In a small, cheery, wood-paneled office in the back of the Design Center of the Americas in Dania Beach, the young, wavy-haired receptionist was polite but firm.

"Mr. Abovitz isn't available right now."

A green cartoon dragon grinned from the wall to her right, next to a glass-walled conference room. A toy sword was propped against the wall in the hallway behind her.

"Is there a phone number I might call to speak with him?"

"I can't give out that information," the receptionist replied.

"Can you give me an email address at least?"

"Sorry, no."

Although they aren't listed anywhere in the building's directory, these are the offices of Magic Leap, a secretive $4.5 billion virtual-reality company that may transform the relationship between humans and technology.

Its founder, Rony Abovitz, a bespectacled 45-year-old with a kind face and a head of unruly salt-and-pepper curls, has spent the past five years quietly raising more than $1.4 billion in investments, all without releasing a single product or divulging much about what he is creating. He aims to develop a "mixed-reality" headset that will trick users' brains into seeing unreal objects in the real world. If he's successful, Abovitz and many others in the tech community think the device could eventually replace computers, TV sets, phones, and every other expensive electronic apparatus with a screen.

"The technology he's working on has the potential to transform every single one of our lives," says Jaret Davis, a managing partner at the law firm Greenberg Traurig, who specializes in technology and startups. "If it pans out, it will be as transformative as the introduction of the PC."

Abovitz, the reclusive mad scientist atop the startup world, has been described in broad terms elsewhere. But never before has anyone told his coming-of-age story as a cartoonist, javelin thrower, and sci-fi geek growing up in South Florida. And there's a reason. Abovitz and his employees are notoriously press shy. They declined more than a dozen calls, emails, letters, and in-person entreaties for an interview. But a six-month search that stretched from a gated eight-bedroom Weston home to the eighth-floor stacks of the University of Miami archives produced this untold tale of the years before Abovitz raised his first billion.

Isaac and Itta Abovitz arrived in Cleveland from Israel in 1962. Nine years later, Rony was born, the first of five children. Friends say he got his business acumen from his dad, who was a real-estate broker, and his creativity from his mom, who is an artist.

The years of Rony's youth were a low point in Cleveland's up-and-down history. Just two years before his birth, the Cuyahoga River infamously caught fire. The city became known in some quarters as "the mistake on the lake." Not long before Rony's eighth birthday, Cleveland became the first major city to default on its federal loans since the Great Depression. In the 12 years he lived there, the Browns, Indians, and Cavaliers combined for 24 losing seasons.

In those days, Abovitz joked to a gathering of University of Miami engineers last year, he wanted to either be a Star Wars X-wing pilot, play football for the Browns, or become a scientist. After recognizing he was about as likely to fly a sci-fi spacecraft as he was to be a star athlete, he decided to pursue science.

In 1983, the Abovitz family moved to South Florida to escape the cold. They bought a house in Hollywood and enrolled Rony at Nova High School in Davie even though he was only 13 years old. The precocious kid joined a band of bookish friends that included Leonard Rappa, a quiet Trekkie who joined the chess club with him and would grow up to be a psychopharmacology professor at Florida A&M University.

"Usually when we got together, we would talk about things like theoretical physics," Rappa says. "It was never a how's-the-weather type of conversation with Rony."

"Rony had an appreciation for counterculture and being on the edge of things." Facebook

Twitter

Rony was younger than most in his group, but that's not what made him stand out. At six feet, one inch, he towered over all of his older friends. He was an eccentric kid who loved Monty Python and avant-garde indie films. He regularly tried to persuade others to go with him to see movies like Heathers, a 1988 black comedy in which a snarky teen teams up with her sociopathic boyfriend to kill off the cool girls who torment her. "We had to drive up to Sunrise to see that," Rappa recalls, some incredulity left in his voice three decades later.

Each year, Rony organized a road trip to Key Largo with his friends to snorkel at John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park. They would rent a boat and a campsite for a few days and swim around the reefs with parrotfish, hogfish, blue tang, and black durgon. "We went to the campground without much more than a tent, but you don't think about having a comfortable bed when you're in high school," Rappa says. "We just wanted to hang out and be on the water."

He graduated from Nova in 1988, an A student and National Honor Society member. He was accepted to Northwestern, MIT, and Michigan, but his parents persuaded him to accept a scholarship to the University of Miami. He was close to his family and didn't want to move far from home.

Within a month of arriving on campus, he established a weekly comic strip in the Miami Hurricane called "Of Lice and Hens," a play on the title of John Steinbeck's famous novel. It was in turn goofy, irreverent, and completely indecipherable — so bizarre that a student named Christian Anderson wrote a letter to the editor in the October 23, 1990 edition of the paper demanding it be pulled. Editors paid no mind. In the next issue, he published a cartoon in which the dad from Family Circus agreed to let Of Lice and Hens' recurring characters have an orgy with his wife, "but only if I can videotape it!"