"I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad."
? Elon Musk
Maye Haldeman, Musk's mother, was born in Regina - the capital of Saskatchewan, Canada. Even from a young age, Maye was extremely attractive in appearance and vivacious in personality. Her energy was undoubtedly compounded by a family who didn't know the meaning of kicking it back or taking it easy. They couldn't necessarily be labeled as overachievers - a suspiciously pejorative term, but they were a high-impact and high-energy lot. They were always on the move and always doing things that were not typical of the average Canadian family.
Maye's parents, Winnifred and Joshua, were trailblazers even if it was just the start of the fifties in North America. History looks at the fifties in southern Canada with the same lens it looked at James Dean's America - wild, successful, and rebellious. That typically characterized the Haldeman family. They were financially well-positioned - enough to pack up and move their entire family across the world to almost wherever they wished. And, because the Haldemans were pretty adventurous and they could afford to buy their own aircraft, they packed up the family, loaded them up into that plane and flew halfway around the world to South Africa.
As the bird flies, in a straight line, that is about 8,000 miles. But if you think about it, that aircraft would not have been able to fly straight across; it needed to puddle jump and head east before coming up on Europe then flying south toward Pretoria, and that made it more like 10,000 miles. So think about that for a minute. It's not like getting on I40 and driving for three days from Nashville to Flagstaff. If you think of driving from Tennessee to the Grand Canyon in the summer, it is a brilliant experience with the kids. Try making this flight with four kids, two of whom were just two years old (Maye and her twin sister were two years old when the family made this journey.)
Maye's twin sister is someone you would have probably heard off: Kaye Rive. Yes, that's her married name. Before that, she was Kaye Haldeman. (Interesting set of names for the twins - Maye and Kaye.) Maye went on to marry Errol Musk and became Maye Musk while Kaye became Kaye Rive, mother of Peter and Lyndon Rive of Solar City. Yes, Peter and Lyndon are Elon's cousins. Small world, ain't it?
Well, back to the cross-continent excursion that the Haldeman's took when Maye and Kaye were just two years old. It must have been one interesting flight to cross the Atlantic and the only way that a single-engine plane could do it without running out of fuel over the Atlantic would have been to hug the New England coast up the Nova Scotia then cross over to Iceland before heading over to Norway and down through mainland Europe, and from that point on it would be all overland flying except for the crossing of the Mediterranean, unless they crossed it near the Nile in Egypt and continued down all the way across the African continent until they got to South Africa. This route is good for two reasons. First of all, it is the best route to take when crossing the Atlantic in a single-engine aircraft.
You can't just plug the lats and longs into the GPS and make a straight line from Regina, Canada to Pretoria, South Africa. Well, first of all, there were no GPS satellites to transmit data, no GPS receivers to receive the sat data, and no database of maps to make sense of it all. It was, after all, the fifties. But even if you put all that aside, remember they were flying a single-engine (piston engine, nonetheless) and in the event of engine failure you need to be able to glide forward or backward, or left or right, toward land for a safe emergency landing. So, for this to happen, you always have to have land within a glide path based on your altitude. The only way to do that would be to fly at a certain altitude and hug the coast in a way that, in the event of a problem, you'd just have to glide to the coast. As safe as that is, it makes for a very long trip because you need to stop every three to four hours and fill up on Avgas. What made the trip even more interesting was that it was done by dead reckoning all the way. That means no electronic or radio navigation equipment, just good old maps, rulers, compasses, and protractors.
Grandpa Haldeman bought his aircraft and obtained his Private Pilot's license while working as a licensed chiropractor in Canada. By the way, Musk is a Private Pilot as well. Just after the sale of Zip2, around the time he bought the McLaren, he also bought a single-engine aircraft.
Back to the Haldemans.
Dr. Haldeman was a popular and well-respected member of society and had a thriving practice when he decided that Canada was not politically in lockstep with his ideals. So, he packed-up, picked-up and moved to Pretoria. Curious choice of cities but the Haldemans were looking for answers to life and nature. They were also looking for a break from the monotony of the West and the romance of the African bush. The Haldemans were of Canadian citizenry even though Joshua was from Minnesota. Maye and the other Haldeman children were born in Canada. You will see later that Elon Musk found his way to North America forty years later thanks to this fact.
Once the Haldemans got to Pretoria and got situated, it didn't stop there for the flying Haldemans. You see, Grandpa and Grandma Haldeman were looking for the lost city in the desert and they made a dozen flights crisscrossing the continent of Africa with that objective in their small single-engine plane.
But that wasn't the extent or limit of their flying. The Haldemans also flew longer journeys and navigated their way - family and all - across the globe and down toward Australia. That was approximately a 14,000-mile trip to basically travel back up to North Africa, then across Asia Minor, over India, and then down through South East Asia, down the Malay Peninsula across to Indonesia, and along the islands of New Guinea and down to Australia - all this with kids in the backseat. "Are we there yet?" takes on a whole different flavor under those circumstances.
The Haldemans were a tremendous influence on the Rive and Musk kids as they grew up close to each other and heard stories of their grandparents who took South Africa by storm. They were brave souls that were up for a good challenge.
Maye and Kaye raised their children close to each other and with a good relationship between the cousins who, as you can tell by this point, are all strong entrepreneurs in their own right. Between Elon's tech endeavors, Kimball's green adventures, and the Rive brothers' energy and so on, what you have is a family that has taken this world by storm. That is one launchpad that you should keep at the back of your mind as you size up Musk and, more importantly, try to understand him so that you can find the light in your life and make a difference, finding your unique way just as he and his siblings and cousins are doing.
Vanity Fair calls them the 'First Family of Tech.' I have to agree.
There was a lot of intellectual wattage in the Haldeman strain. Both Maye's and Kaye's kids - the Rives and the Musks - were an amazing bunch of kids who were close-knit beyond just the binds that tied them from their mothers. They had another similarity going for them beyond genetics, which was the fervor of intellectualism. Imagine having discussions with your siblings and cousins about the efficacy of banking at the age of twelve? Not exactly what I was talking about at that age. How 'bout you?
But that just goes to show the caliber of their grain. In another famous story of his youth, the cousins got together when Musk was still a teenager and they decided that they wanted to get a business up and running.
Musk was an advanced coder by the time he was twelve years old and was able to code a game that found enough interest that it was published, and he was paid for it. There is no doubt that he is industrious and he wants to earn a buck. But earning a quick buck is not all that interests him.
He and his bunch of siblings and cousins got together and decided they wanted to open an arcade near a school. He understood marketing very well and he understood it from a functional perspective rather than an academic one. This group of industrious kids did everything that they needed to do. They got the documents and got the lease, then put in for licensing and did everything that went along with that. A significant amount of thought and work went into it and they were on the home stretch when they came upon municipal documentation, which needed an adult over 18 to sign it. None of them had seen this coming and were totally taken aback. They didn't know where to turn to. They tried Maye, but Maye was too busy working two jobs to be able to take the time to come downtown to sign the documents. They tried Dr. Rive, but he was not only not willing, he was absolutely upset that all this had gone on without a shred of permission from any of the parents. In the end, it couldn't get off the ground because there was no adult to sign-off.
This says a lot about this group of kids. There is a lot of energy and imagination. They didn't just start down this enterprising path when they were teenagers either. This goes pretty far back to even before they were having conversations of banking and commerce amongst themselves. They put rubber to the pavement when they realized that there were so many opportunities in different layers across different...
