Maye Musk knew when Elon was just three years old: that child reasoned in a way that wasn’t normal for his age.
But being a genius didn’t save him from what came next. In her memoir, “Timeless: The Art of Reinvention and Resilience at Any Age”, his mother recounts that Elon was very different from his siblings, Tosca and Kimbal, who made friends easily while he had almost none. From the age of six, he was glued to books or video games. His teachers described him as a “dreamer”: he wasn’t good at sports or subjects that didn’t interest him, although he excelled in physics and mathematics. At home, they called him “our encyclopedia” because he remembered everything he read with precision.
As a teenager, Elon was bullied by his classmates. “On one occasion, they beat him so brutally that he had to go to the hospital”, Maye writes.
Today her son is 55 years old, and she is still worried about him. She says much of the media have treated him like a James Bond villain, when to her he is a hero of American innovation. Sometimes, she admits, she doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. Even so, he can always count on her support.