As a kid growing up in South Africa, Elon Musk knew pain and learned how to survive it.

作为一个在南非长大的孩子，埃隆-马斯克知道痛苦，也学会了如何在痛苦中生存。

When he was twelve, he was taken by bus to a wilderness survival camp, known as a

. “It was a paramilitary

,” he recalls. The kids were each given small rations of food and water, and they were allowed—indeed encouraged—to fight over them. “Bullying was considered a virtue,” his younger brother Kimbal says. The big kids quickly learned to punch the little ones in the face and take their stuff. Elon, who was small and emotionally awkward, got beaten up twice. He would end up losing ten pounds.

12 岁那年，他被大巴带到一个野外生存营，即所谓的 "veldskool"。"他回忆说："那简直就是准军事化的'蝇王'。孩子们每人都有少量的食物和水，他们被允许，甚至被鼓励争夺这些食物和水。"他的弟弟金巴尔（Kimbal）说："欺负人被认为是一种美德。大孩子们很快就学会了打小家伙们的脸，抢他们的东西。伊隆个子小，情绪不稳定，被打了两次。最后他瘦了十磅。

Near the end of the first week, the boys were divided into two groups and told to attack each other. “It was so insane, mind-blowing,” Musk recalls. Every few years, one of the kids would die. The counselors would recount such stories as warnings. “Don’t be stupid like that dumb fuck who died last year,” they would say. “Don’t be the weak dumb fuck.”

第一周快结束时，男孩们被分成两组，让他们互相攻击。"马斯克回忆说："这太疯狂了，令人震惊。每隔几年，就会有一个孩子死去。辅导员会讲述这样的故事作为警告。"不要像去年死掉的那个蠢货一样愚蠢，"他们会说。"别做软弱的傻逼"

The second time Elon went to

, he was about to turn sixteen. He had gotten much bigger, bursting up to six feet with a bearlike frame, and had learned some judo. So

wasn’t so bad. “I realized by then that if someone bullied me, I could punch them very hard in the nose, and then they wouldn’t bully me again. They might beat the shit out of me, but if I had punched them hard in the nose, they wouldn’t come after me again.”

埃隆第二次去维尔德斯库尔时，马上就要满 16 岁了。他的个子长高了许多，一米八的个子，熊一样的身材，还学会了一些柔道。所以维尔德斯库尔也不是那么糟糕。"那时我意识到，如果有人欺负我，我可以狠狠地揍他们的鼻子，然后他们就不会再欺负我了。他们可能会把我打得屁滚尿流 但如果我狠狠地打了他们的鼻子 他们就不会再来找我麻烦了"

South Africa in the 1980s was a violent place, with machine-gun attacks and knife killings common. Once, when Elon and Kimbal got off a train on their way to an anti-apartheid music concert, they had to wade through a pool of blood next to a dead person with a knife still sticking out of his brain. For the rest of the evening, the blood on the soles of their sneakers made a sticky sound against the pavement.

20 世纪 80 年代的南非是一个充满暴力的地方，机关枪袭击和持刀杀人事件屡见不鲜。有一次，埃隆和金巴尔在去参加反种族隔离音乐会的途中下了火车，他们不得不蹚过一滩血，旁边是一个死人，刀子还插在他的脑门上。整个晚上，他们运动鞋鞋底上的血都粘在人行道上，发出 "粘粘 "的声音。

The Musk family kept German Shepherd dogs that were trained to attack anyone running by the house. When he was six, Elon was racing down the driveway and his favorite dog attacked him, taking a massive bite out of his back. In the emergency room, when they were preparing to stitch him up, he resisted being treated until he was promised that the dog would not be punished. “You’re not going to kill him, are you?” Elon asked. They swore that they wouldn’t. In recounting the story, Musk pauses and stares vacantly for a very long time. “Then they damn well shot the dog dead.”

马斯克家饲养的德国牧羊犬受过训练，会攻击任何从房子旁边跑过的人。六岁时，埃隆在车道上奔跑，他最喜欢的狗袭击了他，在他的背上咬了一大口。在急诊室，当医生准备为他缝合伤口时，他一直拒绝接受治疗，直到医生向他保证不会惩罚那条狗。"你不会杀了它吧？埃隆问道。他们发誓说不会。在讲述这个故事时，马斯克停顿了很久，目光空洞。"然后他们就一枪打死了那条狗。"

His most searing experiences came at school. For a long time, he was the youngest and smallest student in his class. He had trouble picking up social cues. Empathy did not come naturally, and he had neither the desire nor the instinct to be ingratiating. As a result, he was regularly picked on by bullies, who would come up and punch him in the face. “If you have never been punched in the nose, you have no idea how it affects you the rest of your life,” he says.

他最痛苦的经历是在学校。在很长一段时间里，他是班里年龄最小、个子最小的学生。他很难接受社交暗示。他没有天生的同理心，也没有讨好别人的欲望和本能。因此，他经常被恶霸欺负，他们会冲上来打他的脸。"他说："如果你从来没有被人在鼻子上打过一拳，你就不知道这会对你的余生产生怎样的影响。

At assembly one morning, a student who was horsing around with a gang of friends bumped into him. Elon pushed him back. Words were exchanged. The boy and his friends hunted Elon down at recess and found him eating a sandwich. They came up from behind, kicked him in the head, and pushed him down a set of concrete steps. “They sat on him and just kept beating the shit out of him and kicking him in the head,” says Kimbal, who had been sitting with him. “When they got finished, I couldn’t even recognize his face. It was such a swollen ball of flesh that you could barely see his eyes.” He was taken to the hospital and was out of school for a week. Decades later, he was still getting corrective surgery to try to fix the tissues inside his nose.

一天早上的集会上，一个学生和一帮朋友胡闹，撞到了他。埃隆把他推了回去。双方发生了口角。课间休息时，那名男生和他的朋友追赶埃隆，发现他正在吃三明治。他们从后面冲上来，踢他的头，把他推下水泥台阶。"他们坐在他身上，不停地打他，踢他的头，"和他坐在一起的金巴尔说。"他们打完后，我都认不出他的脸了。他的脸肿得像个肉球，你几乎看不到他的眼睛。他被送往医院，并休学一周。几十年后，他仍在接受矫正手术，试图修复鼻子里的组织。

But those scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, Errol Musk, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist who to this day bedevils Elon. After the school fight, Errol sided with the kid who pummeled Elon’s face. “The boy had just lost his father to suicide, and Elon had called him stupid,” Errol says. “Elon had this tendency to call people stupid. How could I possibly blame that child?”

但与他父亲埃罗尔-马斯克（Errol Musk）造成的情感伤疤相比，这些伤疤就显得微不足道了，埃罗尔-马斯克是一位工程师、流氓和魅力十足的幻想家，至今仍让埃隆寝食难安。校园斗殴之后，埃洛尔站在了打埃隆脸的孩子一边。"埃洛尔说："那个男孩刚刚失去了自杀的父亲，埃隆骂他愚蠢。"埃隆总是喜欢说别人笨。我怎么可能责怪那个孩子呢？"

When Elon finally came home from the hospital, his father berated him. “I had to stand for an hour as he yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless,” Elon recalls. Kimbal, who had to watch the tirade, says it was the worst memory of his life. “My father just lost it, went ballistic, as he often did. He had zero compassion.”

当埃隆终于从医院回到家时，他的父亲对他大加斥责。"埃隆回忆说："他骂我是白痴，说我一文不值，我不得不站了一个小时。不得不眼睁睁看着父亲咆哮的金巴尔说，这是他一生中最糟糕的记忆。"我父亲就像他经常做的那样，失去了理智，大发雷霆。他一点同情心都没有。

Both Elon and Kimbal, who no longer speak to their father, say his claim that Elon provoked the attack is unhinged and that the perpetrator ended up being sent to juvenile prison for it. They say their father is a volatile fabulist, regularly spinning tales that are larded with fantasies, sometimes calculated and at other times delusional. He has a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature, they say. One minute he would be friendly, the next he would launch into an hour or more of unrelenting abuse. He would end every tirade by telling Elon how pathetic he was. Elon would just have to stand there, not allowed to leave. “It was mental torture,” Elon says, pausing for a long time and choking up slightly. “He sure knew how to make anything terrible.”

埃隆和金巴尔都不再和父亲说话，他们说父亲声称是埃隆挑起的袭击是不正常的，肇事者最后因此被送进了少年监狱。他们说，父亲是个多变的胡言乱语者，经常编造一些充满幻想的故事，有时是经过深思熟虑的，有时则是妄想。他们说，他有一种 "杰基尔和海德 "的天性。上一秒他还很友好，下一秒就会开始一个多小时的喋喋不休的谩骂。每次咆哮结束时，他都会告诉埃隆自己有多可悲。埃隆只能站在那里，不准离开。"那是一种精神折磨，"埃隆说，停顿了很久，略带哽咽。"他确实知道如何让一切变得可怕。"

When I call Errol, he talks to me for almost three hours and then follows up regularly with calls and texts over the next two years. He is eager to describe and send me photos of the nice things he provided to his kids, at least during the periods when his engineering business was doing well. At one point he drove a Rolls-Royce, built a wilderness lodge with his boys, and got raw emeralds from a mine owner in Zambia, until that business collapsed.

当我给埃罗尔打电话时，他和我谈了将近三个小时，然后在接下来的两年里定期给我打电话和发短信。他热衷于向我描述他给孩子们提供的好东西，并给我发照片，至少在他的工程生意做得不错的时候是这样。他曾一度开着劳斯莱斯，和他的孩子们一起建了一个野外小屋，还从赞比亚的一个矿主那里买到了祖母绿原石，直到那家公司倒闭。

But he admits that he encouraged a physical and emotional toughness. “Their experiences with me would have made

quite tame,” he says, adding that violence was simply part of the learning experience in South Africa. “Two held you down while another pummeled your face with a log and so on. New boys were forced to fight the school thug on their first day at a new school.” He proudly concedes that he exercised “an extremely stern streetwise autocracy” with his boys. Then he makes a point of adding, “Elon would later apply that same stern autocracy to himself and others.”

但他承认，他鼓励人们在身体和情感上保持坚韧。他说，"他们和我在一起的经历会让 veldskool 变得很温顺，"他补充说，暴力只是南非学习经历的一部分。"两个人按住你，另一个人用木头打你的脸，以此类推。新来的男孩第一天到新学校，就被迫与学校的恶棍搏斗。他自豪地承认，他对孩子们实行的是 "极其严厉的街头专制"。然后，他还特意补充道："埃隆后来也会对自己和其他人实行同样严厉的专制"。

“Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes,” Barack Obama wrote in his memoirs, “and I suppose that may explain my particular malady.” In Elon Musk’s case, his father’s impact on his psyche would linger, despite many attempts to banish him, both physically and psychologically. Elon’s moods would cycle through light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional, with occasional plunges into what those around him dreaded as “demon mode.” Unlike his father, he would be caring with his kids, but in other ways, his behavior would hint at a danger that needed to be constantly battled: the specter that, as his mother put it, “he might become his father.” It’s one of the most resonant tropes in mythology. To what extent does the epic quest of the

hero require exorcising demons bequeathed by Darth Vader and wrestling with the dark side of the Force?

"有人曾说过，每个人都在努力不辜负父亲的期望，或者弥补父亲的过错，"巴拉克-奥巴马在回忆录中写道，"我想这或许可以解释我的特殊弊病。"在埃隆-马斯克的案例中，尽管他曾多次试图从身体和心理上驱逐父亲，但父亲对他心灵的影响却挥之不去。埃隆的情绪时明时暗、时紧张时呆滞、时疏离时情绪化，偶尔还会陷入周围人所恐惧的 "恶魔模式"。与父亲不同，他对孩子们关怀备至，但在其他方面，他的行为却暗示着一种需要不断与之斗争的危险：正如他母亲所说，"他可能会变成他的父亲"。这是神话中最能引起共鸣的套路之一。星球大战》英雄的史诗式追求在多大程度上需要驱除达斯-维德遗留下来的恶魔，并与原力的黑暗面搏斗？

“With a childhood like his in South Africa, I think you have to shut yourself down emotionally in some ways,” says his first wife Justine, the mother of five of his surviving ten children. “If your father is always calling you a moron and idiot, maybe the only response is to turn off anything inside that would’ve opened up an emotional dimension that he didn’t have tools to deal with.” This emotional shutoff valve could make him callous, but it also made him a risk-seeking innovator. “He learned to shut down fear,” she says. “If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy.”

"他的第一任妻子贾丝廷是他幸存的 10 个孩子中 5 个孩子的母亲。"如果你的父亲总是骂你低能和白痴，也许唯一的反应就是关闭内心的任何东西，因为这些东西会打开他没有工具处理的情感维度。这种情感关闭阀可能使他变得冷酷无情，但也使他成为一个寻求风险的创新者。"他学会了关闭恐惧，"她说。"如果你关闭了恐惧，那么也许你就必须关闭其他东西，比如快乐或同理心"。

The PTSD from his childhood also instilled in him an aversion to contentment. “I just don’t think he knows how to savor success and smell the flowers,” says Claire Boucher, the artist known as Grimes, who is the mother of three of his other children. “I think he got conditioned in childhood that life is pain.” Musk agrees. “Adversity shaped me,” he says. “My pain threshold became very high.”

童年的创伤后应激障碍也给他灌输了厌恶满足的思想。克莱尔-布歇（Claire Boucher）说："我只是觉得他不懂得如何品味成功，闻闻花香，"克莱尔-布歇是格兰姆斯的艺术家，也是他另外三个孩子的母亲。"我觉得他从小就被灌输了生活就是痛苦的思想"。马斯克也这么认为。"逆境塑造了我，"他说。"我的痛苦阈值变得非常高"。

During a particularly hellish period of his life in 2008, after the first three launches of his SpaceX rockets exploded and Tesla was about to go bankrupt, he would wake up thrashing and recount to Talulah Riley, who became his second wife, the horrendous things his father had once said. “I’d heard him use those phrases himself,” she says. “It had a profound effect on how he operates.” When he recalled these memories, he would zone out and seem to disappear behind his steel-colored eyes. “I think he wasn’t conscious of how that still affected him, because he thought of it as something in his childhood,” Riley says. “But he’s retained a childlike, almost stunted side. Inside the man, he’s still there as a child, a child standing in front of his dad.”

2008 年，在他的 SpaceX 火箭前三次发射爆炸、特斯拉即将破产的那段特别痛苦的日子里，他会惊醒过来，向成为他第二任妻子的塔卢拉-莱利（Talulah Riley）讲述他父亲曾经说过的可怕的话。"她说："我亲耳听他说过这些话。"这对他的工作方式产生了深远的影响"。当他回忆起这些往事时，他就会昏迷过去，似乎消失在他那双钢色的眼睛后面。"莱利说："我想他并没有意识到这对他还有什么影响，因为他认为这是他童年的事情。"但他还保留着孩子气，几乎是发育不良的一面。在他的内心深处，他还是一个孩子，一个站在父亲面前的孩子。

Out of this cauldron, Musk developed an aura that made him seem, at times, like an alien, as if his Mars mission were an aspiration to return home and his desire to build humanoid robots were a quest for kinship. You’d not be totally shocked if he ripped off his shirt and you discovered that he had no navel and was not of this planet born. But his childhood also made him all too human, a tough yet vulnerable boy who decided to embark on epic quests.

在这口大锅中，马斯克形成了一种光环，使他有时看起来像个外星人，仿佛他的火星任务是一种回家的愿望，而他制造人形机器人的愿望是一种寻求亲情的愿望。如果他脱掉上衣，让你发现他没有肚脐，也不是这个星球上出生的人，你也不会感到完全震惊。但是，他的童年也让他变得非常人性化，他是一个坚强而又脆弱的男孩，决定开始史诗般的探索。

He developed a fervor that cloaked his goofiness, and a goofiness that cloaked his fervor. Slightly uncomfortable in his own body, like a big man who was never an athlete, he would walk with the stride of a mission-driven bear and dance jigs that seemed taught by a robot. With the conviction of a prophet, he would speak about the need to nurture the flame of human consciousness, fathom the universe, and save our planet. At first I thought this was mainly role-playing, the team-boosting pep talks and podcast fantasies of a man-child who had read

once too often. But the more I encountered it, the more I came to believe that his sense of mission was part of what drove him. While other entrepreneurs struggled to develop a worldview, he developed a cosmic view.

他的狂热掩盖了他的傻气，而傻气又掩盖了他的狂热。他对自己的身体略感不适，就像一个从未当过运动员的大块头，走起路来像一只肩负使命的熊，跳起似乎是机器人教的吉格舞。他会带着先知的信念，讲述培育人类意识之火、探索宇宙和拯救地球的必要性。起初，我以为这主要是角色扮演，是一个读了太多遍《银河系漫游指南》的男孩子在播客上发表的鼓舞人心的演讲和幻想。但我接触得越多，就越相信他的使命感是推动他前进的动力之一。当其他企业家努力发展世界观时，他却发展了宇宙观。

His heritage and breeding, along with the hardwiring of his brain, made him at times callous and impulsive. It also led to an exceedingly high tolerance for risk. He could calculate it coldly and also embrace it feverishly. “Elon wants risk for its own sake,” says Peter Thiel, who became his partner in the early days of PayPal. “He seems to enjoy it, indeed at times be addicted to it.”

他的血统和教养，再加上大脑的硬连接，使他有时冷酷无情、冲动易怒。这也导致他对风险的承受能力极强。他可以冷酷地计算风险，也可以狂热地拥抱风险。"彼得-蒂尔（Peter Thiel）说："埃隆为了风险而风险。"他似乎乐在其中，有时甚至沉迷其中"。

He became one of those people who feels most alive when a hurricane is coming. “I was born for a storm, and a calm does not suit me,” Andrew Jackson once said. Likewise with Musk. He developed a siege mentality that included an attraction, sometimes a craving, for storm and drama, both at work and in the romantic relationships he struggled and failed to maintain. He thrived on crises, deadlines, and wild surges of work. When he faced tortuous challenges, the strain would often keep him awake at night and make him vomit. But it also energized him. “He is a drama magnet,” says Kimbal. “That’s his compulsion, the theme of his life.”

当飓风来临时，他就会成为那种感觉最有活力的人。"安德鲁-杰克逊曾经说过："我为风暴而生，平静不适合我。马斯克也是如此。他形成了一种围攻心态，包括对风暴和戏剧的吸引，有时甚至是渴望，无论是在工作中还是在他努力维持却未能维持的恋爱关系中。他在危机、最后期限和狂飙突进的工作中茁壮成长。当他面对曲折的挑战时，这种压力常常让他彻夜难眠，甚至呕吐不止。但这也让他精力充沛。"金巴尔说："他是一个戏剧磁铁。"这是他的强迫症，也是他生活的主题"。

When I was reporting on Steve Jobs, his partner Steve Wozniak said that the big question to ask was

When I turned the question back to Woz at the end of my reporting, he said that if he had run Apple, he would have been kinder. He would have treated everyone there like family and not summarily fired people. Then he paused and added, “But if I had run Apple, we may never have made the Macintosh.” And thus the question about Elon Musk: Could he have been more chill and still be the one launching us toward Mars and an electric-vehicle future?

当我报道史蒂夫-乔布斯时，他的搭档史蒂夫-沃兹尼亚克（Steve Wozniak）说，最重要的问题是，他有必要这么刻薄吗？如此粗暴残忍？如此戏剧化？报道结束后，当我把这个问题反问沃兹时，他说，如果由他来管理苹果公司，他会更和蔼可亲。他会像对待家人一样对待那里的每一个人，而不是草率地解雇员工。然后他停顿了一下，补充说："但如果是我管理苹果，我们可能永远都不会生产 Macintosh。"这就是关于埃隆-马斯克的问题：他是否可以更冷酷一些，然后仍然带领我们驶向火星和电动汽车的未来？

At the beginning of 2022—after a year marked by SpaceX making thirty-one successful rocket launches, Tesla selling close to a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on Earth—Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. “I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode,” he told me, “which it has been in for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life.”

2022 年初，在这一年里，SpaceX 成功发射了 31 枚火箭，特斯拉销售了近 100 万辆汽车，他也成为了地球上最富有的人，马斯克沮丧地谈到了他的煽风点火强迫症。他告诉我："我需要把心态从危机模式中转移出来，""这种状态已经持续了大约 14 年，也可以说是我生命中的大部分时间。"

It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he made the pledge, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. That April, he snuck away to the Hawaiian house of his mentor Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, accompanied by the actress Natasha Bassett, an occasional girlfriend. He had been offered a board seat at Twitter, but over the weekend he concluded that wasn’t enough. It was in his nature to want total control. So he decided he would make a hostile bid to buy the company outright. Then he flew to Vancouver to meet Grimes. There he stayed up with her until 5 a.m. playing a new war-and-empire-building game,

. Right after he finished, he pulled the trigger on his plan and went on Twitter. “I made an offer,” he announced.

这只是一句俏皮话，并非新年决心。就在他许下承诺的同时，他还在秘密购买 Twitter 的股票，这是世界上的终极游乐场。那年四月，他悄悄来到甲骨文公司创始人拉里-埃里森（Larry Ellison）的夏威夷别墅，同行的还有他的偶遇女友、女演员娜塔莎-贝塞特（Natasha Bassett）。他获得了 Twitter 董事会的席位，但在周末，他认为这还不够。他的天性就是想要完全控制公司。于是，他决定出价恶意收购这家公司。然后，他飞到温哥华去见格莱美斯。在那里，他和她一起玩一款新的战争与帝国建设游戏《Elden Ring》，一直玩到凌晨 5 点。游戏结束后，他立即扣动了计划的扳机，并登上了 Twitter。"他宣布："我开出了条件。

Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place or felt threatened, it took him back to the horrors of being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground.

多年来，每当他陷入黑暗或感到威胁时，就会想起在操场上被人欺负的恐怖情景。现在，他有机会拥有操场。

妈妈是模特，父亲是工程师，还是贼有钱的那种。可是，马斯克的童年，在很多时候，却像噩梦一般。因为性格非常与众不同，在学校被老师特别对待，甚至被认为智商有问题；还老是被同学欺凌，被揍的爹妈都差点认不出来，关键自己的亲爹脑回路也是十分奇特，竟然还责怪马斯克被揍

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