Truth about Elon Musk’s violent childhood in South Africa
Many people continue to associate Elon Musk being severely beaten by bullies as a teenager with Pretoria Boys High School, even though the record of events has been corrected several times.
One of Musk’s former classmates at Boys High in 1988, Greg Sherwood, recently posted an old class photo on Twitter/X to joke about the SpaceX founder becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
Elon Musk became a trillionaire on Friday when his space launch services provider and satellite broadband company, SpaceX, listed on the Nasdaq at $150 (R2,423) per share, 11% above its IPO price.
That valued the rocket and AI company at roughly $2 trillion and placed Musk’s personal fortune at almost $1.05 trillion (R16.96 trillion), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
“Only one trillionaire in my end of year class pic,” said Sherwood, a Master of Wine now based in London. Sherwood said he wasn’t in the photograph because he had already left for Holland.
Sherwood fielded two questions on Twitter/X. “Were black people allowed in that school at that time, Greg, genuinely asking?” one person asked.
“Pretoria Boys High was the first ‘Model C’ white school in Pretoria to accept black children in ‘85-86. A very liberal, forward-looking school,” responded Sherwood.
Another person asked: “I wonder if any of the classmates in the picture were involved in the bullying of Elon Musk?”
Sherwood explained that the bad episodes of bullying happened at Bryanston High School in Standard 6 — Musk’s first year of high school. He moved to Boys High in Standard 7.
He acknowledged that there was some bullying at Boys High, but said it wasn’t nearly as severe as what Musk went through in 1984.
“It was an all-boys school in the 80s. Everyone got a little bullied… even the bullies. Mocking was the big thing at PBHS. Not really bullying,” said Sherwood.
Boys High falsely accused
“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect,” Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710.
Even in the age of the Internet, the proverb misattributed to Mark Twain remains true: A lie will go halfway around the world while truth is pulling its boots on.
The misinformation about where Musk received the beating of his life came from the conflation of two stories following the publication of an unofficial biography by Ashlee Vance in 2015.
The book, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, accurately described an incident at Bryanston High School where bullies kicked and threw Musk down a set of stairs.
Around the same time, there was a report that Pretoria Boys High had asked Musk for a R1-million donation to build a new stadium, which he provided on the condition that they never contact him again.
However, that report proved inaccurate. Former Pretoria Boys High headmaster Bill Schroder wrote a letter to BizNews in 2018 to contradict this version of events.
“It is true that Elon Musk did, at my request, give a donation for R1 million,” wrote Schroder, who passed away in 2025.
“What is not true is that he disliked the country or the school so intensely that he told me not to approach him again. I, in fact did, and he sent a second donation per that request.”
Schroder explained he lost direct contact with Musk as his companies grew, and the school had to start working through teams of communications representatives who handled donations.
Several intervening reports conflated these stories or failed to explicitly state that Musk had been beaten in one school and completed matric in another, only mentioning Boys High.
This led people to incorrectly conclude that Musk had been bullied at Boys High. Despite several articles correcting the record, the story has stuck.
Real story about Elon Musk being bullied in South Africa
Musk’s father, Errol, contacted BizNews in 2015 after it published an article about Vance’s book with more information about what happened that fateful day in 1984.
Errol told the publication that Elon was so severely hurt after the Bryanston High attack that he could not recognise him.
Walter Isaacson’s authorised biography of Elon Musk, published in September 2023, included an additional detail from Errol about the incident.
“The boy had just lost his father to suicide and Elon had called him stupid. Elon had a tendency to call people stupid. How could I possibly blame that child?” Isaacson quoted him as saying.
As Musk tells it, the fight began with an exchange of words that escalated to grievous assault when the bullies hunted him down later.
He said that a group of boys were horsing around in assembly one morning when one of them bumped into him. Elon pushed back, and “words were exchanged,” Isaacson wrote.
They found him enjoying a sandwich at break time and allegedly attacked him from behind, kicked him in the head, and pushed him down concrete steps.
Younger brother Kimbal, who had been sitting with Musk, said the attackers kept beating Elon even after he went down, including several kicks to the head.
“When they got finished, I couldn’t even recognise his face. It was such a swollen ball of flesh that you could barely see his eyes,” Kimbal Musk said.
Elon was taken to hospital and was out of school for a week. He was reportedly still getting corrective surgery to fix tissue inside his nose decades later.
More photos of Elon Musk’s younger years
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