Before Elon Musk became the visionary CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, he spent his teenage years working odd jobs to make ends meet in Canada. His journey to success was anything but glamorous, as detailed in Ashlee Vance's biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.
At the age of 17, Musk left his home in South Africa and moved to Canada with the goal of eventually reaching the United States. While waiting for his big break, he took on various jobs to survive. With the help of his mother, who was born in Canada, Musk obtained citizenship and began his stint as a farm worker at his cousinâs farm in a small village in Saskatchewan, population less than 300. His tasks included gardening and shoveling grain binsâfar from the high-tech world he would later conquer.
Later, he found work cutting logs with a chainsaw in Vancouver, British Columbia. However, Muskâs most grueling job came at a lumber millâs boiler room. After visiting the unemployment office to find the highest-paying job available, he accepted a position paying $18 an hourâgood money for 1989. However, it came with extreme physical demands. Wearing a hazmat suit, Musk had to crawl through narrow tunnels, shoveling sand and debris. The job was so tough that out of the 30 workers who started with him, only five made it through the third day, and by the end of the week, just Musk and two others remained.
These early struggles highlight Musk's resilience and work ethic, traits that would eventually fuel his meteoric rise in the world of tech and business.
