In 1984, bullies kicked a twelve-year-old boy down a flight of concrete stairs.

They beat him until he blacked out.

The boy spent two weeks in a hospital in South Africa.

The boy's name was Elon Musk.

Elon later said, "I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents."

By age nine, he had read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.

At ten, he bought a small computer with only five kilobytes of memory.

At twelve, he wrote a space game called Blastar and sold it.

A computer magazine paid him five hundred dollars for the code.

In 1989, at seventeen, Elon decided to leave for Canada alone.

His father told him, "You'll never be successful."

He got on the plane anyway.