Elon Musk Biography

Elon Musk life story begins in South Africa, where he was born. Later, he went on to become an American entrepreneur who co-founded PayPal and established SpaceX, a launch vehicle and spacecraft manufacturer. He was also one of the original major investors in and the CEO of Tesla, an electric car company.

Elon Reeve Musk is the eldest of his parents' three children, and a citizen of three countries: South Africa, Canada, and the United States. He was born in 1971 to Maye Musk, a model and nutritionist, and Errol Musk, an electromechanical engineer whom Elon has described as "a dreadful human being." Read the entire article to learn about Elon Musk History which is inspiring for generations to come.

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Elon Musk Early Life

Musk was born in Canada to a Canadian mother and a South African father. Musk grew up with his head stuck in books and computers. He was bullied by his classmates and often beaten up by class bullies as a little, timid youngster until he grew strong enough to defend himself during a growth spurt in his teens. He developed a video game at the age of 12 and sold it to a computer magazine. Musk left South Africa in 1988 after getting a Canadian passport because he refused to support apartheid through compulsory military duty and wanted to pursue the higher economic prospects offered in the United States.

Elon Musk Qualification

Musk travelled to Canada at the age of 17 to attend Queen's University and evade military service in South Africa. Musk got his Canadian citizenship the same year, partly because he thought it would be easier to get American citizenship that way. Musk moved to the United States in 1992 to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned an undergraduate degree in economics before continuing on to earn a second bachelor's degree in physics. Musk went to Stanford University in California to earn a Ph.D. in energy physics after leaving Penn. But that Ph.D couldn’t make it to Elon Musk Degrees since he walked out of Stanford after only two days to start his first firm.

Elon Musk Works

In the summer of 1995, Musk relocated to Silicon Valley. He enrolled at Stanford University's PhD programme in applied physics, but dropped out after only two days. Kimball Musk, Elon's 15-month younger brother, had recently graduated from Queen's University with a business degree and had travelled to California to join him. As the early Internet grew in popularity, the brothers decided to develop a company called Zip2, an internet business directory with maps. That’s how Elon Musk started entering into the business world.

Zip2 eventually recruited angel investors and grew into a profitable firm thanks to the brothers' efforts. Zip2 was sold to Compaq for ＄307 million in 1999 by the brothers. Elon subsequently went on to create his own online financial services company, X.com. Confinity, a company formed by Peter Thiel and two others mere months after X.com and with headquarters in the same building, was its main competitor. In March 2000, the two firms joined and adopted the name of their major product, PayPal, an online money transfer service for individuals. In October 2002, Ebay, the online auction site, purchased PayPal for ＄1.5 billion in Ebay stock. Elon Musk, who had been the largest shareholder in PayPal with 11.7% of the company's equity shares, found himself with ＄165 million in Ebay stock at the age of 31.

Since leaving PayPal, he has founded, co-founded, and/or led companies focused on addressing three distinct existential risks to humanity's long-term survival: climate risk, single-planet dependency risk, and human species obsolescence risk. Two of these companies, SpaceX and Tesla Motors, he risked his entire early fortune to build.

Elon Musk Success Story

Musk joined engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning to help operate Tesla Motors in 2004, where he played a key role in the development of the world's first electric vehicle, the Tesla Roadster. Musk took over as CEO and product architect after Eberhard was fired from the company in 2007 due to a series of conflicts. Tesla has grown to be one of the most popular and desirable vehicle brands in the world under his leadership.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has signed many high-profile contracts with NASA and the US Air Force to manufacture rockets and execute military missions. Musk has been vocal about his desire to work with NASA on a collaborative mission to deploy an astronaut to Mars by 2025. Elon Musk has always been a proponent of various space-age technologies, but it hasn't always been a smooth journey for him. He went on to become a small business owner and eventually the CEO of two creative firms after being bullied in school. But he made the decision to ascend from there and never settle for anything less.

Tesla, in addition to creating electric automobiles, has a strong presence in the solar energy sector, courtesy to its purchase of SolarCity. This clean-energy services company, which was founded in 2006, now develops two rechargeable solar batteries that are primarily used for stationary energy storage. The Powerwall is designed for residential backup power and off-grid use, whereas the Powerpack is designed for business or electric utility grid use.

Facts about Elon Musk

• Elon Musk was born in the year 1971 in South Africa.

• He is best known for co-founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, but he first got his wealth as a PayPal co-founder.

• Tony Stark, the fictional character created, was heavily influenced by Musk (a.k.a. Iron Man). Indeed, elements of Iron Man 2 were shot both inside and outside of SpaceX. Even Elon Musk makes an appearance in the film!

• Musk's official annual pay for Tesla Motors is ＄1, similar to that of Steve Jobs and other well-known entrepreneurs.

• Musk taught himself computer programming at the age of 12 and produced the video game Blastar, which he sold for $500.

• Elon Musk did not become an American citizen until he was 31 years old, in 2002.

• Elon Musk immigrated to Canada from South Africa when he was 17 years old. He eventually went to the University of Pennsylvania in the United States for college.

• Musk moved to California after graduation to pursue physics graduate school at Stanford University. He dropped out of Stanford after only two days, opting to take advantage of the booming Internet industry.

• Musk swiftly founded his first startup, Zip2, which supplied online newspapers with maps and business directories, after dropping out of graduate school. In 1999, he sold the company for ＄307 million.

• Musk co-founded X.com in 1999, an online payment startup that later became PayPal before being purchased by eBay for ＄1.5 billion in equity (of which Musk received ＄165 million).

• Tesla Motors, a firm that designs and manufactures electric sports automobiles, was co-founded by Musk. Tesla was able to flourish where other significant manufacturers failed in the electric vehicle sector. He is presently Tesla's CEO and chief product architect.

• The National Highway Safety Administration gave the Tesla Model S a 5.4/5 safety rating, the highest ever given to a car.

• Musk is one of the driving drivers behind SolarCity, which he and his cousins created. He is also the company's main shareholder.

• Elon Musk also created SpaceX (formerly known as Space Exploration Technologies), a corporation that designs and manufactures space launch vehicles, with a concentration on rocket technology. His goal is to lower the cost of space travel in order to expand human life beyond the Earth.

• Musk originally struggled to raise funds for SpaceX, which investors dismissed as a pipe fantasy. Musk put all of his personal funds into SpaceX in order to make it a reality (going against every piece of business advice ever written).

Conclusion

Elon Musk has shown entrepreneurial inclinations since he was a child. His Engineer father and Dietician mother, who recognised and encouraged his son's passion in technology, accepted him warmly. He got his first computer when he was ten years old and taught himself how to programme. At the age of 12, the young boy built a fully playable video game called "Blastar," which he allegedly sold for ＄500. Elon Musk attended Pretoria Boys High School and graduated in 1988. To avoid South Africa's obligatory military duty, he went to Canada in 1989 and enrolled at Queen's University in Ontario. He only stayed at the University of Pretoria for five months after that. Musk went on to the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business to earn a bachelor's degree in economics. He also left after two days to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions after being accepted into the University of Stanford's Physics Graduate Program. As we learn about Elon Musk biography, we understand that he has pursued goals that have motivated not only himself, but also the team of people he has engaged to work with him. Whether it's interplanetary space flight or electric vehicles, these objectives are all geared toward the future and dramatically improving existing conditions.