Compared with Elon, Justine studied more than he did. She had to. To keep her scholarship for four years, she needed straight A average, and she often got panic attacks from the pressure. To ease the stress, she practiced for a black belt in taekwondo, wrote fiction in cafes, and drank vast amounts of coffee and inexpensive red wine. “Bless those tasty Australian shirazes, stay away from the cheap French stuff,” she said.153,157
Elon saw Justine from across a room inside of the university. To begin talking to her, he lied by saying they had met before at a party. But Justine knew she had never attended this party, and she thought Elon was a clean-cut, upper-class boy with a South African accent. When Elon asked her out for an ice cream date, Justine decided to lie back by saying yes.182
The unsuspecting Elon went to Justine’s room where there were supposed to meet each other. He walked up to the door where he found a note explaining the lie. But Elon didn’t give up. He searched through the university and found Justine while she read a Spanish text in the student center. Carrying two ice creams, he surprised her. But Justine wasn’t impressed and Elon had already decided to transfer to a university in another country.182
Canada wasn’t exciting enough to Elon and he decided early on that he wanted to live where the really exciting breakthroughs happened: United States. “If you want to have a significant impact on the world, the United States is the best place to do that,” he said.316
“I’m not suggesting that things couldn’t be better,” Elon said. “We should be asking ourselves, have we made the environment better or worse?”316 He compared it with democracy. While democracy is the least bad government system, the US is least bad at encouraging innovation compared with other countries.351 “However, if you look at new technology, it’s crazy how much of it comes out of the United States,” Elon said. “If you want to do cutting edge stuff, you come to the United States. It’s not so much that there aren’t great entrepreneurial opportunities in China and India, they are huge – especially for people who were born and raised there. But it’s not cutting-edge technology. Name three things that came out of India or China in the last 200 years.”375
Winston Churchill had a saying, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.” The reason to why US is the country where you succeed is that US is open to new ideas. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. US attracts people with new ideas because of its openness to new ideas and the acceptance of failure.354 “If I had been born in some cave, I suppose I would still try to be innovative, but there would be limits,” Elon said. “You have to have the environment that encourages innovation as well. Let’s say I had been constrained to live in South Africa, where I was born. I would not have been able to achieve a fraction of what I have here.”52
Elon arrived to the US thanks to a scholarship and enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, also known as Penn. While studying at Penn, Elon shared a house with Adeo Ressi, who was another Penn student as well as an outsider like Elon. “He was the biggest dork I’ve ever met,” Ressi said of Elon years later.
Ressi, the son of an engineer and a social worker, grew up in New York. During the summer, while other children went on summer camps, Ressi lived in the experimental city Arcosanti in the middle of the Arizona desert. The Italian architect, Paolo Soleri, had designed the city. He used a concept called arcology – a combination of architecture and ecology. “I had the opportunity to experience a very utopian vision of the world,” the youngest inhabitant in the city, Ressi, said. While at Penn, Ressi ran a newspaper with a focus on environmental issues: The Green Times. As his final thesis, he tried to submit this newspaper, but his thesis professor didn’t accept it, so he never got a degree.46
When Elon and Ressi first met, they lived in a giant campus dorm. But they didn’t like the environment, so they decided to rent a large house outside of the campus area. “We were both transfer students and they stuck us in these giant dorms and we just wanted to get out,” Ressi said.60 They would later move to an even larger house with fourteen rooms. Spent kegs with plywood on top became cheap furniture.
Only three of them lived in the larger house.47 The third person is unknown, but Elon and Ressi recalled they had forever changed this person’s life. It’s unknown if it was for better or worse.349 At one point, Elon’s mother felt a need to check on him to see if he had enough food to eat, and she also made sure he wore a fresh pair of socks each day.117
“We weren’t connected to the fraternity scene, and we weren’t new students either,” Ressi said. “We had to meet people, so we decided to have parties, but since we also didn’t have money, we decided to make it a business.” While Ressi transformed their house into a club, Elon took care of the finances. Elon was the sober one who had to talk to the police when they arrived for unknown reasons. To take care of the guests, they hired bouncers, and to clean up, they hired a cleaning crew.60 Up to 500 guests could attend these wild parties. The guests had to pay five dollars each to drink as many beers as they wanted, but the profit each night could still be as high as a thousand dollars.47
While not hosting parties, Elon played first-person shooter games on his computer. It’s unclear how much he studied and how much he played games, but Elon explained he earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and economics with an unofficial minor in first-person shooter games.
Elon earned two degrees: a degree in finance from the Wharton School and a degree in physics from the University of Pennsylvania.262 He already knew he wanted to create something big, so he didn’t have any other choice than to get two degrees. “I studied physics and business, because in order to do these things you need to know how the universe works and how the economy works and you also need to be able to bring people together to create something,” he said. “It’s very difficult to create something as individuals if it’s a significant technology.”63
As an engineer before anything else, Elon thought the undergraduate business degree was easy. All business courses combined during the final year were not as difficult as one course in quantum mechanics from the degree in physics.350 But he would never regret the decision to also get a degree in finance. “I’m head engineer and chief designer as well as CEO, so I don’t have to cave to some money guy,” Elon said. “I encounter CEOs who don’t know the details of their technology and that’s ridiculous to me.”50
While not studying, playing games, or hosting parties, Elon worked. He wrote business plans for an electronic book scanning service, and he worked two summers for an ultracapacitor energy storage venture called Pinnacle Research.51
Elon also worked for the video game developer Rocket Science Games.71 He participated in the development of the games Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine, released in 1994, and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs: The Second Cataclysm, released in 1995.118 In the game manual, Elon was credited below the heading Rocket Scientists.38 “He [Elon] has that Bill Gates energy where his foot bounces and he’s wiggling just because he’s so smart,” one of his co-workers said.51