This week, on the leader’s couch, rWe will review Elon Musk’s tortuous relationship with his fathera bond that has marked the personal and professional life of the founder of SpaceX like no other. And Errol Musk, as his YouTube program says, is the dad of a genius and he clearly feels that his role was crucial in his son’s success. Was it?
For the psychoanalyst Luciano Lutereau, “thanks to the fact that we believe that we have parents, we explain many particularities of our life, because we make its existence a deterministic resource” and that is why this Argentine analyst, to help us get out of our confinement, postulates that “we do not have parents. We are children of singular desires. From that man, that woman and maybe from someone else.”
From this perspective, the desires for genius and wealth of this eccentric daddy, marked the lives of their three children with fire, fostering, in that supposed safe place, called home, such a level of physical and mental toughness that the veldskool –summer camps where South African children had to endure physical and psychological abuse from elders They were an experience bland compared to his upbringing.
For Errol, “violence was simply part of the educational experience in South Africa” and it is one of the key ingredients in his successful formula for forging geniuses. Proud, he confesses to Walter Isaacson, biographer of his sonwhich he exercised “an extremely severe street self-criticism towards his children”self-criticism that would forge in Elon the “same autocracy severe with oneself and with others.”
Clearly, following Luthereau, “Parental functions are neither abstractions nor ideals. They are embodied by specific people” and Errol, before being a stern father, was a successful engineer who worked in the construction of hotels, shopping centers and factories, dabbled in South African politics, flew airplanes and, among many other activities, imported and sold emeralds. Apparently, His great fortune comes from this last business. and that is why many critics have insisted that Elon Musk is not the self made man that proclaims, but a lucky son of a millionaire dad.
And the father of Elon’s childhood is described -by Isaacson- as a subject “boastful and manly, a big guy with big hands and a fascinating presence. His career had many ups and downs, but at that time he was swimming in abundance. He owned a gold Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible and, more importantly: two encyclopedias, stacks of books and an assortment of engineering tools.”
Despite the obvious similarities in their professional interests and passion for cars and airplanes, Elon Musk distances himself and clarifies that ““My father had a combination of legitimate businesses and quackery.” and over time, “he went from being a genius in engineering to believing in witchcraft.””. Elon distances himself from his father’s strange ideas by saying that he is a man of science, while Errol has become a magnet and promoter of dangerous conspiracy theories.
Outside of business, this “engineer, rogue and charismatic fantasist” continues to torment Elon Musk, not only because of his outlandish ideas, the allowance he demands or the truths and lies he spreads about his billionaire son to capture the world’s attention (and increase the allowance to silence him), but because of the psychological damage he causes to him and his loved ones. nearby.
Tosca, Elon’s only sister, notes in Musk’s biography that his father “He was jovial and fun, but at times he became dark, abusive and possessed by fantasies and conspiracies. His mood could change in an instant. “Everything could be wonderful and then, in a second, he would become cruel and start spewing insults.”.
Kimbal, Elon’s inseparable brother, remembers the father of his childhood like this: “One minute he was super nice and the next he was yelling and lecturing you for hours.“Literally two or three hours, while I made you stand there, calling you useless, pathetic, making horrible, mean comments, not letting you leave.”
These descriptions of the father… fit perfectly with those of the son that we have shared in previous columns. Both Kimbal, as well as his ex-partners Justine, Talulah, Grimes and Amber Heard, agree on this sad similarity, since Elon Musk’s mood swings can end in extremely hurtful actions and words…so it is worth asking why if he was a victim of his father’s violent behavior… he replies.
Bad treatment that led Maye Musk to go as far as she could with her three children, Because her nine years of marriage to Errol Musk were marked by physical and psychological violence and infidelity. But Errol did not give up and sued his ex-wife again and again, to obtain custody of their children and force her to return to him.
And although he never managed to make Maye Musk regret her decision, he did manage, after years of conversations, to get Elon to move in with him: “My father was alone, tremendously alone, and I believed that I should keep him company. He used psychological tricks on me.”
With the perspective of time, Elon recognizes that it was a serious mistake to live with his father, Because until then I didn’t know how evil he could be. Kimbal, five years later, decided to accompany him and confesses that ““My father made my brother go live with him by making him feel guilty and then he did the same with me.”
Yes, their father convinced them of something they didn’t want, because as Isaacson points out, “Errol can be very forceful and sometimes convincing”. And this ability to “transform the reality around you” It is another of the characteristics that father and genius son share. For Kimbal, his father had the ability to “completely invent things”and “truly believe its false reality”, description that coincides with that of several critics of the owner of Twitter.
Isaacson himself noticed “that I was getting caught in Errol’s tangled web. In a series of phone calls and emails over two years, He offered me changing versions of his relationship with his children.Maye and her stepdaughter, with whom she would have two children”
Yes, Walter Isaacson, a professional biographer, fell into the trap of a guy capable of saying one thing and then the opposite, in order to clear the fame of wicked that those close to him have aired in different media. In fact, his firstborn, in an interview, pointed out that his father “He was a horrible being. He had a detailed plan to do evil. He planned evil. He committed almost every crime you can imagine. Almost every evil thing you can imagine, he did.”
At the time of giving this interview Elon was going through a dark period in his life, because of the immense difficulties his companies faced, Added to this was the breakup with Amber Heard and the news that Errol had gotten Jana, daughter of Justine, Elon Musk’s first wife, pregnant. For the Musk clan, this was the last straw that broke patience, since Errol met the future mother of two of his children when she was barely fifteen years old… and his stepfather… was no one other than his son.
This grotesque icing on the cake, left Elon Musk disgusted and knocked outsince he, despite the violence suffered in his childhood, tried to get closer to Errol precisely when he became the father of Nevada, his first child, who died before being born. Yes, despite the horrors he experienced with his father in South Africa and despite the damage he caused his mother and siblings, Elon, upon becoming a father, wanted to get closer to his father.
Why would he have done something like that? The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, almost a hundred years ago, said that the superego, representative of the moral and ethical thoughts received from culture, has “a basis in the death drive” and “its severity is the result of destructive impulses of the subject.”
This superego It is formed in our childhood by the introjection of two contradictory objectsone with protective and benevolent qualities (idealized partial object) and another with punitive characteristics (persecutory partial object) and as we grow and mature these polar entities begin to integrate.
Thus, if we play with these concepts, Elon Musk’s idealized partial object wants to be the hero who saves humanity from the destruction of planet Earth, while Errol embodies that persecutory partial object that, to the horror of those closest to him, possesses him when He gets frustrated in love and in business.
And it is likely that, when Nevada was born, Elon will need his father to integrate his two faces. Unfortunately, despite the son’s good intentions, the idea of reconciling with his father was another serious mistake. Elon not only suffered the death of his first son, but also a deep disillusionment that, far from helping him integrate his idealized and persecutory aspects, made them more polarized.
Errol, by seducing Jana just when he was most vulnerable and in need of a good and protective father figure, broke all possibility of reunion and integrationbecause as the psychoanalyst Gabriel Rolón asks, How many times is the germ of his child’s misfortune hidden behind a father’s well-intentioned command?