series, I'm exploring a new kind of capitalism. I call Muskism extravagant extreme capitalism, extraterrestrial capitalism where stock

A century old.

Elon Musk runs a rocket company. It's called space X, his artificial intelligence company x AI, the name he gave to Twitter after he bought it. X. Musk loves the letter X, one of his first big startups, X dot com.

The alphabet.

X for extraterrestrial, as in the film The Strange World of Planet X.

Be prepared for a fantastic adventure into.

The future, a monstrous world of terror and chaos. By the nineteen nineties x men, xbox, x files, and then Elon Muskin x, dot com, SpaceX. Something strange was happening to capitalism. As the gap between the rich and the poor got wider and wider, the claims of corporations got more and more grandiose. Google opened an R and D division called X, whose aim was to solve some of

The world a better place.

Scholars kept groping for adjectives to describe these new brands of capitalism. Surveillance capitalism, platform capitalism, identity capitalism, What about just capitalism X for extreme extravagant existential A capitalism in which companies worry very publicly and quite feverishly about planetary disaster, about the all too real catastrophe of climate change, but also about all sorts of so called existential risks to the future of the human race, so that they can

Own origins to recover that history.

Each episode of X Men were blasting off to the past. This episode is called Dimension X. Our first destination and time and space is South Africa in the nineteen seventies. Elon Musk was born in Pretoria in nineteen seventy one. His father, Errol, was an engineer who owned a construction business. His mother was a former model. They had three kids. Elon was the oldest. His parents got divorced when he was still a boy. Eryl Musk has lately become a

Is something about Elon that's an X factor?

What is that? Yeah? I would say that he's always been a very deep thinker.

Yeah.

When he was very small, for example, he would ask me, where is the whole world?

The story of Elon Musk's childhood, as it's usually told, is right out of science fiction, from a genre known as the boy Wonder story. My favorites are the Tom Swift books series that started in nineteen ten.

Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout, the speediest car on the road. Barton Swift, esteemed inventor, was drawing a complicated machine, pausing to make some intricate calculations when his young son interrupted him.

I'm gonna build an electric runabout.

Dad. Hmmm, I don't take much stock in electric autos. Tom. All the electric runabouts I ever saw didn't seem able to go so very fast, oh very far.

That's true, but it's because they didn't have the right kind of battery. It seems to me that if you put the right kind of battery into an automobile, it could scoot along pretty lively.

That Tom Swift story was published more than a century ago. But the way well Musk tells it, little Elon was that same boy wonder.

When the computers came out right in the beginning, he came to me and said he would like to have one of these new computers.

In nineteen eighty four, when Elon Musk was twelve, he sold a video game to PC magazine for five hundred dollars. It's called Blastar Black Screen, little squary blobs, Space Invader style our mission destroy alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam machines. So don't get me wrong, Elon Musk really was a whiz kid. And when Elon Musk tells his own origin story, like when he spoke at the Computer History Museum in California, that's how.

He tells it.

I was very prairie booker, so I was reading all the time. So I was either reading, working on my computer, or reading comics.

He read a lot of books, but he says that one book above all became his guide for life, the Elon Musk Bible.

When I was twelve or thirteen, a head company existential crisis, and I was reading various books trying to figure out the meaning of life. And we happened to have like some books by Nietzschen Schopenhauer in the house, which you should not read at age fourteen is bad, it's really negative. Then I read The Hitchhiker's Guide the galaxyat which was quite positive, I think.

In Douglas Adams is Hitchhiker's Guide, the people of Megalithia built an enormous computer to ask it a question about life, the universe and everything, and after thinking for millions of years, it answers forty two.

Musk says that taught him a.

Lesson a lot of times, the question is hotter than the answer, and if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.

The Hitchhiker's Guide didn't start out as a book. Adams wrote it for BBC Radio four, and starting in nineteen seventy eight it was broadcast on the BBC World Service, including to Pretoria l What was.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams? Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich, and on the whole tax free. Many men, of course, became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of, because no one was really poor, at least no one worth. Speaking of.

The Hitchhiker's Guide, that is, begins with an indictment of economic inequality. What was it like to listen to this in South Africa under apartheid. Musk hardly ever talks about apartheid.

At least not publicly. I'm going to.

Talk about it for a while here because it's a crucial piece of this history. But first, let me be really clear. White people who happened to grow up in South Africa under apartheid in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties are not responsible for apartheid. Peter Teel, another Silicon entrepreneur and later a key business partner of Elon Musk's, also lived in South Africa for a while as a kid.

They were children.

Also, Musk left South Africa when he was seventeen to avoid being conscripted into the army, the army that imposed and enforced the regime. I'm not placing blame here. Still, I do think there's a weird way in which the culture of apartheid found expression in the nineteen nineties in Silicon Valley's Vision.

Of the Future.

You know, you've said that apartheid is a habit of mind. Can you tell me what you mean by that? I called up Jacob Glamini, a professor of African History at Princeton. He grew up in South Africa, and he's written beautifully and powerfully about apartheid.

What I mean by that is that so the partid was not just a social and political and economic system, but that it was also a cultural system which inculcated in South Africans, both black and white, patterns of behavior, ways of thinking. It's side to transform how people saw themselves, but also how they saw the world.

The color question is rapidly increasing in seriousness and urgency. I consider a Partheight to be South Africa's lost chance to remain a white man's country.

Apartheid, which means aparthood, began in nineteen forty eight. That same year, nineteen forty eight, Elon Musk's mother was born in Canada. Her father, jay N. Haldeman, was an ardent conservative and anti communist. In nineteen fifty, Haldeman moved his family to South Africa. Was there a lot of immigration from say North America to South Africa after apartheid was declared? I just find that like an odd journey for a family to make in nineteen fifty.

Oh yeah, I think that is quite striking. There is this conscious airport and conscious attempt to recruit people to South Africa to beef up white numbers to a point where blacks would not be such a demographic threat. You know, here's a place, you know, with amazing sunshine, great weather, and you can actually live like a king or a queen.

Elon Musk's mother published a memoir in twenty twenty. It's called A Woman Makes a Plan Advice for a lifetime of adventure, beauty and Success. A lot of the book is about growing up in South Africa in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. She says her parents were persuaded to move there from Canada by missionaries who talked of

Unlike in the Americas, right, you know, where the indigenous populations were annihilated, the South Afcana Gas is different. The vast majority of the population is not annihilated, and whatever you have to build has to be built around this idea that the natives have not disappeared.

A resistance movement rose up, led beginning in the nineteen sixties by a young lawyer, Nelson Mandela.

The Africans require the franchise on the basis.

Of one man, one vote.

They won political independence.

Mandela was sent to prison in nineteen sixty two. Meanwhile, the resistance grew.

Radioprio.

The Boys of the African National Congress, the U and General Assembly denounced the apartheid regime in nineteen seventy three. Two years later, right about when Elon Musk was starting kindergarten, police opened fire on thousands of school children during a protest and Soweto were playing.

In the yard in the school yard and the stituating Atrendo in the process.

Hitting three kids.

These were black children. White children went to white schools.

Black people had to pay for their education, but whites didn't. Some people were jogging. It was actually socialism for whites and capitalism for blacks. Right, That's how a party it actually justified itself that you know, we are creating a class of successful white people.

People who ran construction businesses like Eryl Musk. Elon's father made a lot of money in the apartheid era, building two of everything, one for blacks and one for whites. For whites, they built a fantasy.

World ideologically, I think one of the successes of a part daid was in making white South often believe that everything they achieved was through individual initiative, and everything that they ever got in life was through their own hard work, you know, never mind the fact that the system was designed to in some ways give them all the benefit and to give them all the resources to gether in life.

It's so interesting because the starkness of that divide, you know, the rigidity of the separation, has so many earlier representations in the world of science fiction, right, Like so much of H. G. Wells's science fiction is about what about a terrible, awful future in which we divide people into some who will live underground and do all of the work for us, and we will never see them, and we will pretend they don't even exist, and those of us who will live in the skies and in the clouds.

Their experience on Earth.

I mean, am I off base to say that some of that seems to revive these notions of very very strict hierarchies.

I don't think you off based at all, Jill. I mean, I think you've put your finger on it. And of course we don't want to instrumentalize this and see you know, it has just cause an effect. But I think there's a strong case to be made for the connection between the Sabarti dystopia and this idealized version of a world where the elites don't have to share their oxygen with lesser beings.

So I listened to The Hitchhiker's Guide, and I find it strange that the Elon Musk is such a fan, because a lot of it sounds to me like an indictment of people just like him, or like Amazon's Jeff Bezos. The mega rich, with their privately owned rockets blasting off to other planets.

And for these extremely rich merchants, life eventually became rather dull, and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn't quite right in the later part of the afternoon, or the day was half an hour too long, or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink, and thus where it created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry, custom made luxury planet building.

Also hear me out, I think the Hitchhiker's Guide, broadcast by the BBC in the nineteen seventies, just when the world was condemning apartheid, sounds quite specifically as though it's an indictment of apartheid like social and economic systems. And I don't think I'm over reading. Douglas Adams wrote Hitchhiker's Guide on a Hermes manual typewriter. One key is more worn down than the rest, the letter X. And you know what was on the side of that typewriter, a sticker.

Today the mighty off South Africa back and why a back up nine has.

No huge hib By then, in nineteen ninety, when Mandela was released after twenty seven years in prison, Elon Musk had left South Africa behind to launch his new life in North America. After studying at the University of Pretoria, Elon Musk traveled to Canada, where his maternal grandfather was from. He wanted to get to the United States, but it

What Technocracy Inc. Is chiefly engaged in now is the organization of an army of trained men and women who, when the present interference controls break down and the intricate machinery of production and distribution is in danger of stopping, will be able to prevent that catastrophe before it is too late.

So this sounds like science fiction, but this really happened. People in the technocracy movement, they called themselves technocrats, wanted engineers and scientists to run governments. They took their inspiration from science fiction, where engineers and scientists.

Were always solving problems.

They were suspicious of democracy and also of capitalism.

Biprice system is not meant merely the capitalistic system, which is only one variety of the species. It means the collapse and complete obsolescence of the entire method of distributing goods and services by means of a price. There will be no place for politics or politicians finance, so financiers rackets are racketeers.

Grant Weitdoff teaches Digital Humanities and American Studies at Princeton. He says the technocracy movement started in New York in nineteen nineteen with a guy who ran a floor waxing business.

His idea was that engineers had these unique qualities that would somehow make them good social leaders. They could assess a situation from a bou they would come up with much more rational or economic solutions than politicians or economic leaders would.

Then, with the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine and the depression that followed, democracies were collapsing all over the world. Technocracy really had its moment.

Local chapters at that point had sprung up everywhere across the US and Canada, and each of those chapters start putting forward their own competing ideas. There's an invented unit of measure called the ERG. This is one solution that we replace currency with units of energy, depended on how much energy a single worker is capable of producing in a given day and how much they should get in return for that work.

As far as I can tell, it's at this point that Elon Musk's grandfather got involved with technocracy. He lost his farm during the depression and ever after didn't believe in banks or banking. A lot of people felt that way, and some of them were drawn into the set of ideas about a different way of thinking of about money.

And some of the chapters start doing odd things to kind of get their message across. They start wearing these identical gray uniforms, driving these gray cars in these large parades, blasting speeches out of megaphones. They adopt this yin yang symbol on all of their uniforms and all of their signs.

I'm kind of pulled in two different directions, you know. On the one hand, I just think they're nuts. On the other hand, it seems to reflect an enormous amount of anguish and uncertainty, but it has a kind of quasi fascistic feel to be how should we read that?

Technocracy from the start was caught up in a lot of different science fictional imaginarys that it didn't always have full perspective on. They want to write themselves into these gleaming science fictional futures that they are obsessed with, but without actually thinking through what that would mean in practice, what it would mean to replace an entire system of government.

Some of what.

Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs now endorse, including through DOGE the Department of Government Efficiency, bears more than a family likeness to the technocracy movement. Libertarianism, deregulation of the economy, faith that technological innovations can solve both political and social problems, a critique of paper currency and the price system. Also, for some reason, technocrats objected to personal names. Musk's grandfather renamed himself one zero four five zero dash

He spent a summer interning.

At dot COM's in Silicon Valley, where things were getting wild. It was a gold rush. In nineteen ninety five, the Internet opened to commercial traffic for the first time. You could buy stuff online. But how Musk started a PhD program in material science engineering at Stanford but dropped out after two days. As he later told CNN, back in.

Ninety five, there weren't very many people on the Internet, and certainly nobody was making any money at all. Most people thought the Internet was going to be a.

Fat Elon Musk started his first company, ZIP two, with his brother and a friend. Everyone at the time was trying to engage in what was called disruptive innovation, which means destroy existing industries by doing things completely differently online. Zip too, was a newspaper industry disruptive innovation. It helped newspapers make the transition to online publishing, though it also contributed to a crisis in journalism, all sorts of people

Cash.

Receiving cash is cash. I mean those are just a large number of band Franklins.

He then turned to thinking about online money technocrats. Like his grandfather had wanted to abolish the price system, Musk wanted to restructure the system of exchange itself.

This planet has or had a problem, which was this, most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

In nineteen ninety nine, Musk founded a new company, X dot com.

So this is an ATM, and what we're going to do is transform the traditional banking industry.

Musk put millions of dollars into x dot com. He said, selling one business and starting the next was like a high stakes poker game. You win a big pot, you risk it all all over again. This is called serial entrepreneurship. Start it, sell it, raise venture capital to start the next thing. Every time you do this, you've got to come up with a story, characters, and a plot. Because your investors don't have any real metrics, no earnings or profits,

The better.

X dot com described itself as an online bank, but its founders soon discovered that people mostly wanted to use it as an online payment system. Meanwhile, Peter Teal had started a company called Confinity that could send payments between devices. Teal worked as a securities lawyer before helping to found Confinity. In nineteen ninety nine, the company launched.

A service it called PayPal.

If people were going to buy things online, they needed to be able to pay for things online. As Teal saw it, they were reinventing money. In two thousand confinityan

Later.

Musk, nostalgic about this time in his life, reacquired the domain X dot com. For a long time, there was just a little X there on a blank page because the only thing in the source code was the letter X. Who was just waiting there when in twenty twenty two, Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X. But we're skipping

Needed a new origin story.

Next time on X men blasting off to Mars with SpaceX