THE EDUCATION OF ELON MUSK

Queen’s is one of Canada’s oldest and most prestigious universities. It was founded in honour of Queen Victoria by the Presbyterian Church, and its sprawling campus is dotted with limestone buildings that evoke both its religious and royal roots. Musk lived in the blander, newer Victoria Hall, a chunky X-shaped stone building that had, likely to his delight, gone co-ed in 1988. His dorm room was on the international floor, where Canadian students were paired with students from abroad. There, he met Navaid Farooq, a Geneva-raised fellow strategy gamer who remains one of his closest friends. Later on, Farooq would acknowledge that Musk didn’t make friends easily but was incredibly loyal to those he had. (Farooq is just as loyal—when asked for insight on Musk, he said he first needed Musk’s permission in writing. Musk himself never responded to interview requests.) The pair bonded over the video game Civilization, in which players lead their empires through several millennia, exploring, conquering and settling new territories. For the first time, Musk had found his ilk. “We were the kinds of people that can be by ourselves at a party and not feel awkward,” Farooq told Ashlee Vance, author of the 2015 book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

At Queen’s, students and teachers alike respected Musk. They didn’t mock his ambitious ideas; they encouraged them. Unlike in high school, nerds weren’t considered losers. Musk was intense and competitive, interested and interesting. Even in a sea of genius strivers, he stood out. By all accounts, he wanted it that way. In his spare time, he entered public speaking competitions. To make extra cash, he created a small-scale computer empire out of his dorm room. He’d build customized tech—in his words, a “tricked out gaming machine” or a “simple word processor”—for cheaper than what you could find in a store, then sell it to students for a profit. His services also included removing computer viruses and solving general tech issues for other students. In his uniquely immodest way, Musk has said of that time, “I could pretty much fix any problem.”

In 1991, his brother, Kimbal, joined him at Queen’s. By then, the whole Musk family, minus Errol, had moved to Canada. Those who knew them at the time have described the Musk brothers as polite and ambitious, but Kimbal was the more personable and charming of the two. Elon, though enthusiastic and affable in his own way, could come off as awkward and impervious to the feelings of others—a quality that would cause problems, as well as successes, in his early Silicon Valley ventures. In their spare time, the brothers would pore over the Globe and Mail, pinpointing important people they wanted to meet. Then they’d cold-call them and ask them to lunch. This was how they came to know Peter Nicholson, a top executive at Scotiabank. It took the brothers six months to get on Nicholson’s calendar, but they succeeded. Nicholson was impressed by their gumption and ended up offering Musk a summer internship at the bank. There, Musk met a young finance whiz named Harris Fricker, who, along with a friend of Fricker’s named Christopher Payne, would go on to become one of the four co-founders of the online bank X.com, a predecessor of PayPal. 

Another fateful meeting took place during this time. Justine Wilson was a fellow Queen’s student and an aspiring writer from Peterborough, Ontario. To an immediately smitten Musk, she was, as he later said, “the hot chick on campus”—smart, attractive and a black belt in tae kwon do. The feeling wasn’t mutual. Wilson has said that she was looking to fall in love with a motorcycle-riding, James Dean–esque “Romeo in a dark-brown leather jacket.” Instead, she got a clean-cut, baby-faced coder. He first approached her as she was heading up the steps to her dorm. He said he’d met her at a party, one she knew she hadn’t attended. Years later, Musk confessed that he’d noticed her from across the common room and orchestrated the chance meeting. He invited Wilson out for ice cream, and she agreed to the date. But, when Musk went to her room to pick her up, he found a note from Wilson saying she couldn’t make it. Hours later, after gathering intel on her whereabouts and favourite ice cream flavour—chocolate chip—Musk surprised Wilson in the student centre as she pored over her Spanish studies, two melting ice cream cones in his hands. 

“The man does not take no for an answer,” Wilson later wrote in an explosive Marie Claire piece on their relationship. “I do think of him as the Terminator. He locks his gaze onto something and says, ‘It shall be mine.’ ” That was as true with girls as it was with everything else. Once, on a psychology exam, Wilson scored 97 per cent to Musk’s 98. The 1 per cent difference wasn’t enough to make Musk feel like the clear winner, so he went to their professor and successfully argued for a perfect grade. Wilson and Musk dated on and off for years. Whenever she seemed distant, he would double-down on his pursuit of her, calling nonstop. Her friends found him odd: when they tried to hug him, he’d just stand there, stiff and unresponsive, like a short-circuited robot. Still, Musk and Wilson married in January 2000 and went on to have six children: a set of twins and triplets as well as a son who died in infancy. (Musk now has nine children—in addition to those he had with Wilson, he has a son and a daughter with on-again, off-again paramour Grimes and another set of twins that he had in secret with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis. He has claimed that the high number is because he needs to do his part to stave off “population collapse.”)

Despite excelling academically at Queen’s, Musk was dissatisfied. He wanted more and pined for the seemingly limitless potential of the US. One of his early acquaintances told me that Musk seemed to view his Ontario years as a stepping stone: “Elon was always looking for greener pastures.” He needed a playing field big enough for his grandiose dreams. So, only two years into his tenure at Queen’s, he made the jump to the American Ivy League, transferring to the University of Pennsylvania on a scholarship. He believed that a degree from an American institution would add jet fuel to his career. At Penn, he delved into solar power and alternative energy, writing dense papers and building concepts for a research database that resembled today’s online search engines. He also decided that he was done with student housing. He and his roommate, Adeo Ressi, now an entrepreneur, investor and Silicon Valley fixture who runs the Founder Institute, dumped their dorm and rented a large house. To help pay for it, the budding entrepreneurs turned it into a nightclub. On a good night, they attracted up to 1,000 people—though Musk himself was more likely to be holed up in his room gaming than partying.

He graduated from Penn with two degrees—a bachelor of science in physics and, from the university’s Wharton School, a bachelor of arts in economics—while also holding down Silicon Valley summer internships at a video game start-up and a company focused on space-based weapons and alternative fuel for cars. Initially, he planned to complete his PhD at Stanford, but despite being accepted, he never enrolled. That would have been the slow-and-steady route. It was 1995, the internet was beckoning and an impatient, determined Musk was ready to lay his claim to it. Kimbal, who had graduated from Queen’s, joined him in the Valley, and the brothers got to work. Their first order of business: recruit all the young, hungry, hyper-capable go-getters they knew from their time in Ontario.