Before Elon Musk launched rockets, built electric cars and bought social media platforms, he was just a guy with big ideas and relentless focus. He was so focused that his mother, Maye Musk, used to check on him during college to make sure he was taking care of basic human needs.
In a 2012 Forbes profile titled At Home With Elon Musk: The (Soon-to-Be) Bachelor Billionaire, author Hannah Elliott offered an intimate look at Musk’s life, blending anecdotes from his family with her observations.
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One particularly humanizing detail came from Musk’s mother, Maye, who shared how she had to keep tabs on him during his college years at the University of Pennsylvania. Elliott wrote, “Maye felt the need to check on him to make sure he was at least getting something to eat and wore a fresh pair of socks every day.” It was a small but telling window into the singular focus that would later define Musk’s career.
Elliott visited Musk at his 20,000-square-foot French Nouveau mansion in Bel Air, a space that felt surprisingly impersonal despite its size and luxury. The author described the mansion as more of a functional base than a home. The furniture was leased, the shelves in the library were nearly bare and even his two dogs left no trace – no leashes, toys or dishes to be found. Musk himself admitted that the house wasn’t a permanent place for him but a stopover, a way station while he poured his energy into his companies.
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The profile revealed Musk’s relentless drive had existed long before he became a billionaire. Maye recalled how, as a child in South Africa, he would disappear into bookstores for hours, devouring knowledge with an intensity that set him apart. By age nine, he had read and retained much of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
In the article, his sister, Tosca, described him as “brutally honest” but not out of malice. “He thought he was doing [people] a favor,” Tosca said, though it often alienated others.
Musk rejected the notion of living in another era. “Life sucked in the old days,” he said. “People knew very little and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You’d probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.”
