The article leaves it ambiguous whether Errol is embellishing or if it is true. From Errol’s quote in that article, it seems like a weird thing to make up.

When I was child we used to build rockets, and we used to read the books of Professor Hermann Oberth and Wernher von Braun, and they had these illustrated – they weren’t really comics, they were books – but they had illustrations and they were in German unfortunately.

But the adult at that time that we were with, who discovered Bennett’s comet – his name is Mr Bennett – he would tell us what the stories were saying, about going to planets and all that sort of stuff, and we could see the illustrations and everything. And Wernher von Braun’s book I think it was – his, or it could have been Oberth’s book – spoke about that the head of the Mars colony would be called the Elon.

Now I remember that, but I never thought of it as a name. [But] then when Maye and I got married I was quite amazed to discover that her father’s grandfather or something had been called Elon Haldeman, which really reminded me of the stories that we had, and so I thought ‘well yes, I’d like that name for Elon because it means something to me’.