Elon Musk

 Elon Musk was born on the 28th of June 1971 in South Africa, to a model and dietician mother and an electromechanical engineer father.  After his parents divorced in 1980, Elon lived mostly with his father. During that phase, he developed an interest in computing with the Commodore VIC-20.  He self learned computer programming and used to sell the code for a video game he had created called Blastar for $500, to a magazine called PC and Office Technology.  Throughout his childhood, Elon was severely bullied and was even hospitalized when was thrown down a flight of stairs and then beaten until he blacked out.  After graduating from a secondary school in Pretoria, Elon left his home, and migrated to the United States. Without the support of his parents! Although, he didn’t get into the United States right away!  He first moved to Canada to the relatives of his mother in 1989 and attained a Canadian citizenship and moved to Montreal. He began with low paid jobs and somehow survived at the brink of poverty. At the age of 19, he moved to Queens University (Ontario).  Elon Musk studied for two years in Ontario and then, finally, got the opportunity to relocate to the United States in 1992. He had received a scholarship from The University of Pennsylvania: Penn.  He went on to complete his Bachelor of Science degree in Physics. After dropping out of Stanford, Elon and his brother Kimbal borrowed $28,000 from their father and launched a software company called Zip2 in 1995. But later in February 1999 the Musks sold Zip2 to Compaq for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options. Elon received $22 million for his 7% stake from the sale.  Soon after the sale, using $10 million from the sale of Zip2, Elon co-founded another venture called X.com!  X.com was an online financial services and e-mail payment company, which got merged in about a year with Confinity – that had a money transfer service called PayPal.  In October 2000, Elon was overthrown from his role as CEO (although he remained on the board). This was due to the disagreements with other company leadership over his desire to move PayPal’s Unix-based infrastructure to Microsoft Windows.  All of this happened in the late 2000, when Elon took his first vacation in a long time. While he was on the flight, which was still in the air en route to Australia, is when the PayPal’s board fired him and made Peter Thiel the new CEO.  The merged entity was eventually renamed to PayPal in 2001 as well!  And then in October 2002, PayPal was sold to eBay for $1.5 Billion in stock, of which Elon, who was the largest shareholder, received US$165 million for his 11.7% stake. Elon also had interest in space exploration in June 2002, Elon ended up founding Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX.  He was the CEO and CTO of the California-based company, which aimed to develop and manufacture space launch vehicles with a focus on advancing the state of rocket technology.  Since its initiation, the company has gone on to create a lot of news, for several of its accomplishments. Their first two launch vehicles (Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets), and their first spacecraft (Dragon), became the 1st two privately funded liquid-fuelled vehicles to put a satellite into Earth orbit.  In seven years, SpaceX has also gone on to design a family of Falcon launch vehicles and the Dragon multipurpose spacecraft, which has also berthed with the ISS (International Space Station).

Elon Musk

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