Billionaire Recounts Elephant Attack That Left Him and His iPhone Ripped Apart

Billionaire Tom Siebel shares with Forbes a chilling elephant attack horror story that left him and his iPhone ripped to pieces.

Siebel, a former Oracle executive who later founded Siebel Systems, was on a walking safari when an elephant attacked. His guide missed a shot from four yards away resulting in the horrific mauling recounted below.


I can see the gray, the hair follicles the eyeball, the trunk, the tusk, the foot—the whole thing. And I was like, "Okay, what are we going to do now?" And the animal then proceeds to kick my teeth in, basically. 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."

...

So here we are a year later, 16 surgeries later. 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].

I [still] have the iPhone that was in my left front pocket that basically exploded. It’s now in about 200 pieces, and I have been meaning to send it back to Steve Jobs for a refund.


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