Elon Musk was on brink of death after catching malaria on South African safari, book claims

Tesla owner was ‘only hours from death’

Elon Musk contracted malaria while on safari in South Africa in 2000 and almost died, a new biography has claimed.

Walter Isaacson detailed the billionaire’s near-death experience in a new biography published this week.

Mr Musk contracted malaria during a holiday in South Africa after being ousted as CEO of PayPal by Peter Thiel in October 2000.

It was Mr Musk’s first time back in his native South Africa since leaving for Canada aged 17, Mr Isaacson wrote.

During his trip, Mr Musk and his then-wife Justine Musk went to a game reserve.

When he returned to California in January 2001, Mr Musk reportedly began to feel dizzy and experienced recurring waves of chills and started throwing up in an emergency room, leading to him being wrongly diagnosed with viral meningitis.

The billionaire’s condition worsened until his “pulse was barely perceptible,” according to the book.

Mr Musk was only diagnosed with malaria after a doctor with expertise in infectious diseases passed by his bed at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City and realized he had a potentially fatal form of the disease that can affect the central nervous system or cause “acute respiratory distress,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mr Isaacson described how it took Mr Musk five months to fully recover after he was put in intensive care for 10 days and treated with doxycycline and chloroquine.

An email written by the head of human resources at X.com — later Paypal — to Mr Musk’s former business partners Peter Thiel and Max Levchin described how he was “actually only hours from death,” the biography revealed.

The Tesla CEO’s mother Maye Musk described the ordeal as “terrifying”.

“I remember your malaria infection very clearly. You were unconscious, yellow and shivering for days. Tubes were going in and out of you. It was a terrifying time. Modern medicine saved you,” she wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

While he was in hospital, Mr Musk’s then-colleagues found he’d taken out a life insurance policy worth $100 million on behalf of X.com.

“If he had died, all of our financial problems were going to be solved,” Mr Thiel reportedly told Isaacson.

Mr Musk told Isaacson: “Vacations will kill you. Also, South Africa – that place is still trying to destroy me.”

The tech mogul co-founded online bank X.com in 1999. The company merged with another payment system, Confinity, which was co-founded by Thiel and Levchin, and was renamed PayPal.

Isaacson was given access to the Tesla and SpaceX CEO over the past two years, which culminated in Mr Musk’s biography being published this week.

The writer spoke with several figures close to Mr Musk while writing the biography, including his ex-girlfriend Grimes and his former wives Tallulah Riley and Justine Musk, as well as his estranged father.

So far, the book has also claimed Musk and Grimes secretly welcomed a third child, in addition to X and their 22-month-old daughter Exa Dark Sideræl. However, it was not immediately clear when their second son, named Techno Mechanicus or “Tau”, was born.

In the biography, Isaacson also writes that the tech mogul’s brother Kimbal Musk and his friends “hated” ex-girlfriend and actor Amber Heard so intensely, it “made their distaste for Justine [Musk’s first wife] pale”.

One review by The New York Times said Isaacson’s biography stitches together a portrait of a Mr Musk as a “mercurial ‘man-child’”.