Elon Musk's first job in Canada paid $18 an hour to crawl through a boiler room in a hazmat suit shoveling steaming hot sand and chemical residue. He was 17 years old. He had arrived in the country with $2,500 and no place to stay. He walked into the unemployment office and asked which job paid the most. They pointed him to a lumber mill boiler room. The work involved shimmying through a tunnel barely wide enough to fit a human body, scooping boiling residue, and shoveling it back through the same hole you crawled in from. If you stayed inside longer than 30 minutes you got too hot and died. 30 workers started the job alongside him. By the third day only 5 remained. By the end of the week only Elon and 2 others were still showing up. Before the lumber mill he worked on his cousin's farm in Waldeck, Saskatchewan. A village with fewer than 300 people. He shoveled grain bins and tended vegetables. Before that he had cut logs with a chainsaw in Vancouver. The richest man alive spent his first year in North America doing manual labor that most people wouldn't survive a week of. The man who now designs rockets that land themselves and cars that drive themselves once earned his living by crawling through a pipe in a hazmat suit shoveling toxic sludge for $18 an hour. Not as a metaphor for hard work. As his actual Tuesday. The distance between the boiler room and the rocket factory is the most extreme career trajectory any living human has traveled.