A Boy Was Thrown Down a Staircase Here

Bryanston High School sits on Tramore Road in Sandton, north of Johannesburg, and in the school's 1985 yearbook Elon Musk's name appears beside the chess A team. It is also where a group of boys kicked him and threw him down a flight of stairs. His father Errol told the South African site BizNews in 2015 that his son was beaten so badly that he could not recognise him, and that Elon spent roughly two weeks in a Sandton hospital. The principal of Bryanston High told News24 that same year that he was saddened to learn the bullying had happened at his school. That last detail is the one that matters, because the story is almost always told about a different school. Search for Musk's schooldays and you will find headline after headline placing the beating at Pretoria Boys High School, an institution he did not attend until afterwards, roughly sixty kilometres away in another province. Business Insider ran that framing. Much of the coverage that followed it did too. Bill Schroder, headmaster of Pretoria Boys High from 1990 to 2009, addressed the point directly in a 2018 letter to BizNews: there is no evidence, he wrote, that Musk was poorly treated at Boys High. In the same letter Schroder dispatched a second story that had attached itself to the school. The claim was that Musk had donated a million rand on condition that the school never contact him again, because he had come to loathe the place and the country. Schroder confirmed the donation and rejected the condition. "It is true that Elon Musk did, at my request, give a donation for R1 million," he wrote. "What is not true is that he disliked the country or the school so intensely that he told me not to approach him again. I, in fact did, and he sent a second donation per that request." What remains genuinely unresolved is why the assault happened at all. In November 2024 Errol Musk gave an account on a South African podcast in which the attack followed a remark his son had made about the other boy's late father. Secondary coverage reports that Elon and Kimbal reject that version, but no direct statement from either brother could be located, so Errol's account stands as one man's recollection rather than an established fact. Musk finished his schooling at Pretoria Boys High and matriculated in 1988 with distinctions in physical science and computer science. He left for Canada the following June, at seventeen. Sources: MyBroadband, "The big lie about Elon Musk's South African school days" — https://mybroadband.co.za/news/trending/443832-the-big-lie-about-elon-musks-south-african-school-days.html · BizNews, 22 July 2015 — https://www.biznews.com/undictated/2015/07/22/errol-musk-elon-was-beaten-so-badly-i-couldnt-recognise-him · BizNews, 10 August 2018 (Schroder letter) — https://www.biznews.com/undictated/2018/08/10/elon-musk-takeover-talk-sceptical-wall-street-pretoria · News24, 23 July 2015 — https://www.news24.com/News24/Bryanston-High-School-saddened-by-Elon-Musk-bullying-20150723 · HuffPost on Errol Musk's 2024 account — https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-father-errol-debunks-controversial-claims_n_67475372e4b08e4755035f4e