Elon Musk has confessed that he considered committing suicide when he was 12 years old. The founder of Tesla publicly revealed, two years ago, that he suffered from  Asperger Syndrome , a developmental disorder that is part of the autism spectrum and causes impact in social interaction. Since his beginning, the businessman has spoken on multiple occasions about his mental health problems. However, in his last interview, he has gone further, even confessing that  he had “demons”  in his mind and he even thought about removing himself life.

Elon Musk in a presentation

This “existential crisis” came into his life at a time when he began reading religious texts and books of German philosophy that they were depressed But his world was transformed when he began to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, which made him “find the The meaning of life is not reduced to a simple answer, but to what questions we should ask ourselves,” he confessed to Aaron Ross Sorkin during an interview at the DealBook Summit 2023. “Is everything useless? Why not just kill yourself? Why exist?”, Musk recalled about the thoughts that affected him during the early years of his adolescence.

Elon Musk at an event

Now, at 52 years old, the businessman has described his mind as a “wild storm” due to the large number of ideas he They are found in your head and thoughts that you rethink every day. He himself has confirmed that: “It is not a happy storm. It seems like a dangerous storm, because I have a constant source of ideas.” The businessman has confessed that every day he continues to have those “demons” that he felt when he was a child: “I think to a certain extent I was born that way, but, honestly, that was amplified by a difficult childhood. Even in a happy time, when I was a child, I felt a fury of forces in my mind constantly. These demons of the mind are, for the most part, harnessed for productive purposes. But from time to time… Something goes wrong,” said the founder of SpaceX.

Elon Musk at the Gala Met

A life marked by Asperger Syndrome 

Two years ago, Elon Musk revealed during his participation in a live television program that he had been suffering from this developmental disorder since the early years of his childhood. “Look, I know I sometimes say or post strange things on the internet, but that’s just how my brain works. To anyone who has felt offended, I just want to say that I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket, did you think I was going to be a normal, relaxed guy?” he said in the opening monologue of  Saturday Night Live. Contrary to what one might assume, Musk turned Asperger’s into  an ally for his success instead of considering it a limitation. In a public speech, he explained how he learned to collaborate with his mind instead of confronting it.