In this screengrab from a YouTube video posted by CC, a young Elon Musk waits for the arrival of a McLaren F1.
In this screengrab from a YouTube video posted by CC, a young Elon Musk waits for the arrival of a McLaren F1.
Maye Musk – Canadian-South African model, dietitian and mother of tech mastermind Elon Musk – has shared a remarkable vestige from her now-billionaire son’s childhood that once again goes to show that equipped with a highly advanced intellect, he was always destined to do great things.
A computer aptitude test conducted by the University of Pretoria in May 1989 demonstrates a 17-year-old Musk’s near-flawless understanding of computer programming, with the Tesla and SpaceX founder having rinsed the test and walked away with a pair of A+ scores.
Aptitude test of teenaged Elon Musk emerges
Maye Musk tweeted on Wednesday 3 March that she recalls the university having been astounded by Elon’s performance on the tests, and said that she remembers them requesting that he retake the test to ensure that they hadn’t erred in assigning him one of the best scores they had ever given a student at the University – never mind a teenager yet to complete his school studies.
“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,” she tweeted.
“No wonder you are such a brilliant engineer,” his proud mum said.
‘I knew he was a genius at three-years-old’
Maye Musk was recently interviewed on CBS This Morning to talk about her new book, A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success, and during the interview she reminisced on the unique experience of raising a child-genius who consistently inspired the awe of contemporaries far older and more accomplished than he was at the time.
“At three, I knew [Elon] was a genius,” she said during the interview in January 2021. “But you still don’t know if he’s going to do great things because many geniuses just end up in a basement being a genius but not applying it.”
She recalled how Elon wrote a computer game when he was 12-years-old that impressed a group of college engineering students.
“They said, ‘Wow, he knows all the shortcuts’,” she said of the students who previewed the game. Young Elon Musk then submitted the game to a magazine, and earned himself $500 for his work.
“I don’t think they knew that he was 12-years-old,” she said. “So that was a good start.”
