Back in 2017 I wrote an article pointing out what appeared to be a strange coincidence: that Mars-fixated Elon Musk’s first name was the same as the title of the leader of Mars in the science fiction novel Project Mars: A Technical Tale, written in 1949 by none other than legendary NASA rocket scientist (and previously Nazi rocket scientist) Wernher von Braun. In von Braun’s book, he explained the political design of Martian civilization in these words:
The Martian government was directed by ten men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled “Elon.” Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet.
The Upper House was called the Council of the Elders and was limited to a membership of 60 persons, each being appointed for life by the Elon as vacancies occurred by death. In principle, the method was not unlike that by which the College of Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church is appointed. Usually the Elon chose historians, churchmen, former cabinet members or successful economic leaders who could offer lifetimes of valuable experience.
A recent article that revisited that topic has brought some extra, seemingly importation information to light: in a 2022 interview posted on YouTube, Musk’s father Errol claims that he intentionally named his son Elon as he was familiar with the name from von Braun’s novel, and remembered it when he learned that his wife (and Elon’s mother) Maye’s grandfather was named J. Elon Haldeman (video interview embedded below):
When I was child we used to build rockets, and we used to read the books of Professor Hermann Oberth and Wernher von Braun, and they had these illustrated – they weren’t really comics, they were books – but they had illustrations and they were in German unfortunately.
But the adult at that time that we were with, who discovered Bennett’s comet – his name is Mr Bennett – he would tell us what the stories were saying, about going to planets and all that sort of stuff, and we could see the illustrations and everything. And Wernher von Braun’s book I think it was – his, or it could have been Oberth’s book – spoke about that the head of the Mars colony would be called the Elon.
Now I remember that, but I never thought of it as a name. [But] then when Maye and I got married I was quite amazed to discover that her father’s grandfather or something had been called Elon Haldeman, which really reminded me of the stories that we had, and so I thought ‘well yes, I’d like that name for Elon because it means something to me’.
So it seems we now have a prosaic explanation for the strange coincidence I wrote about all those years ago, although still perhaps a strange case of nominative determinism that has caused the world’s richest man to make it his life goal to colonize Mars?
If only it were so simple. Because, if the publishing history for von Braun’s book on Wikipedia is correct, then Errol couldn’t have heard about it when he was a child and used it as the basis for naming his son – as it wasn’t actually published until well after Elon Musk was born.
Von Braun wrote Marsprojekt, a science fiction novel in German between 1948 and 1949 while stationed at the U.S. Army’s rocket research facility at Fort Bliss in New Mexico….Henry J. White translated the book into English (in 1950) and it was published later by Apogee Books (Canada) in 2006 as Project Mars: A Technical Tale, almost thirty years after von Braun’s death. The original German text remains unpublished…Von Braun submitted the English manuscript to eighteen US publishers, but it was rejected by all of them.
(It should be noted that the technical appendix to the book, which contained the specifications for the novel’s expedition to Mars, was published earlier: in Germany in 1952, and in English the following year – however, this appendix as it appears in Project Mars does not contain any mention of ‘Elon’.)
Did Errol Musk just start claiming this as a determining factor in naming Elon after hearing about it? While I wrote about it back in 2017, the topic received worldwide publicity four years later when it was reproduced in a number of articles published in the mass media in 2021 (e.g. this story in the New York Post) – perhaps Errol heard about it and thought it might add a nice extra layer to the Musk mythos (Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk suggests that Errol doesn’t mind a bit of embellishment)?
Nevertheless, the amount of detail that Errol Musk includes in his explanation seems above and beyond a simple fabrication: he claims the book was in German, not English – von Braun did originally write it in his native language; that it had illustrations/was almost a comic book (a number of excerpts of von Braun’s ideas were published by magazines such as Collier’s and This Week during the 1950s, and some featured colored paintings by American science fiction and space illustrator Chesley Bonestell; and he also mentions that he learnt these things through a South African amateur astronomer of some fame, John ‘Jack’ Bennett. But on the flipside, not all of those things add up – for example, the excerpts in magazines were in English, not German.
Was there another publication in German that contained these ideas? Or did John Bennett have insider information about von Braun’s unpublished work? Or is Errol Musk just mashing a whole heap of things from his childhood together to fabricate a non-existent reason for naming his son Elon, in order to add an element of predestination to his life?
With Musk recently tweeting about how he thinks Martian politics should work, it’s perhaps a mystery that should be considered more than just a mere Fortean curiosity, given his current absurd wealth, recent interest in financial manipulation of the democratic process in nations across the world, and ambitions on being the person to begin Mars colonization…
Update: Reader Ralf B. from Germany got in contact with some extra information that might be relevant:
Wernher von Braun sent his Mars novel (with “Elon” in it) to German publishers in the early 50s, and they refused to print it. But one publisher tasked the author Franz Ludwig Neher (1896-1970) to write a new novel based on von Braun’s text. It came out in 1953 with the title Menschen zwischen den Planeten (Men between the Planets). I read this book decades ago but remember only a few things, and I think that Neher did not mention Martians. But it may be a good idea to get hold of the book and check for details. Menschen zwischen den Planeten was reissued in 1983 as a paperback and may be available in second-hand bookstores.
This new information could well explain Errol Musk’s recollection of a book that was in German, by von Braun (it is his book, rewritten, and he wrote the foreword to it), and that featured illustrations, during the 1950s. A paper on von Braun’s novel by A.A. Jackson (PDF) notes that it “was sent to an engineering student in Berman, Heinz Kölle in 1950 who was a member of a new spaceflight society, GfW (Gesellschaft für Weltraumforschung). Kölle passed the novel to publisher Otto Bechtle. Bechtle said he would publish the novel if he had it rewritten; von Braun agreed to this but was so unhappy with the result that he only wrote a foreword the book.”
A quick look of second-hand booksellers online reveals that Menschen zwischen den Planeten did indeed feature some illustrations (though it was hardly similar to a ‘comic book’ in any sense). For instance, this listing on Etsy includes the description that “There are illustrated endpapers with several other illustrations throughout”, and includes the following images:
The question is though: does this alternative edition retain the information on the government of Mars, in particular the ‘Elon’? All second-hand editions and libraries with the book are a long way from me here in Australia – does anyone have access to a copy to check (I’d assume the mention would be in Chapter 8, ‘Marswelt’)?
