“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.” Elon Musk
Elon Musk is a big name in the tech world. He has started several businesses, and it seems like he can succeed at anything.Musk was born on June 28th, 1971, in South Africa, and at 17, he immigrated to Canada. As a transfer student at the University of Pennsylvania, he finally landed in the United States.
Musk is a well-known tech mogul, widely recognized as the CEO of Tesla Inc. and the Founder and CEO of SpaceX. Currently, with a net worth of more than $199.9 billion, Tesla’s CEO is one of the wealthiest people in the world.
“Company Possessions of Elon Musk”
Tesla Inc.: The Electric Car Manufacturing Company SpaceX: Musk’s Aerospace Manufacturing Company Neuralink is a research company trying to build devices implanted into the human brain.
OpenAI: AI researched by a not-for-profit company to ensure it doesn’t destroy humanity. The Boring Company is focused on digging a network of city tunnels for high-speed and no-traffic driving.
The Early Life:
Elon Musk demonstrated entrepreneurial traits from an early age. His engineer father and dietician mother, who understood his son’s technology penchant and nurtured his interest, embraced him remarkably.
He obtained his first computer at age 10, teaching himself how to write code. And at 12, the young boy constructed a functional video game named “Blastar” that was reportedly sold for $500.
In 1988, Elon Musk graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. In 1989, he moved to Canada and joined Queen’s University in Ontario to escape the compulsory military service in South Africa. After that, he attended the University of Pretoria for merely five months.
Musk went on to get a Bachelor of Economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.Also, he quit after only two days because he wanted to start his own business. When he was accepted into the Physics Graduate Program at the University of Stanford, he did so.
Success Story of the Tech Buff:
Musk and his brother Kimbal started the IT company Zip2 in 1995. Zip2 licensed newspaper software for use in online city guides.The company didn’t get many customers in its first few years, but then local and national newspapers started using Zip2 to sell extra services to their own customers.In 1999, Zip2 was bought for a whopping $340 million by Compaq’s AltaVista web search engine.
Then, Musk and his business partners Peter Thiel and Max Levchin started X.com, which offers online financial services and email payments.In 2000, X.com became part of the American software company Confinity. It is best known for making PayPal.Shortly before eBay bought PayPal for USD 1.5 billion in 2001, Elon Musk was named president and CEO of PayPal.
Here, Musk eventually had the funds to put the Internet business behind and channel his attention to the engineering business as an equity investor with nearly 180 million dollars in shares.
Struggling and Rising Years:
In 2004, Musk played an instrumental role in designing the first electric car from Tesla, named “The Tesla Roadster.” Under the direction of such a wealthy person, Tesla became the most popular and sought-after car brand in the world.
Musk claims 2008 was the worst year of his life. With the financial crisis, Musk was broke, and he also had to pull out of Tesla because of the massive debt. Along with that, he was undergoing a divorce procedure.
In January 2018, Tesla said that Musk would not get a payment every year. Instead, the company would raise money based on how much its market cap would grow over the next ten years. Elon Musk has signed a number of high-profile contracts with NASA and the U.S. Air Force for SpaceX to build rockets and carry out military missions. Musk was outspoken about his hopes for a joint project with NASA to send an astronaut to Mars by 2025.
Elon Musk has always pushed all varieties of space-age technologies, but it was still challenging. He went on from being bullied in school to becoming a small entrepreneur and finally becoming the leader of two innovative companies. But from there, he decided to rise and never settle for anything less.
Courtesy: Business Connect