If you’ve heard Elon Musk tell the story about being bullied all the time as a kid and jumped by a whole group of thugs? You may want to take that with a grain of silicon…
The billionaire who reduced Twitter to X has a new biography out, and it’s the hottest tell-all right now. If the “all” that’s being told is legit anyway. His father has a pretty big point of contention.
In Walter Isaacson‘s book, simply titled Elon Musk, the biographer begins with an early story of an attack that the Tesla CEO has spoken about before. Isaacson writes that young Elon was “regularly beaten by bullies” growing up in South Africa — and once was pushed down a flight of concrete steps and kicked in the face until he was just a “swollen ball of flesh.” He was rushed to the hospital and out of school for a whole week. His face allegedly took so much damage, he was getting corrective surgeries on his nose to fix it decades later.
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Elon has described the attackers — plural, mind you, that’s important — as a “bunch of f**king psychos” who tracked him down for no reason.
But Elon’s dad says different. Errol Musk says it was one boy, one time — and Elon started it! He told The US Sun:
“Elon was never regularly beaten up by anybody. One time, a small boy Elon had insulted pushed him down some stairs.”
A “small boy”? One small boy?? The way Errol tells it, Elon was the bully, and this kid had just had enough!
Indeed, the child had just lost his father to suicide, Errol recalls, and his son had been teasing him, calling him “stupid.” The kid lost it and shoved Elon, who fell down the stairs. No gang of “psychos”, no kicking. DEFINITELY no regular bullying. Errol maintains that was a one-off:
“That incident came out of the blue one day, but there were no further incidents after I moved Elon to a school in Pretoria. I have tried repeatedly to tell the facts, but I am ignored. If this appears in the book, Isaacson has started with patently false information, thus making the reading of the rest of his writing highly suspect and not to be taken seriously.”
Elon and his brother Kimbal say their father’s version of events is “unhinged” and argue the boy was sent to juvie for the attack. Sorry, the boy? Singular? Not a gang of psycho bullies?
In any case, Elon lamented to the author how his father had called him an “idiot” when he got home from the hospital (which makes more sense with he dad’s version, frankly — that he’d be angry at Elon for being a bully, not for getting bullied). Elon has also said he had “PTSD” from his childhood, not just the bullying but suffering “mental torture” at the hands of Errol.
What do YOU think, Perezcious readers??
[Image via Real Time With Bill Maher/YouTube.]
