Boredom Leads to Great Things 51
mother had a Canadian citizenship she could pass on to her
son.^327
As his grandfather Joshua once had, but in the opposite
direction, Elon decided to move across the Atlantic Ocean.
Just before his sixteenth birthday, Elon and his brother
Kimbal took the bus to the Canadian embassy where they
applied for passports. Kimbal also knew he wanted to leave
South Africa before he had to join the military.^71
Three weeks after the passport arrived, and despite that
Elon’s parents didn’t want him to leave South Africa, he
bought a one-way plane ticket to Montreal, Canada.^128 He
financed the plane ticket by selling shares in a pharmaceuti-
cal company. One year earlier, Elon had begun speculating
in stocks; tracking them in the local newspaper.^4 He had
tripled his money before he got bored of it.^258
Elon was now ready for a new adventure. “We humans
are explorers by nature, that’s why we’ve ventured to the
bottom of the oceans and the top of the tallest mountains,”
he said. “That’s also why we have sent men to the Moon
and astronauts to live on the orbiting International Space
Station. It was this innate desire for exploration that also
motivated me to leave South Africa.”^62