Elon Reeve Musk was born on 28 June 1971 in Pretoria. His mother, Maye, was a Canadian-born model and dietitian; his father, Errol, was a South African engineer. He has a younger brother, Kimbal, and a younger sister, Tosca. His parents divorced when he was young. [1]
In a 2013 oral history for the Computer History Museum he described teaching himself to program on a Commodore VIC-20 and selling a simple video game he wrote. He talked about reading constantly, including The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. These are his own recollections. [2]
Classmates and relatives have described a bookish boy who was badly bullied; he finished at Pretoria Boys High School. Guardian reporting in 2025 on his schooling placed it in the context of apartheid-era education, which was segregated by law. [3][4]
Apartheid was a legal system of racial segregation and white-minority rule. It ended through negotiations between 1990 and the 1994 election, after Musk had left. A white child in Pretoria had access to schools, neighborhoods and opportunities denied to the Black majority by law. That is context, not proof of any view he held as a child. [5]
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