Another Iceberg, Right Ahead 236
they? They were going to spend their time in a low-risk
malaria area. What they didn’t know was that a recent
flooding turned the low-risk area to a high-risk area.^169
When they came back to California, Elon felt ill and
went to the hospital. But the tests for malaria were nega-
tive, so he returned home again. But he didn’t get better. He
returned to the hospital, where the doctors began treating
him for malaria. He was less than two days away from
being irrecoverable – when the disease would have caused
so much damage in his body that all the doctors could have
done was nothing.^169 “Man, that experience was no fun
at all, but it does tend to sharpen your goal-setting,” Elon
said.^56
Elon never prayed when he almost died of Malaria and
he is not a religious man.^341 He once got the question if he
thought there’s some master intelligence. “I think probably
not because then you have to say: Where does the master
intelligence come from?” Elon replied. “So it sort of begs
the question. So I think really you can explain this with
the fundamental laws of physics. You know its complex
phenomenon from simple elements.”^354