Elon Musk is a South-African-Canadian-American entrepreneur who lives in the United States. He is the founder of SpaceX, Tesla, and Zip2, among others. He was also one of the people responsible for the success of PayPal. Currently he serves as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chief Designer (CDO) of SpaceX, CEO and product architect of Tesla (electric vehicles), and chair of SolarCity.
Biography Elon Musk
Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South-Africa on 28 June 1971. He’s the son of a Canadian model (Maye Musk) and a South-African electromechanical engineer (Errol Musk). His parents divorced in 1980, after which Musk lived with his father.
When he was 10 years old, he discovered the Commodore VIC-20. He taught himself to programme and sold a video game coded in BASIC two years later. BASIC is an imperative programming language that was originally intended to help people learn programming very quickly. The game was called Blastar, and he sold it to PC and Office Technology magazine for 500 dollars soon after.
As a child, Musk attended the independent Waterkloof House Preparatory School. He did his final exams at Pretoria Boys High School and moved to Canada in June of 1989. He then became a Canadian citizen through his Canadian mother.
In 1989 Elon Musk was admitted to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In 1992, after two years at Queen’s University, Musk left for the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Penn’s College of Arts and Sciences and his Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Musk continued for another year to get his second bachelor.
During his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Musk and fellow student Adeo Ressi bought a student house to use as a nightclub. In 1995, at the age of 24, Musk moved to California to get his PhD in physics from Stanford University, but left the university after just two days to start his own businesses in the fields of Internet, sustainable energy, and space. He became an American citizen in 2002.
When he’s just twelve years old, he’s already a better programmer than his teachers. At 24 he gives up his studies at Stanford University to start his first business.
Four years later, that business is worth 300 million dollars and is bought by Compaq. In 2002 eBay buys one of his other businesses – PayPal – for the considerable sum of 1.5 billion dollars. He invests his considerable fortune in SpaceX (2002), Tesla Motors (2004), and SolarCity (2006).
Zip2
Musk and his brother Kimbal founded Zip2 in 1995, an internet company. They did so with investments from a group of business angels.
One of the things the company developed was an online city guide for newspapers. Elon Musk approached The New York Times, Wall street journal and the Chicago Tribune. During his time at Zip2, Elon wanted to become CEO of the company, but none of Zip2’s board members agreed. Compaq bought Zip2 for 307 million American dollars, of which 7% went to Musk, amounting to 22 million dollars.
X.com and PayPal
In March of 1999, Musk founded X.com, an online payment platform. He invested 10 million in it.
A year later the company merged with Confinity which had its own payment platform named PayPal. The merged company focused on the services PayPal already had and continued under that name in 2001.
PayPal’s early growth was driven by a promotion that offered money to new customers if they signed up. PayPal was acquired by eBay in October of 2002, for one-and-a-half billion dollars. 165 million of that sum went to Musk. Before the takeover, Musk had been the largest shareholder with 11.7% of PayPal’s shares.