Errol Musk
Article
Errol Musk is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 13, 2023 and April 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Musk’s father Errol ran a successful engineering company in Pretoria, South Africa”; “I can’t help thinking of this anecdote about how Elon’s father Errol courted his mother Maye”; “his father Errol, previously a successful engineer, suddenly became a crackpot”. It most often appears alongside Donald Trump, Elon, Elon Musk.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: September 13, 2023
- Last seen: April 22, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Donald Trump (2 shared issues)
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- Elon (2 shared issues)
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- Elon Musk (2 shared issues)
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- Musk (2 shared issues)
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- 80,000 Hours (1 shared issues)
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- @msamalam (1 shared issues)
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- A Ketamine Addict’s Perspective On Musk (1 shared issues)
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- Abe Lincoln (1 shared issues)
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- Agent Village (1 shared issues)
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- AGI Fridays (1 shared issues)
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- AI 2027 (1 shared issues)
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- AI alignment movement (1 shared issues)
External Links
None.
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Musk’s father Errol ran a successful engineering company in Pretoria, South Africa. For a while he also represented the anti-apartheid party in the city council. His net worth was probably in the single-digit to low-double-digit millions.
Although it’s unfair and doesn’t relate to Elon specifically, I can’t help thinking of this anecdote about how Elon’s father Errol courted his mother Maye:
According to Maye, Errol spent about seven years as a relentless suitor seeking her hand in marriage and eventually breaking her will. “He just never stopped proposing,” she said.
3: Anatoly Karlin highlights (X) a section from Walter Isaacson’s Musk biography claiming that his father Errol, previously a successful engineer, suddenly became a crackpot in his forties:
Inline links: Anatoly Karlin highlights (X)
One day [Musk’s cousin] Peter came over to the house and found Errol sitting in his underwear at the kitchen table with a plastic roulette wheel. He was trying to see whether microwaves could affect it. He would spin the wheel, mark down the result, then spin it and put it in a microwave oven and record the result. “It was nuts”, Peter says. Errol had become convinced that he could find a system for beating the game. He dragged Elon to the Pretoria casino many times, dressing him up so that he looked older than sixteen, and had him write down the numbers while Errol used a calculator hidden under a betting card.
Elon went to the library and read a few books on roulette and even wrote a roulette simulation program on his computer. He then tried to convince his father that none of his schemes would work. But Errol believed that he had found a deeper truth about probability and, as he later described it to me, an “almost total solution to what is called randomness.” When I asked him to explain it, he said, “There are no ‘random events’ or ‘chance.’ All events follow the Fibonacci Sequence, like the Mandelbrot Set. I went on to discover the relationship between ‘chance’ and the Fibonacci Sequence. This is the subject for a scientific paper. If I share it, all activities relying on ‘chance’ will be ruined, so I am in doubt as to doing that.”