Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk had to be retested at the age of 17 even when he scored an ‘A+’ grade for a special reason. The recent news about the billionaire innovator has impressed netizens and since its breaking, has been making the rounds of Twitter.
On Wednesday, Elon Musk’s mother, Maye Musk took to Twitter and shared a throwback picture of the computer aptitude test result that her son took when he was 17-years-old. In her tweet, Maye revealed that her genius son had to take another test because Elon Musk’s examiners had never seen such high grades before.
The throwback image posted by Canadian-South African supermodel Maye revealed a letter signed by the Director of Information Management at Musk’s graduation institute, University of Pretoria. In the letter, the Director of Information Management wrote, “I have requested ISM (SA) to conduct aptitude tests on Elon Musk regarding computer programming etc. The results were outstanding.”
The letter showed Elon Musk’s grades in Operating and Programming which were both “A+”.
Sharing the throwback image on Twitter, Maye Musk wrote, “I found your computer aptitude test from when you were 17. If I remember correctly, they had to retest you because they had never seen such a high score.”
Elon Musk’s mother also added, “No wonder you are such a brilliant engineer,” and added the ‘ProudMom’ hashtag to her statement.
.@elonmusk I found your computer aptitude test from when you were 17. If I remember correctly, they had to retest you because they had never seen such a high score. No wonder you are such a brilliant engineer. #ProudMom pic.twitter.com/7sGxAvLF4r
— Maye Musk (@mayemusk) March 3, 2021
Since its posting, the tweet has received over 156.6k ‘likes’, over 13 thousand retweets and thousands of replies on Twitter.
Elon is too smart not to be an alien.
— Official* Pope of Muskanity 🖌 (@RationalEtienne) March 3, 2021
— I'm Hrush (@HrushiVahadane) March 3, 2021
He he handed her his milk bottle and said "Mother. I believe this needs to be warmed to a temperature of 99 degrees Fahrenheit. I'll wait. Thank you Mother" 😊
— Toni Marconi 🦩🦩🦩 (@gatica1813) March 3, 2021
Amazing, it’s absolutely fabulous that documents like this were saved. Thank you for being such an incredibly wonderful mom! pic.twitter.com/nZNdsWmLAG
— Gail-Texas (@gailalfa1) March 3, 2021
And here in India people are saying that piece of a paper can’t decide your future. 😂
— Ranjitsinh B (@rnjt2112) March 3, 2021
Elon on seeing this: pic.twitter.com/THcSED4WqJ
— Shivam Kumar Gupta ✍️ (@shivamg381) March 3, 2021
Maye Musk often takes to Twitter to share throwback pictures of Elon during his teenage and adolescent years.
1989 stories in my book:
January: @kimbal @ToscaMusk @elonmusk #Johannesburg
May: Elon (17) leaves for #Canada
October: Tosca (15) sells my home
December: We move to #Toronto #AWomanMakesAPlan link:https://t.co/LvptB4fjM3 pic.twitter.com/oLVd8stKOW— Maye Musk (@mayemusk) June 11, 2020
@elonmusk #1995 And people said you knew nothing about cars😏🤣 #FoundThisPhoto 😍 pic.twitter.com/CpfKvjXdQh
— Maye Musk (@mayemusk) December 10, 2019
Today, Elon Musk is the second-richest person in the world and the founder of the most valuable companies like SpaceX and Tesla. But his rise didn’t come to him so easily. Musk’s childhood, in his own terms, was ‘excruciating’. In a book called “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and Quest for a Fantastic Future”, there are several anecdotes that can give us all a glimpse into Musk’s troublesome childhood.
Born in South Africa, Elon was a nerdy and introspective kid who was interested in computers, fantasy and sci-fi. His father was an emotionally abusive man who from time to time used to force Musk and his brother to sit silently for four hours as he lectured them. This made him an easy target for bullies at his school. According to Musk, gangs of bullies used to hunt him down and used to kick and punch him. As Musk was physically not that intimidating, the bullies went as far as pushing him down a staircase that sent him to a hospital.
This went till 15-years-old where Internet’s most loved entrepreneur went through a growth spurt. Musk eventually learned self-defence forms like judo, karate and wrestling. By the age of 16 years, Musk in his own words, used to “dish out as hard as they’d give it” to him.
Musk’s only escape came in the form of technology. At the age of 10 years, Musk started learning programming via an inexpensive home computer that used to sit at his home unused. Before long, he mastered programming to such an extent that he created a video-game all by himself called Blastar. He sold the code of the game to a magazine called PC and Office Tech for a price of $500.
Elon’s early interest in science fiction, fantasy and philosophy can be easily seen reflecting his own sense of vision for the human race. Dots can be connected easily from his childhood interests to his current areas of work where he is proactively working towards colonizing Mars, giving pollutant-free vehicles to the world, and when he’s free, save companies from bullies in the form of hedge funds.
With his work with Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Hyperloop, Musk has time and time again defied bullies and critics.