In just 36 years, Elon Musk went from scraping soot for $18 an hour in a sweltering Canadian boiler room to potentially earning $11.4 million an hour if his $1 trillion Tesla pay package fully pays out. It’s hard to fathom growth this profound in one lifetime. But is it destiny, or simply the relentless, never-say-die spirit of a Pretoria-born, upper-middle-class yet socially miserable teen who refused to settle for less than the highest-paying job on the board?
Let’s rewind to 36 years ago, when a young Musk moved to Canada in 1989. He was determined to find the best-paying job, and had reasons that went beyond just grit and ambition. Musk, who flew to Canada by himself with very little money, had no fixed place to stay. After landing in Montreal, he couldn’t locate the uncle he thought he would live with and made a youth hostel his temporary home.
After a small stint on a farm in tiny Waldeck, and after turning 18, he moved to Vancouver and finally began earning some money. It wasn’t easy, and ease was never the criterion. Musk simply asked the unemployment office which job on the board paid the most.
That’s how the world’s richest man today, worth $491 billion, ended up in a lumber mill boiler room, suited up in a hazmat suit, crawling through a narrow tunnel, and shoveling burning residue and sand out through the same hole. The working conditions were neither comfortable nor safe. According to Ashlee Vance’s biography on the tech tycoon, dozens attempted the job but quit in the very beginning. Only Musk and two others made it through the week. As Musk recalled, “You had to put on this hazmat suit and crawl through a tunnel just big enough for you… If you stayed in there for more than 30 minutes, you’d die.”
Fast forward to the present decade, and Musk has often shown that wealth has no correlation to how he views his work. Even when ranking among the richest men in the world, the Stanford dropout slept on an extremely narrow, uncomfortable couch in Tesla’s factory during an interview with CBS. His determination and go-getter attitude have surely been the driving forces that took him from making $18 an hour to nearly $12 million per hour in almost four decades.
According to Forbes, Tesla shareholders approved Elon Musk’s compensation package, which would increase the billionaire’s stake to about 25% if he meets a set of ambitious goals (expanding the company’s market capitalization to $8.5 trillion over the next 10 years). If anyone can get it done, it has to be Musk; he has gamed achievement itself. The CEO of SpaceX and xAI had previously hinted on social media that he might leave Tesla if he didn’t secure enough control, saying he wanted a big enough ownership stake to ensure the “robot army” he was developing wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands, but not so large that he couldn’t be fired if he went “crazy.”
Looks like Elon Musk always gets what he wants, from the best-paying job opportunity back in the ’80s to a $1 trillion package in 2025. From crawling through tunnels for a few extra dollars to commanding a trillion-dollar empire, Musk has proven that for him, even the stars aren’t far enough; only Mars will do.
