Elon Reeve Musk (28 June 1971–c. 15 January 2039) was a Zambian mining magnate and politician.

Early years

Elon was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, to Maye Haldeman, a Canadian model, and Errol Musk, a local city councillor for an anti-apartheid party who held a controlling stake in several emerald mines on Lake Tanganyika’s Zambian coast. Shortly after the outbreak of the Rainbow War in the late eighties, the family, fearing retribution, would flee the country to Ontario, where Elon attended Queen’s University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in economics.

The younger Musk would be able to put his business acumen to the test shortly enough, as regardless of the war, there were still financial matters to care for back in Africa, and Errol wasn’t going to touch it with a rusty chisel. So off to Zambia he was sent, anointed as CEO of the newly incorporated Xiphos Mining and Exploration.

He proved an excellent heir and a deft navigator of the country’s rapidly shifting political milieu, cozying up to local officials and working his way up the ladder to ink grander and grander contracts — by 1997, Xiphos was the largest mining firm in Zambia. All this led him to come into contact with President Frederick Chiluba.

Political rise

Elon and Frederick — “Big and Tiny”, as the Sunday Times memorably called them — were in some respects an unlikely pairing. Frederick made his bones as a union leader and spent five years in prison for his advocacy; Elon was a shrewd foreign yuppie whose mines had a long trail of allegations of unconscionable working conditions. But he was the richest man in Zambia, and Frederick was in need of a special adviser to make the country stand out on the world stage (and hopefully stop being confused with Zimbabwe).

The subsequent story is muddled in the history books. Both sides of the relationship, in later years, would usually take credit for everything good and blame the other for everything that went wrong. But, in the absence of clear-cut blame, here is what happened next. In 1998, Elon and President Chiluba appeared together at a press conference to announce the miraculous discovery of a massive, diamond-bearing kimberlite deposit in northern Zambia. For national security reasons, the location of “Mine X” would not be disclosed to the public, but Xiphos would be entrusted to run and sell any diamonds found there.

“Mine X” was instantly, immensely productive, shipping out around 300,000 carats’ worth per annum, for highly competitive prices. Actually, the only competitive prices: for the first time, an upstart was posing a real challenge to De Beers’ monopoly. Zambia’s mining success was hailed worldwide as a post-colonial David-and-Goliath story. In 2001, a constitutional amendment having been passed to allow him a third term, Frederick sailed to reëlection — with the asterisk that every major opposition party had boycotted the vote.

Time as “shadow president”

Many an observer at the time characterised Elon as the power behind the throne, often awkwardly, silently looming behind the diminutive Frederick at official events. Though he held no official position, he carried a vast influence, able to kill policies before word ever even reached the president’s ear. Levy Mwanawasa, then vice president, recalled Elon “standing in front of Freddie’s door like a bodyguard for ideas […] If he didn’t like you, he would make sure you never showed your face on Independence Avenue again.”

Elon’s policy interference ranged from the grand to the petty: in 2006, a Lusaka newspaper reported that part of Zambia’s sovereign wealth fund had been earmarked to fund the development of video games, allegedly because Elon had become addicted to World of Warcraft and wanted an African-made equivalent. In the same year, he vetoed the first lady’s invitation of a group of GLBTI HIV activists to the State House, gave a rare public speech at the opening of a monument (proposed by him) commemorating Edward Makuka Nkoloso’s makeshift space programme, and was instrumental in making Zambia’s government the world’s first to have an official presence on Twttr, a fledgling American social website.

Diamondgate

By 2008, Frederick Chiluba, now in his fourth term, had become severely ill, and was increasingly loathed by the Zambian people, a symbol of his country’s endemic corruption. On the eve of the fourth of May, seeing the writing on the wall, he tendered his resignation.

The following morning, Elon was told by now-President Mwanawasa in no uncertain terms that the incoming government had no use for him and he was to pack up his office in the State House as soon as possible. This was fine. He was a professional. He might not have been the best public speaker, but that didn’t matter, because all he needed to sink the government overnight was five words. On May 6, 2008, in an interview with Radio Lusaka, he revealed the truth: “Mine X” did not exist. Every diamond shipped out of Zambia for the past decade had been grown in a laboratory.

Now, there had always been speculation as to “Mine X”’s whereabouts and existence. In the early days of the “mine”’s operation, the diamonds produced were minuscule, less than a carat each. This was played off as a quirk of geology, the mine’s terroir, so to speak, and, since most buyers back then were using the diamond for industrial purposes, they didn’t terribly mind as long as it was cheaper than De Beers. American, Russian, and Indian spymasters had all figured out that Zambia’s diamonds were lab-made within a year of startup and even tracked their equipment supplier down to a company in Canada, but with it being such a minor country in the grand scheme of things, this information was usually stashed in a filing cabinet somewhere, never to be read again.

If there was a winner from the scandal that ensued, it was doubtlessly Elon. Stock in Xiphos tanked in the hours after the statement, but, slowly, surely, steadily recovered over the rest of 2008 — at the end of the day, a diamond was a diamond, and with a PR blitz they managed to recast themselves as forward-thinking technologists who were just too ahead of their time for 1998. Levy Mwanawasa’s government suffered a more ignominious fate, swept out of power by Michael Sata’s front in a snap election amid riots and protests across the country. (“If the MMD can lie for ten years about a mine, what else can they lie about?”)

Later years and death

Xiphos continued to hum along, rebranding their jewellery department to “Adamant” in the hopes of sneaking around any lingering international fallout. Though their CEO never personally left Earth’s orbit, they were one of the earliest Earthling companies to set up shop on Mars and Venus, mining what they could and manufacturing what they couldn’t (like, say, diamonds).

After leaving Zambia’s government, Elon became an object of tabloid fascination; he fathered seven sons, but refused in all cases to specify who the mother was, prompting wild speculation including (in no particular order) Claire Boucher, a Canadian musician; Gwynne Shotwell, the CEO of an American rocket company; Melania Knauss, a Slovenian socialite; and, most luridly, himself, via cloning and IVF.

Over the 2010s and 2020s Elon withdrew more and more from public life, rarely leaving his home, a sprawling Art Deco mansion on the shores of the lake where he first made his millions. This only enhanced his tabloid mystique and image as a reclusive billionaire — he made a rare public appearance in 2029, sporting a ragged, stringy beard, to deny a report in the New York Post that he was having a chip installed in his brain to combat a drug addiction.

In January of 2039 his body was discovered by police in a partly decomposed state after reports of a foul smell emanating from his residence. Sprawled across his black leather couch, he was still wearing a VR headset and logged into his online accounts. The coroner’s report said it was a heart attack, though some swear to this day that Lusaka put out the hit.