Considers himself as a futurist, he is an inventor, engineer, investor, philanthropist and a business magnate. It is not humanly possible to describe everything that a certain South African-born Canadian-American gentleman called Elon Musk has and will accomplish in one article.
He is the founder, CEO, and lead designer of SpaceX; co-founder, CEO, and product architect of Tesla Inc.; co-chairman of Open AI; founder and CEO of Neuralink, and founder of The Boring Company. He is also a co-founder and former chairman of Solar City, co-founder of Zip2, and founder of X.com, which merged with Confinity and took the name PayPal.
He is also the man behind the high-speed transportation system Hyperloop and the VTOL(Vertical Take- Off and Landing) supersonic jet aircraft with electric fan propulsion also known as Musk electric jet.
Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, and is a man who well and truly changing the world in a really big way. He became a multimillionaire in his late 20s due to his positive outlook towards life and innovative ideas.
Elon Musk has been described as the most imaginative business magnate of the 21st Century. His net worth is $19.2 billion (As of 6/28/2019).
Elon Musk is the one for the future. According to him, his goals are to change the world and humanity. It includes reducing global warming by the use of more sustainable energy production & consumption and reducing the risk of “Human Extinction” by establishing a human colony on Mars.
Education
When he was 12 he sold his first software: a game he created called Blastar.
In grade school Musk was short, introverted and bookish. He was bullied until he was 15 and went through a growth spurt and learned how to defend himself with karate and wrestling.
At age 17, in 1989, Elon Musk moved to Canada to attend Queen’s University and avoid mandatory service in the South African military. Musk obtained his Canadian citizenship that year, in part because he felt it would be easier to obtain American citizenship via that path.
In 1992, Musk left Canada to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with an undergraduate degree in economics and stayed for a second bachelor’s degree in physics.
After leaving Penn, Elon Musk headed to Stanford University in California to pursue a PhD in energy physics. However, his move was timed perfectly with the Internet boom, and he dropped out of Stanford after just two days to become a part of it, launching his first company, Zip2 Corporation in 1995. Musk became a U.S. citizen in 2002.
Musk’s Ventures:
Zip2 Corporation
Elon Musk launched his first company, Zip2 Corporation, in 1995 with his brother, Kimbal Musk. An online city guide, Zip2 was soon providing content for the new websites of both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. In 1999, a division of Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options.
PayPal
In 1999, Elon and Kimbal Musk used the money from their sale of Zip2 to found X.com, an online financial services/payments company. An X.com acquisition the following year led to the creation of PayPal as it is known today.
In October 2002, Elon Musk earned his first billion when PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock. Before the sale, Musk owned 11 percent of PayPal stock.
SpaceX
Musk founded his third company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, in 2002 with the intention of building spacecraft for commercial space travel. By 2008, SpaceX was well established, and NASA awarded the company the contract to handle cargo transport for the International Space Station—with plans for astronaut transport in the future—in a move to replace NASA’s own space shuttle missions.
Falcon 9 Rockets
On May 22, 2012, Musk and SpaceX made history when the company launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space with an unmanned capsule.
BFR Mission to Mars
In September 2017, Musk presented an updated design plan for his BFR (an acronym for either “Big F—ing Rocket” or “Big Falcon Rocket”), a 31-engine behemoth topped by a spaceship capable of carrying at least 100 people. He revealed that SpaceX was aiming to launch the first cargo missions to Mars with the vehicle in 2022, as part of his overarching goal of colonizing the Red Planet.
Internet Satellites
In late March 2018, SpaceX received permission from the U.S. government to launch a fleet of satellites into low orbit for the purpose of providing Internet service.
Tesla Motors
Elon Musk is the co-founder, CEO and product architect at Tesla Motors, a company formed in 2003 that is dedicated to producing affordable, mass-market electric cars as well as battery products and solar roofs. Musk oversees all product development, engineering and design of the company’s products.
Roadster, Model S, Model 3, Semi Truck, Model Y
Five years after its formation, in March 2008, Tesla unveiled the Roadster, a sports car capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds, as well as traveling nearly 250 miles between charges of its lithium ion battery.
The Boring Company
In January 2017, Elon Musk launched “The Boring Company,” a company devoted to boring and building tunnels in order to reduce street traffic. He began with a test dig on the SpaceX property in Los Angeles. Being able to construct smaller, cheaper transit tunnels is still an important innovation, and the massive tunnels needed to accommodate multi-passenger subways
Hyperloop
In August 2013, Elon Musk released a concept for a new form of transportation called the “Hyperloop,” an invention that would foster commuting between major cities while severely cutting travel time. The world’s first full-sized Hyperloop passenger capsule has been unveiled in Spain giving those in attendance a glimpse of the future. This capsule can reach speeds of 1,220 kilometres per hour.
AI and Neuralink
Elon Musk has pursued an interest in artificial intelligence, becoming co-chair of the nonprofit OpenAI. The research company launched in late 2015 with the stated mission of advancing digital intelligence to benefit humanity.
Elon Musk’s accomplishments over the last two decades make him a role model for young entrepreneurs. Here are five powerful lessons that you can learn from his life and career.