Billionaire Tom Siebel decided to go out for a walking safari in Tanzania with his guide, while the rest of his family took the day off — and things didn’t go so well:
I’m not certain what happened. But, all of a sudden, one of the larger female elephants just spun around and sat on her haunches and put her trunk in the air and her ears out fully extended and just bellowed at us. I don’t know if she could see us or smell us, but she pointed right at us. She paused for probably two seconds and then [made] a beeline right at us. So, this is 6 tons of elephant moving 30 miles per hour, and she could cover 200 yards in not much time…. And I would say about 4 yards in front of me the guide is standing there with his.470 double-barreled rifle….
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So, the animal is closing in and the guy doesn’t shoot. Then 40 yards, and the guide doesn’t shoot. This animal’s now 20 yards [away], and the guide has not shot. At 10 yards he still hasn’t shot, and this animal is closing in… like a Caterpillar tractor coming at you…. I’d say the animal is 4 yards away and this guide then shoots and misses. It goes above its head…. Then the elephant came up to him and [with her] trunk… just threw him aside. I could hear the air decompress out of his body as the animal hurled him over maybe 10 yards to my right.
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It knocked me to the ground with its trunk, it rolled me, punched me, put a tusk through my left thigh, gored it, then ripped it out sideways. It stepped on my leg, kicked my leg, broke six ribs and ripped up my shoulder…. I remember every instant of it… trying to protect my head with my arms. I remember the blows to my lower extremities, and it just hurt so bad I couldn’t believe it…. Imagine what it’s like taking an elephant tusk through the thigh… or hav[ing] a 6-ton animal step on your leg… It just snaps…. The pain was intolerable…. I had one thought: “Please, God, make this stop.”And after a while I looked up…. The dust is settled. The elephant’s gone. Dead quiet in the Serengeti…. The guide is over there 12 yards [away], curled up in a ball, wrapped around [the]… rifle, playing dead…. Basically what happened is I got served up. So I said, “This might be a good time to reload.”… He was virtually unhurt.
It took three and a half hours for trucks to arrive from the lodge. Then he had to fly to a hospital in Nairobi. Then he had to fly 20 hours to San Jose — and found out the hard way that they had provided him with 10 hours of morphine.
One year and 16 surgeries later, he’s… better:
I still have something on my leg called an Ilizarov external fixator [to mend, lengthen and reshape] the tibia… between your ankle bone and your knee…. They’ve taken a chunk of bone out of my pelvis about the size of your fist and moved it down into my ankle to try to get it all fused together…. The prognosis is that I’ll be able to walk and run and ride a bicycle and play golf [again]….
(Hat tip to Todd.)
Siebal was later heard to observe, “It’s still an improvement over lunch with Larry Ellison”.