Elon musk biography
Written by Gordon Cheung and Dennis Xu
Elon Reeves Musk (born in June 28th, 1971, Pretoria, South Africa) is a South African-born American entrepreneur and business magnate. He is the co-founder of PayPal and the founder of SpaceX. Also, he is the CEO and one of the first major investor in Tesla. Currently, he is divorced and has 5 children.
Starting Out
After he dropped out of Stanford, Musk and his brother, Kimbal, co-founded Zip2, a company that developed an online city guide to provide its service to newspapers. Later, Zip2 was actually able to land offers from popular newspapers like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. Musk eventually sold the company to Compaq computers in 1999 for 307 million dollars. However, Musk did not just stop there. Using some of his money, he founded another company called X.com, which was an online financial service website. Following the creation of X.com, the company merged with Confinity in 2000 which led to the formation of PayPal. In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion. From the acquisition, Musk earned $180 million. With this, he had enough fund to pursue his passion in space and alternative energy sources. |
Early Life
Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa to a South African Father Errol Musk and a Canadian Mother Maye Musk. As a kid, Musk showed talent and interest in computers. He taught himself programming after his father bought him a personal computer. At the age of 12, he created a video game called Blastar and earned $500 from it when sold it to a magazine. University When Musk was 17 and just graduated from high school, he left South Africa to North America in order to avoid compulsory military service, along with the protest of racism and the Apartheid system in South Africa. Thanks to Musk’s mother, he was able to earn his citizenship in Canada and attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Later, he was transferred to University of Pennsylvania and completed his bachelor’s degrees in Physics and Economics. Later on, Musk was also accepted into Stanford’s doctoral program in Energy Physics. However, Musk dropped out of Stanford as he saw opportunities in working with the Internet, which was a new growing industry at the time. |
Career
In 2002, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) following his dreams of commercializing rockets for transportation systems and allowing humans to colonize Mars. In 2008, SpaceX launched their first liquid-fueled rocket that reached orbit (Falcon 1). Now, SpaceX has over 100 launches and around 7000 employees after many unsuccessful trials and setbacks. Furthermore, in 2004, he invested and took control of Tesla Motors (later renamed Tesla). Musk participated in the designing of Tesla’s first car, the Roadster, and received the Global Green 2006 product design award for its design. However, because of many adversities, the production of Tesla Roadster was delayed to early 2008. And now, Tesla holds a big place in the auto industry in the world. Tesla’s Model S was the best-selling plug-in electric car of 2015 and 2016. By February 2018, the Tesla had produced over 300,000 vehicles. The company even made into the Fortune 500 list in June of 2017.
What Is He Doing Now?
As of April 2018, Musk’s net worth is $19.6 billion. Nowadays, he has been working on many of his ambitious projects such as Hyperloop, OpenAI, SolarCity, building large renewable energy storages in Australia, sending people to Mars, and very recently, creating The Boring Company which is an infrastructure and tunnel construction company.
In 2002, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) following his dreams of commercializing rockets for transportation systems and allowing humans to colonize Mars. In 2008, SpaceX launched their first liquid-fueled rocket that reached orbit (Falcon 1). Now, SpaceX has over 100 launches and around 7000 employees after many unsuccessful trials and setbacks. Furthermore, in 2004, he invested and took control of Tesla Motors (later renamed Tesla). Musk participated in the designing of Tesla’s first car, the Roadster, and received the Global Green 2006 product design award for its design. However, because of many adversities, the production of Tesla Roadster was delayed to early 2008. And now, Tesla holds a big place in the auto industry in the world. Tesla’s Model S was the best-selling plug-in electric car of 2015 and 2016. By February 2018, the Tesla had produced over 300,000 vehicles. The company even made into the Fortune 500 list in June of 2017.
What Is He Doing Now?
As of April 2018, Musk’s net worth is $19.6 billion. Nowadays, he has been working on many of his ambitious projects such as Hyperloop, OpenAI, SolarCity, building large renewable energy storages in Australia, sending people to Mars, and very recently, creating The Boring Company which is an infrastructure and tunnel construction company.
works cited
- “Elon Musk Biography.” Encyclopedia of World Biography, www.notablebiographies.com/news/Li-Ou/Musk-Elon.html.
- “Elon Musk Biography: Success Story of The 21st Century Innovator.” Astrum People, astrumpeople.com/elon-musk-biography/.
- Gregersen, Erik. “Elon Musk.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 17 May 2018, www.britannica.com/biography/Elon-Musk.
- “Elon Musk.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 23 June 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk.
- “Elon Musk.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 13 June 2018, www.biography.com/people/elon-musk-20837159.