In 1989, a seventeen-year-old Elon Musk left South Africa alone in part to avoid compulsory military service — he had claimed Canadian citizenship through his mother, and after landing in Montreal he bussed across the country to a second cousin in Waldeck, Saskatchewan, before shovelling grain bins, cleaning the boiler room of a British Columbia lumber mill and enrolling at Queen's University around 1990, transferring to Penn in 1992

In 1989, a seventeen-year-old Elon Musk left South Africa alone in part to avoid compulsory military service — he had claimed Canadian citizenship through his mother, and after landing in Montreal he bussed across the country to a second cousin in Waldeck, Saskatchewan, before shovelling grain bins, cleaning the boiler room of a British Columbia lumber mill and enrolling at Queen's University around 1990, transferring to Penn in 1992

In June 1989, a seventeen-year-old Elon Musk left South Africa for Canada on his own, having secured a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother. The founding-myth version of this story moves fast: he escaped, he arrived, he built rockets. The documented sequence is slower and stranger, and the most telling part lives in the gaps between those landmarks. The passport made the departure possible. Musk applied for a Canadian passport thro…