Category: A Victory!
Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. His was an interesting childhood. Photo: Public Domain
Elon Musk is the richest man on Planet Earth. Elon made his billions producing rocket ships and electric cars, among other things. He was a darling of the Left right up until he declared his friendship with Donald John Trump. Now they think he’s the Antichrist.
Elon is a delightfully weird guy with a delightfully weird past. He’s certainly diagnosable on a certain level. However, he has weaponized his curious form of Asperger’s syndrome into financial success the likes of which have not been seen in the modern age. Having invested a little time researching his Dad, it seems the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Left: Like his uber-wealthy son, Errol Musk is a pretty fascinating guy. He once killed three murderous cannibals with only two shots from a .357 Magnum revolver. Below: Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. His was an interesting childhood. Photo: Public Domain
The Father Of The Savant
Errol Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1946. His father was South African, and his mother was English. Errol married Maye Haldeman in 1970. Their first son, Elon, was born the following year.
Errol Musk was a successful businessman in his own right. He was politically active and served in a variety of roles in local government. Along the way, he developed office buildings, subdivisions, retail store space and an air force base. He also owned an auto parts store and had a substantial interest in several emerald mines. He once boasted that his emerald dealings were more smuggling than anything respectable.
These sundry enterprises brought the elder Musk a great deal of money. He used these proceeds to buy himself a yacht, an airplane, several luxury automobiles and a couple of palatial homes. Among all that was a large estate that he used as a rental property.
In the days of high-capacity concealable 9mm wonderguns, never underestimate the manstopping power of a classic magnum revolver.
The Gunfight
My source was an in-person interview I watched with Errol Musk himself. The man looks vaguely like an aging Al Pacino and sports that same lyrical South African accent as does his famous son. I have no compelling reason to doubt the details.
Errol and his six-year-old daughter went out to this remote rental property to check on things. The house was empty in anticipation of its next set of renters. They were hot and sweaty, so Errol set his daughter up in the tub for a bath. He then heard noises coming from downstairs.
When he went down to investigate, Musk found several strange men in his living room. The spokesman for the group was wearing a coat and tie. Musk assumed they might be prospective renters and introduced himself. Without preamble, this man presented a handgun and opened fire.
Musk retreated miraculously unscathed. He scrambled back upstairs and retrieved a loaded .357 magnum revolver. Posting himself in the doorway between the gunmen and his daughter, Errol waited until they came up the stairs. As soon as he got a decent angle, he shot the lead assailant through the head.
The first shooter was dead where he stood. That same bullet also struck and killed the man behind him. Then all hell broke loose.
The Bad Guys fired a total of 52 rounds, one of which would have struck Musk in the chest had it not fortuitously lodged in an aluminum door frame. Musk fired twice total. His second shot struck a man in the groin who bled out on the floor. The rest of the crew then fled in disarray. Musk scooped up his daughter and leapt through a shattered window to safety.
Details
Musk claims that these men were practitioners of muti — witch doctors who would kill adults to kidnap kids. They would then harvest limbs and organs from the stolen children to make traditional medicines. Along the way, they would supposedly nibble a bit as well.
This seemed pretty far-fetched to me. However, Google claims it’s real. In 2010, traditional African healers and the South African government held a conference with the published goal of rooting out the “Evil practice of mutilating human bodies for purposes of muti making.” It is actually plausible that the three men Musk killed really had broken into his home with the intent of killing and eating his daughter.
The Rest Of The Story
Errol Musk is not a terribly nice guy. He divorced Elon’s mom in 1979 amidst allegations of abuse. Elon has described his Dad in the media as a “terrible human being.” Apparently, he’s not wrong.
When Errol was 45, he married 25-year-old Heide Bezuidenhout. He and Heidi had two children. Errol later fathered two more kids by Heidi’s daughter from a previous relationship.
He was once quoted as having said, “The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce.” Regardless of the man’s character, when Errol Musk was threatened by a mob of armed witch doctors, that guy took care of business. Dropping three murderous cannibals with two rounds from a magnum revolver is undeniably fine gunmanship.
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Me
“Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan” is my second favorite science fiction movie after “Aliens.” Had the M41A Pulse Rifle been in the hands of Peewee Herman, “Aliens” still would have been the coolest movie in human history. “The Wrath of Khan” earns its spot because of the amazing 1982 analog special effects combined with Ricardo Montalban’s epic pecs (which were real, by the way).
All real men are smitten with the concept of space combat. Nobody does that better than “The Expanse.” The folks who made that series put a great deal of effort into getting the physics right. If you haven’t seen it, “The Expanse” is nailing 95% on the Tomatometer and is available on Amazon Prime. Check it out. You’ll thank me later.
As cool as “Aliens,” “Star Trek,” and “The Expanse” are, none of that is actually real. However, on January 24, 1975, the Soviets test fired the first legit orbital space cannon. This modified 23mm antiaircraft gun loosed twenty rounds in three bursts pointed Lord-knows-where. Given that there is no air friction in space, the Russkies likely dropped those 20 high explosive shells into some benevolent alien’s afternoon picnic someplace. Tragically, humanity has gone to war over stupider things.
Details
In the 1970s, the U.S. and the USSR were locked in the Space Race. The Russians smoked us when they launched Yuri Gregarin into low Earth orbit in April of 1961. Then Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin told the Commies to suck it from the surface of the moon eight years later. By the mid-1970s the metric to beat was an inhabitable orbital space station.
Our own Skylab went up in May of 1973. However, the Russians beat us to it with their first Salyut (“Fireworks”) space station in 1971. Now faced with the prospect of Americans and Russians occupying the same vast reaches of infinite space, the Soviets naturally began scheming how to blow us to pieces over it.
Salyut wasn’t much of a space station. This thing was thrown together out of Soyuz components just to win the race. The Salyut was cramped and fairly miserable. However, in their defense, they did orbit seven of the things. Four of these were nominally there for respectable research purposes. The remaining three were Almaz (“Diamond”) military spy stations.
Origin Story
Aleksandr Nudelman of the KB Tochmash design bureau in Moscow got the tasker to build the world’s first orbital space cannon to defend the Almaz stations from imaginary American attacks. Nudelman and his team began with a 14.5mm automatic gun that weighed 37 pounds and could accurately engage terrestrial targets up to a mile away. This was adapted from the KPV antiaircraft gun that the Russians used as primary armament on their BTR and BRDM armored personnel carriers.
The KPV formed the basis for the family of towed ZPU antiaircraft guns as well. It cycled at 600 rounds per minute and was a proven and effective short-recoil design that should function just fine in outer space. However, Nudelman’s mob eventually decided on something with a bit more authority.
Proper Defensive Weaponry
The final operational version was a 23mm beast called the R-23M Kartech (“Buckshot”). This fast-firing weapon was adapted from the tail gun on the Tupolev Tu-22 Blinder supersonic strategic bomber. The R-23M Kartech was a curious gas-operated, single-barrel weapon that incorporated four individual chambers like a revolver. The gun fired 23x260mm telescoped ammunition at 2,500 rpm. Muzzle velocity hovered around 2,800 feet per second.
The R-23M was fitted in a fixed mount along the centerline of the station. There was an optical sight mounted in the spacecraft’s cockpit. To aim the thing, cosmonauts had to orient the entire space station. Actually touching it off was where the real fun started.
Physics is a Cruel Mistress
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That’s not just a good idea, that’s the law. This is the reason full-power 12-gauge buckshot rounds are adequate to peg your funmeter after a long day on the range. This gets even worse in zero gravity with no air.
Smokeless powder contains an oxidizer that provides its own oxygen. Modern cartridge-firing weapons will shoot just fine in a vacuum. The problem is what to do when the recoil from that 23mm gun sends your sparkly new spaceship hurtling toward Uranus.
They only fired the thing once and then only remotely. The station was de-crewed and about to plunge into the earth’s atmosphere to be incinerated at the time.
The Russians are so paranoid they still haven’t declassified the results of that firing test. However, back in 1975, our communist friends really did unlimber their R-23M Kartech space cannon for real, quite effectively lighting up the final frontier.
A&G Fish Shoppe of the 458th Bomb Group in Belgium after an emergency landing, 18 March 1945. The aircraft had taken three direct hits over Berlin, causing it to lose electrical and hydraulic power as well as the #3 engine.
The engine threw its prop on the return flight, and engine #2 shut down shortly later. On final approach to a small dirt airfield in Allied-occupied Belgium the #4 engine also quit, but the plane made it to the ground safely with less than 50 gallons of fuel remaining.