Elon Musk is a billionaire, co-founder of many vanguard companies, and the current richest man in the world. Elon Musk is an entrepreneur billionaire who is the co-founder of companies such as PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX. But how did his life start and how did he become the industry titan he is today? Let us try to take a look into the life of Elon Musk.
Birth and Early Life
Elon Musk was born in South Africa on 28 June in the year 1971 to Maye Musk and Errol Musk. His parents had a divorce in 1980. Two years after the divorce Elon decided to live with his father. He did regret this decision later in his life as he became estranged from his father. Throughout his childhood, he was bullied and on one occasion even hospitalized after he was thrown down a staircase by a group of boys.
Education
After completing high school Musk attended the University of Pretoria although only for five months. Musk then moved to Canada and entered Queen’s University. He transferred after two years to the University of Pennsylvania and finally graduated in 1997.
Musk also traveled to Stanford University in order to get his Ph.D. but left after only two days. Musk also held two internships at an energy storage start-up in 1994.
Business Career
Elon Musk has started many business ventures some have been successful but some have failed too. Here is a list of some of those that succeeded and were the stepping stones for the development of his career.
Zip2
Elon Musk founded a company called Zip2 with Greg Kouri and his brother Kimbal which was funded by a cluster of Silicon Valley investors. The basic function of the company was to provide newspapers with city travel guides. Before the success of this company, Elon couldn’t even afford an apartment and used to sleep on the office couch and showered at YMCA. Eventually, the company took off and was sold to Compaq in 1999. This sale resulted in Elon earning $22 million.
X.com and PayPal
Elon started an online banking company called X.com in the year 1999. After about a year X.com and Confinity merged and became PayPal. Elon became the CEO of PayPal but he was fired by the board in the year 2000 although he remained on board. He was also the largest shareholder of PayPal before the company was sold to eBay. Elon received $165 million out of the $1.5 billion paid by eBay to buy PayPal.
SpaceX
In 2002 Elon Musk founded a company called SpaceX or Space Exploration Technologies. The goal of SpaceX was to lower the price of spaceflight. Although the long-term goal of the company is to make colonizing mars affordable. The company was a huge success and is a titan in the industry today.
Tesla
Elon invested in Tesla and became the chairman of the company. Tesla is a company that focuses mainly on electric transportation. Elon eventually became the CEO of Tesla which is now worth around half a trillion dollars.
SolarCity
Elon provided his two cousins, Lyndon and Peter rive, with the financial capital and the initial concept for SolarCity. Lyndon and Peter co-founded the company. The company was later bought by Tesla in a deal of $2.4 billion.
These were some of the major companies that have acted as a stepping stone in the success story of Elon Musk. There are some other companies such as The Boring Company, Neuralink, and many other vanguard companies that Elon is pushing towards greater success every day. Elon Musk’s success is continuously growing because of his ambition, passion, and his insane work ethic.
