Elon’s 7 years of primary school
January 1977 – December 1983 · ages 5½ to 12½ · Grade 1–7
Elon went first to Waterkloof Primary School and then to Waterkloof House Preparatory School, transferred to Hatfield Primary School partway through Grade 4, and finished Grade 7 there. Before his parents divorced, the early grades were looked after by the two of them together; during Grade 4 he lived briefly with his mother, then went back to his father. From the middle of Grade 4 to the end of primary school, he was raised mainly by Errol.
What Errol provided was more than a comfortable standard of living. Life at Lonehill meant books, engineering tools, cars, horses, a minibike and model aircraft, and it meant travel and time outdoors as well. On car journeys Errol would turn distance, aviation, mathematics and science into questions and have the boy estimate, press further and reason it out; when Elon was about eleven, he also got him into a computing course that did not otherwise take children, and gave him an early start on computers.
From the spoken account of Danny Warnick, a friend of Elon Musk’s from primary school: “From the transfer to Hatfield Primary School partway through Grade 4 to the end of Grade 7, Elon Musk was raised mainly by his father, Errol. As his classmate Danny Warnick remembers it, Elon in those years was quiet and inward, and a happy child throughout. He was no good at ball games and took no part in school sport, but he was not a boy who only stayed indoors with a book: he rode a minibike, flew model aircraft, took his turn at chores such as looking after the horses, and often went waterskiing with his father on the Vaal River — both of them were accomplished waterskiers. Errol was closely involved in his life and his schooling at the time; he took him travelling and outdoors, and on car journeys he trained the boy’s mathematical thinking with questions about distance, aviation and engineering, and encouraged him to keep asking. So from Grade 4 to Grade 7 Elon was immersed in mathematics, science, science fiction and comics on the one hand, and had a full outdoor life on the other; in his classmates’ eyes this was a stretch of primary school in which he got on well with his father, and life was settled and happy.”













