The life story of Elon Musk from Pretoria to America, from Earth to Mars

Once upon a time, in Illinois, a man named John Elon Haldeman was born in 1871. In fact, Haldeman was nothing special. There was nothing special when he decided to move to Minnesota and started a family by marrying Almeda Jane Norman at a young age.

As a mediocre story, and as a family became a family, Haldeman had a son, Joshua Norman. Following his father's footsteps, the junior Haldeman finally got married. Unfortunately, again, there was nothing special about the junior Haldeman. In fact, the figure who eventually chose a career as a chiropractor, aka a masseur with a scientific approach, fell into the brink of bankruptcy when the US economic depression hit in the 1930s. The junior Haldeman's son, Scott, admitted that a piece of farmland owned by the family had disappeared since his father went bankrupt. Since then he didn't believe in banks. So, not wanting to live in the shadow of his father's bankruptcy and wanting to be a special figure, in 1934, Scott Haldeman left his parents. He decided to move to Canada.

Of course, there were striking differences between migrants and indigenous people. Generally, as migrants, they did not have a place to live, in terms of ownership, nor did they have close relatives to turn to for help. So, in order to survive, migrants generally worked harder, to pay for their more expensive life than the indigenous people.

This was what Scott Haldeman did. Apart from being a chiropractic masseur, much like his father, Scott Haldeman also worked as a builder, doubling as a rodeo rider for a local theme park.

Hard work eventually led to Scott Haldeman owning a terraced house and then marrying Winnifred Josephine Fletcher in 1948. Soon, the family had twin daughters, Kaye and Maye.

Living with a complete family and financially healthy was apparently not enough for Scott Haldeman. So, feeling that Canada's morality was declining, Scott Haldeman decided to become a politician. He also bought a plane and flew it for fun with the family.

But, Scott Haldeman's political career was over. Not wanting to be embarrassed, Scott Haldeman sold all of his assets, except for the plane. With the plane, Scott Haldeman's family traveled to various countries.

In the late 1950s, Scott Haldeman chose to end his adventure in a city called Pretoria in South Africa, which became his family's new home. It was in this city that far greater adventures and privileges began.

Of course, it wasn't Scott Haldeman who did it, but his grandson who took a tiny bit of his great-grandfather's name, Elon Musk.

From Africa, Elon Musk colonized the United States and, possibly, Planet Mars

Elon Musk loved computers, even before anyone knew what computers were in the midst of South African society, wrote Ashlee Vance in his book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. Born in 1971 in Pretoria, Elon Musk grew up as a foreigner, because of his wealthy family in the midst of South African society that still enforced apartheid. It was in the midst of social tension that young Musk fell in love with computers.

Little Musk, 10, saw a computer for the first time in a shop inside Sandton City Mall, Johannesburg. "Holy shit!" he exclaimed when he saw a computer called the Commodore VIC-20. According to Musk's confession to Vance, since then he had hunted his father to get the computer.

Of course, it was easy for his father, Errol Musk, who worked as a pilot and technician, to buy his son a computer. So, since he had his first computer, Musk immediately spent time playing with the computer. Not only playing video games, but he also studied computers thoroughly. Unfortunately, his father warned Musk that the computer was just a game and couldn't be used to do real technical work.

Little Musk just replied, "Whatever."

Little Musk, like little Bill Gates and little Mark Zuckerberg, finally spent his time learning BASIC, a programming language that was born into the world of computers seven years before Musk was born into the world.

It was not something too difficult for Musk to learn BASIC. Because, as written by Vance, Musk was a person who liked to read. In fact, Kimbal, Musk's brother, said it was not uncommon for Musk to spend 10 hours non-stop every day reading books. And when Musk was missing, his family knew they could find Musk in bookstores from Pretoria to Johannesburg. Some of his favorite books were The Lord of the Rings series, the science fiction books by Isaac Asimov, to the novels of Robert Heinlein.

Once upon a time, Musk ran out of books to read and ended up reading the Encyclopædia Britannica over and over again.

Having a computer and reading books eventually led little Musk to create his first computer program: a video game. At the age of 12, he created a video game called Blastar. This video game required you to destroy an alien space cargo ship carrying a hydrogen bomb. Not to forget, the video game that Musk created was worth playing.

Why did Musk create a video game about an alien invasion? He probably read mostly comics. And in comics, it seemed that everyone was trying to save the world.

One day at a young age, still referring to Vance's report, Musk created rockets, on a small scale, of course. Assisted by his personal computer, Musk mixed his own explosive chemicals. It was wonderful to know that so many things could explode.

Of course, as a different young man in South Africa, Musk had a very youthful problem in him: an identity crisis. When an identity crisis hit Musk, he switched to reading religious books and philosophy and ended up with Douglas Adams's quote in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. One of the most difficult things in the world, Adams wrote in the book, was figuring out what questions to ask. From that quote, Musk then understood an important mission in his life: striving for collective enlightenment.

There was no definite answer to what collective enlightenment meant. Vance, still in his book, suspected that this was related to the racial segregation in South Africa that was still ongoing when Musk spent his youth in the country.

Racial segregation had prevailed in South Africa before the 20th century. In fact, in 1948, the South African National Party, which consisted of white members from European colonizers, gave rise to the territory law which divided South Africa into special racial zones. Unfortunately, because the rules were made by residents of colonial descent, until the late 1950s, 80 percent of South African landowners were white. Even direr, non-whites were required to carry special documents to cross into areas reserved only for whites, which were enormous.

Racial injustice was not a mere zoning issue, but also about access to education, transportation, resources, and all other public facilities. No matter how hard they worked, the results would not be the same as white people.

Until 1989, South Africa was a field of racial violence. The black working class rebelled against their masters, the white citizens. The white-ruled country fought back with weapons, wounding and killing its own citizens.

Musk probably thought the injustices in South Africa were caused by a lack of collective enlightenment. On many occasions, Musk had always said that humanity should have a bright future, regardless of the differences between people.

In his 20s, Musk moved to the United States, leaving a land that had no collective consciousness to his ancestral land.

That was where he found his luck. After founding a startup called Zip2, Musk became the largest shareholder of PayPal, the parent of all e-wallets that existed today in the digital world. He also got rich suddenly since eBay bought PayPal for 1.5 billion dollars. With the money he had, he founded SpaceX, injected money into Tesla, and together with his cousin, founded SolarCity. Not to forget, in the midst of his spare time, Musk came up with an idea called Hyperloop and then founded The Boring Company.

On closer inspection, everything Musk gave birth to was designed to destroy the existence of all things ancient. SpaceX wanted to try to destroy an overpriced and unfriendly rocket industry. With Tesla, Musk was trying to stop humanity's addiction to fossil fuels while also wanting to destroy the auto business from Ford to Toyota. Through SolarCity, Musk wanted households to use solar energy sources. Through Hyperloop and The Boring Company, Musk wanted to revolutionize transportation.

For Musk, returning to the above statement, by presenting these companies, he wanted to present a bright future for humanity. And if humanity's future didn't exist on Earth, Musk was ready to fly humans to Mars.

But, in the country that Musk lived in, there was a very thick gap between whites and blacks, rich and poor, and Fox News vs CNN viewers. Sadly, in his track record in the US, Musk seemed to have lost his passion for creating the collective consciousness he missed in his youth.

In Uncle Sam's land, Musk didn't want to lose his fortune. On the one hand, Musk could sit at the same table as Donald Trump. On the other hand, he criticized Trump for not believing in climate change. On the one hand, Musk donated 40 thousand dollars worth of money to an event organized by the Republican Party. On the other hand, he openly supported Andrew Yang from the Democratic Party to run for the presidency. When the corona pandemic approached the US, Musk once pressed the government to open the lockdown as soon as possible. On the other hand, he firmly believed that SARS-CoV-2 was deadly.

Not to forget, instead of echoing collective consciousness, Musk's Twitter account scolded cyber citizens, who often made his company crash in the capital market. Once upon a time, Musk posted a photo of three Tesla cars: Model S, Model 3, and Model X. In the latest opportunity, Musk conducted a poll: "Should Tesla make a robocat?" There were only two answers: "Absolutely" and "Of course."