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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Rachel Savage in Pretoria

The making of Elon Musk: how did his childhood in apartheid South Africa shape him?

Composite of pictures of Elon Musk as a child and adult.
Elon Musk grew up under the collapsing apartheid regime in South Africa. Composite: Getty Images / Guardian design / Bryanston High School

With an imposing double-winged redbrick main building, and school songs lifted directly from Harrow’s songbook, Pretoria boys high school is every inch the South African mirror of the English private schools it was founded in 1901 to imitate.

Elon Musk, who has rapidly become one of the most powerful people in US politics, spent his final school years in the 1980s as a day pupil on the lush, tree-filled campus in South Africa’s capital, close to his father’s large detached home in Waterkloof, a wealthy Pretoria suburb shaded by purple jacaranda blossoms in spring.

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