For many, the Tesla and Space X co-founder, Elon Musk is perhaps the most ambitious man on the planet. His exploits have already made him amongst the wealthiest (2nd on the Forbes list), but things weren't always so good for the enigmatic South African. Musk was born in South Africa and but he went to Canada and then eventually ended up in the US when he founded Zip2. Let's take a look at his professional career which has now spanned 26 years.
undefinedHappy birthday @elonmusk ???????? Thank you for this wonderful day 50 years ago. You have brought me great joy. Lots of love ❤️❤️❤️ #HappyBirthdayElonMusk now trending ???????? pic.twitter.com/xro3QwQD1z
— Maye Musk (@mayemusk) June 28, 2021
1. Zip2 was Elon's first company which he co-founded with his brother Kimbal. As always, founded back in 1995, it was ahead of its time, Elon did a lot of the coding himself. It was basically an online directory in the form of yellow pages, and Musk sold the company in 4 years, at the cusp of the millennium in 1999. The brothers sold the company to Compaq which was later acquired by HP for $305 million and Elon netted $22 million while his brother Kimbal made $15 million.
PayPal was a lovechild of x.com and coninfinity
2. X.com was the online back founded by Musk, along with Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho in March 1999. Within a year it merged with another payments platform called Confinity co-founded by billionaire and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. After the merger, firstly the joint entity was a called X.com with Musk replacing Thiel as the CEO. But clashes between the two teams internally resulted in Musk being ousted and Thiel was back in as CEO. Because x.com was mistaken to be a pornographic website it was rebranded to what we all know as the pioneering online payments platform - PayPal. PayPal was sold for $1.5 billion to eBay in 2002. Since Musk was the largest shareholder of PayPal with 11.7 percent, he received over $100 million from the sale.
3. Most people don't realize that SpaceX was founded before Tesla that too in 2002. Musk used his new fortune from PayPal to founding the company and to date remains its CEO and chief engineer. In 2008, the Falcon 1 rocket was the first private liquid-fuel rocket to circle the Earth's orbit. Later that year it even managed a $1.6 billion contract to replace the Space Shuttle after its retirement in 2011. In 2015, the Falcon 9 landed the first stage of the rocket and eventually created an autonomous landing platform, heralding the era of reusable rockets. SpaceX has announced plans to take humans to space, including to the Moon and eventually to Mars. It has also deployed an armada of satellites that will beam high-speed internet which is called Starlink. It is Elon's most ambitious company.
Musk led the series A of Tesla and become its chairman
4. Tesla was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk wasn't actually a co-founder but he was one of the investors for its series A in 2004 and by this time he had become the chairman of the board. After the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, classes between Musk and Eberhard, the co-founder was pushed out of the company and since then Musk has assumed the role of CEO and co-founder. After its first groundbreaking vehicle - the Roadster, in 2012, he launched the first long-range electric luxury vehicle the Model S which has transformed the modern automotive market. An SUV based on the Model S was launched in 2015 called the Model X. In 2017 he unveiled the affordable electric car that is the Model 3 which has spawned a crossover SUV called the Model Y. In 2019, Tesla announced plans for the CyberTruck and a new versions of the Roadster, both of which are yet to hit the roads.
5. Solar City was founded in 2006 by brothers Lyndon and Peter Rive, but Musk was the chairman of the board who was their cousin. The company was founded based on Musk's suggestion. By 2013, it was the leading solar installer in the residential sector of the US. In 2016, SpaceX bought $90 million of SolarCity stock. By August 2016, Tesla acquired SolarCity for $2.6 billion while it had also started selling its PowerWall of home-based battery packs under the Tesla Energy moniker. In 2017, Lyndon and Peter Rive left the company. Using its technology, Tesla has also entered into the installation of home solar panels and combined it with the PowerWall charger and energy storage solution offering a way for people to live fully on renewable energy and be off the grid.
That's already a lot but Musk has never been one to stop. He has other initiatives as well.
The Boring Company envisions high speed tunnels with Tesla's ferrying people across the city underground
Hyperloop was proposed first by Musk in 2013 as a means of a vacuum-operated train with the help of Tesla and SpaceX engineers designing the first bits of the concept. The alpha design was published as a white paper on the Tesla and SpaceX blogs. By 2015, he had opened a design competition.
By 2016, he opened up the Boring Company to dig underground tunnels to address the traffic situation in Los Angeles and has scaled it to Las Vegas as well. He uses some ideas from Hyperloop here with Tesla's operating at high speed in a tunnel.
Musk has been a proponent of safe AI and he founded Open AI in 2015. The idea was to prevent the formation of a superintelligence that could take over the world potentially so as witnessed in many science fiction movies. He left the board of Open AI in 2018 because of conflict of interest issues with Tesla.
In 2016, he founded Neural Link - a neurotechnology company that intends to merge AI with the human brain. It is working on projects that will sync some hardware with your brain. In 2020, a live demonstration showed it to be a "Fitbit of sorts" for the brain with the potential for it to use things like paralysis, blindness, and deafness, though many neuroscientists have criticized these claims.
