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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
