At the age of 12, Elon Musk created and sold a video game to a magazine. The space fighting game called ‘Blastar’ was sold to PC and Office Technology magazine for $500. Musk also worked at a gaming start-up called ‘Rocket Science’.
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Musk’s earliest venture was the founding of Zip2, a company that provided maps and business directories to newspapers and was later sold to Compaq for $307 million.
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Paypal, erstwhile X.com, was what eventually made Musk his fortune. Founded in 1999 , Paypal was then acquired by Ebay for $1.5 billion, of which $165 million was given to Musk in stocks.
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In 2002, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX. Musk was convinced that humanity's survival depended on its ability to become a multi-planetary species, but current rocket launching technologies were too expensive. This he accomplished with the launch of the Falcon 1 in 2006, the Falcon 9 in 2010 and the Falcon Heavy in 2018.
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The Falcon Heavy was capable of carrying 53,000 kg into orbit, twice as heavy as its closest competitor at nearly one-third the cost.
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Because of the lack of funding, Musk had to invest his own money into the development of SpaceX rockets. Currently, the company has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA for resupply missions and eventually ferrying people to and from the International Space Station.
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Thanks to the developments in SpaceX, Musk has managed to reduce the cost of travelling to the space station by up to 90 percent. What then cost $1 billion per mission now costs $60 million.
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Musk then became a major funder in Tesla Motors, now called Tesla. Largely uninterested in the electric vehicles then, Tesla introduced the Roadster, a car with futuristic looks and a battery with a range of 394 km on a single charge.
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Both of Musk’s successes, SpaceX as well as Tesla, had come very close to failing. While the first three rockets failed to launch the fourth was a success and the Roadster went through several production problems.
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In 2010, Musk received the FAI Gold Space Medal from the Federation Aronautique Internationale for designing the first privately developed rocket to reach orbit.
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In 2018, Musk introduced the Hyperloop, a transportation system that is theoretically capable of transporting people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 90 minutes.
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Musk has named one of his sons, Xavier, which, he confessed was after Professor Xavier from the X-Men.
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Musk is sometimes referred to as a thrillionaire, a high-tech entrepreneur looking to turn science-fiction into reality.
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Musk also owns a James Bond custom-car called Wet Nellie. The Wet Nellie is a custom-built Lotus Espirit submarine car in the movie, the Spy Who Loved Me.
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Musk also made an appearance in The Simpsons episode, “The Musk Who Fell to Earth”.
