The name Elon Musk has been in the news recently and it’s time more people know about the man, the entrepreneur, and the business genius.
Elon Musk was born in South Africa on June 28, 1971. He is the son of a Canadian mother and a South African father.
At the age of 10, Musk developed a big interest in computers and was something that he began devoting all of his time to. By the age of 12 he had taught himself how to program and created his own game called Blastar.
When he turned 17, Musk decided to leave South Africa to avoid military service. “I don’t have an issue with serving in the military per se, but serving in the South African army suppressing black people just didn’t seem like a really good way to spend time.”
He got his citizenship through his Canadian mother and enrolled in Queen’s University, where he only spent two years before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania.
There, he graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science in physics and a Bachelor’s of Science in economics. Shortly after, he moved to California to pursue his PhD in applied physics and materials science at Stanford University.
He only spent two days at the program before he dropped out to work on his own ideas and businesses. Here came his first company, Zip2.
The company dealt with web software and contracted worked with newspaper corporations like New York Times and Chicago Tribune.
Compaq bought Zip2 in 1999, making Musk a multimillionaire in his 20s. Enough to buy his own island and retire, Elon Musk decided to continue working on his legacy instead.
He next co-founded X.com, an online financial service and email payment company. This eventually merged with Cofinity, which had the financial transfer company known as PayPal. They mainly focused on PayPal and the merged company renamed themselves PayPal.
They had early success and were eventually bought by eBay in a billion dollar deal where Musk walked away with 165 million dollars.
Again, Musk wasn’t done. He went on to find Tesla motors and his space company Space X.
Space X came first with Musk’s never dying ambition and drive. He founded this company in hopes of avoiding human extinction and pushing the timetable for space exploration possibilities.
Tesla motors came after that, his vision was to create a car company that could mass produced environmentally sound vehicles that were electric. Since it’s start in 2008, Tesla motors have won multiple awards including being named Car of the Year by Motor Trend magazine for their model S vehicle.
Then in 2012, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket was launched into space with the Dragon spacecraft and they made history. It became the first private company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station.
Multiple milestones and achievements followed and the most recent one came this weekend. SpaceX had a launch over the weekend at the NASA’s Launch complex 39A at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. The same place where the old Apollo moon missions launched as well.
Elon Musk is 45-years-old with a resume and legacy long enough to go around the world twice and he is far from retiring.
Musk has multiple goals, one of those being able to put humans on Mars and having them colonize. I cannot wait to see what else Elon Musk has up his sleeves.
