We’re all used to seeing Elon Musk as the gutsy tech pioneer who gave us Tesla and SpaceX.
But what’s lesser known is his humble beginnings on the path to changing the tech industry as we know it.
Watch him describe the most dangerous job he took that put him at risk of getting hyperthermia:
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Video credit: Rumble
The fascinating story came to light during an interview during the “Third Row Tesla” podcast. In it, Musk described the years prior to him founding Tesla. This is when he revealed that the worst job he ever did was to clean boiler rooms in a Vancouver lumber mill.
Musk already wanted to move to the US from South Africa, where he grew up, even as a teenager because he wanted a crack at the tech industry. But Musk first moved to Montreal at 17 years old because through his mother, he could get Canadian citizenship. He first worked at a wheat farm before making his way to Vancouver, where he worked at a lumber mill short-term.
His job necessitated shoveling “steaming” sand and mulch out of a wood-pulp boiler, Musk explained. Musk would shovel the sand and mulch into an access tunnel in the boiler where a waiting worker outside would remove from the tunnel.
Musk described the job as quite dangerous owing to the fact that the single small tunnel was the only entrance and exit to the boiler. If the tunnel was full of mulch and sand when an emergency happened, it would prove tricky to extricate any worker trapped inside.
“It’d be really hard to drag somebody out,” Musk said. “It does not seem safe because if the tunnel gets blocked, trying to unblock that tunnel would be very difficult in a short period of time.”
In fact, the workers would switch positions every 15 minutes between one outside and one inside the boiler because they were at risk of getting hyperthermia if they stayed inside too long.
Musk only stayed at the job for four days but it paid roughly double the hourly rate that other jobs were offering at the time.
Musk would later end up moving to the US in a few years to attend the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation, he founded Zip2, the online mapping startup, then an online bank that eventually became PayPal, before founding SpaceX, the iconic rocket company.
Bloomberg estimates Musk’s worth to be around $40 billion. Apart from Tesla and SpaceX, Musk is also involved with the Boring Company, a tunneling startup, as well as Neuralink, an artificial-intelligence startup.
With such a distinguished resume, it’s not hard to figure out why people wouldn’t have thought that he once worked a job as dangerous as shoveling sand and mulch out of a boiler!
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