Before Elon Musk became the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, he was just a teenager trying to make ends meet in Canada. His rise to the top was neither easy nor particularly glamorous, as evidenced by Ashlee Vance’s book, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.
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At the age of 17, Musk left his home in South Africa for Canada, hoping to eventually reach the United States. He obtained citizenship with the help of his mother, who was born in Canada, but in the meantime he had to take whatever job he could find to make ends meet.
One of Musk’s first jobs was on his cousin’s farm in Saskatchewan, a small town of fewer than 300 people. He worked as a vegetable gardener and grain pusher, not exactly the life of a tech startup founder you’d expect from one of the most famous business people in the world. Musk then learned to saw logs with a chainsaw in Vancouver, British Columbia.
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But Musk’s toughest job during his time in Canada was working in the boiler room of a sawmill. After asking the unemployment office which job paid the most, Musk took a grueling job that paid $18 an hour—good money for 1989, but at a high cost.
The work was exhausting and dangerous, requiring crawling through small tunnels while wearing a hazmat suit to ‘shovel’ [sand and goop] through the same hole you came through.” Conditions were so tough that most workers did not last long. According to Musk, of the thirty people who started working for him, only five were left by the third day. By the end of the week, only Musk and two others were still shoveling.
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“There is no way around it,” Musk said in the biography. This 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 clean it up. It was physically demanding and the heat made it dangerous if someone stayed inside for too long.
After a few 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 obtained degrees in physics and economics, but not without keeping his entrepreneurial spirit alive. To help pay tuition, Musk hosted large ticketed house parties, turning his dorm into a nightclub on weekends.
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Musk’s early years were full of hard work and important decisions to keep him on track. He even turned down a spot in Stanford’s graduate program to enter the booming Internet scene instead. He co-founded Zip2, which later sold for $300 million and used the money to start X.com, which eventually became PayPal.
That $1.5 billion sale to eBay 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.
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This article Elon Musk spent his teenage years working odd jobs in Canada. For $18 an hour he would clean the boiler room without escaping into a sawmill. Originally appeared on Benzinga.com
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