Before Elon Musk became the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, he was just a teenager trying to make ends meet in Canada. His ascent to the top wasn’t easy, nor was it particularly glamorous, as evident in Ashlee Vance’s book, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.
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At 17, Musk left his home in South Africa and headed to Canada, hoping to eventually make it to the United States. He obtained citizenship with the help of his mother, who was born in Canada, but in the interim, he had to accept whatever job he could find to make ends meet.
One of Musk’s first jobs was at his cousin’s farm in Saskatchewan, a small village with fewer than 300 people. He worked as a vegetable gardener and grain bin shoveler, not exactly the life of a tech startup founder you might expect from one of the most well-known businesspeople in the world. After that, Musk learned to cut logs with a chain saw in Vancouver, British Columbia.
But Musk’s hardest job during his time in Canada was working in a lumber mill’s boiler room. After asking at the unemployment office which job paid the most, Musk took on a grueling gig that paid $18 an hour – good money for 1989, but at a steep cost.
The work was exhausting and dangerous, involving crawling through small tunnels wearing a hazmat suit to “shovel [sand and goop] through the same hole you came through.” The conditions were so tough that most workers didn’t last long. According to Musk, out of 30 people who started the job with him, only five were left by the third day. By the end of the week, just Musk and two others were still shoveling.
“There is no escape,” Musk said in the biography. The job required him to crawl into a small space, shovel the hot residue through the same hole and hope the person on the other side managed to clear it out. It was physically demanding and the heat made it dangerous if anyone stayed too long inside.
After a few stints working odd jobs across Canada, Musk eventually enrolled at Queen’s University in Ontario and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. He earned degrees in physics and economics, but not without keeping his entrepreneurial spirit alive. To help pay for tuition, Musk hosted large, ticketed house parties, turning his college house into a nightclub on the weekends.
Musk’s early years were full of tough work and key decisions to keep him on track. He even turned down a spot in Stanford’s graduate program to jump into the booming internet scene instead. He cofounded Zip2, which later sold for $300 million and used the money to start X.com, which eventually became PayPal.
That sale to eBay for $1.5 billion gave Musk the financial boost he needed to launch SpaceX and Tesla – ventures that would make him one of the richest people in the world.
