Elon Musk's Success Story

E lon Reeve Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, the oldest of three children. His father was a South African engineer, and his mother a Canadian model and nutritionist After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk lived primarily with his father. He would later dub his father "a terrible human being… almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he did."Technology became an escape for Musk. At 10, he became acquainted with programming using a Commodore VIC-20, an early and relatively inexpensive home computer. Before long, Musk had become proficient enough to create Blastar—a video game in the style of Space Invaders. He sold the BASIC code for the game to a PC magazine for $500.In one telling incident from his childhood, Musk and his brother planned to open a video game arcade near their school. Their parents nixed the plan. After two years at Queen’s University, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. He took on two majors, but his time there wasn’t all work and no play. With a fellow student, he bought a 10-bedroom fraternity house, which they used as an ad hoc nightclub. Musk graduated with a bachelor of science degree in physics, as well as a bachelor of arts in economics from the Wharton School. The two majors foreshadowed Musk’s career, but it was physics that left the deepest impression. In 1995, with $15,000 and his younger brother Kimbal at his side, Musk started Zip2, a web software company that would help newspapers develop online city guides. In 1999, Zip2 was acquired by Compaq Computer Corp. for $341 million. Musk used his Zip2 buyout money to create X.com, a fintech venture before that term was in wide circulation

X.com merged with a money transfer firm called Confinity, and the resulting company came to be known as PayPal.Peter Thiel ousted Musk as PayPal's CEO before eBay (EBAY) bought the payments company for $1.5 billion, but Musk still profited from the buyout via his 11.7% PayPal stake."My proceeds from PayPal after tax were about $180 million," Musk said in a 2018 interview. "$100 million of that went into SpaceX, $70 million into Tesla, and $10 million into SolarCity. And I literally had to borrow money for rent."Musk became involved with the electric cars venture as an early investor in 2004, ultimately contributing about $6.3 million to begin with and joined the team, including engineer Martin Eberhard, to help run a company then known as Tesla Motors. Following a series of disagreements, Eberhard was ousted in 2007, and an interim CEO was hired until Musk assumed control as CEO and product architect. Under his watch, Tesla has become the world's most valuable automaker and one of his best-known brandsMusk used most of the proceeds from his PayPal stake to found Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, the rockets developer commonly known as SpaceX. By his own account, Musk spent $100 million under Musk's leadership, SpaceX landed several high-profile contracts with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Air Force to design space launch rockets