A simple sorting of photos has produced spectacular evidence of Elon Musk’s precocious genius. On Sunday, his mother, Maye Musk, posted on X an image of a document dated 1989: the results of a computer aptitude test taken by her son when he was just 17. “My brilliant boy. A proud mum”, she wrote with a photo. The document, from the University of Pretoria in South Africa, shows that he scored the top mark, A+, in both programming and computer operations. Elon Musk himself commented on the publication: “They told me I had the best engineering aptitude score they had ever seen. In other words, not bad for a human, as a future AI might say.”
This test, carried out long before the creation of Tesla, SpaceX or xAI, gives a glimpse of the technological potential he was already demonstrating as a teenager. Today, the billionaire is at the head of a technology empire and a personal fortune estimated at more than 421 billion dollars, according to Forbes.
From a cheap bowl of cereal to Texas rockets
Despite this success, Maye Musk regularly reminds us that the family’s beginnings were anything but comfortable. After her divorce in 1979, she raised her children on limited means. “I remember Elon saying, ‘I wanted Coco Pops, but we only had Raisin Bran’,” she told Fox News. Even today, when her son has residences all over the world, she claims to live in modest conditions when she visits him. “You can’t have a fancy house near a rocket site,” she explained, referring to SpaceX’s Texas complex.
At the same time, Elon Musk continues to make headlines, whether with his artificial intelligence Grok or his political stance. What’s more, the billionaire is also in turmoil, seeing his position at the head of Tesla increasingly threatened by growing investor concern.
