Elon Reeve Musk (/ˈiːlɒn ˈmʌsk/; born June 28, 1971) is a South African-born Canadian-American business magnate, investor, engineer, and inventor.
He is the founder, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX; co-founder, CEO, and product architect of Tesla Inc.; co-founder and chairman of SolarCity; co-chairman of OpenAI; co-founder of Zip2; and founder of X.com, which merged with Confinity and took the name PayPal. As of March 2017, he has an estimated net worth of $13.9 billion, making him the 80th wealthiest person in the world. In December 2016, Musk was ranked 21st on Forbes list of The World’s Most Powerful People.
Musk has stated that the goals of SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX revolve around his vision to change the world and humanity. His goals include reducing global warming through sustainable energy production and consumption, and reducing the “risk of human extinction” by “making life multiplanetary” by setting up a human colony on Mars.
In addition to his primary business pursuits, he has also envisioned a high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop, and has proposed a VTOL supersonic jet aircraft with electric fan propulsion, known as the Musk electric jet.
After dropping out of his PhD program at Stanford, Musk and his brother Kimbal launched a software company in 1995 called Zip2, using $28,000 of their father’s money and funds from angel investors. The Internet was beginning to expand by leaps and bounds, and newspapers were trying to figure out how they could make the best use of the new medium. The Musks’ company developed online city guides for newspaper publishers. Before long, Zip2 had won contracts with major players in the industry, including The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.
But there was tension at Zip2. Musk wanted to be CEO, but the board stood firm against the move. In 1999, as the tech bubble was approaching its zenith, the board sold the company to Compaq for $307 million plus $34 million in stock options. In the sale, Elon Musk received 7% of the sale, $22 million. (See also: Three Steps Elon Musk Took To Become Successful.)
PayPal
That same year, Musk co-founded X.com, an online banking company, using $10 million from the sale of Zip2. A year after that, with the dot-com bubble fully popped and a preponderance of tech companies closing their virtual doors, X.com would purchase Confinity, another online financial services firm, and its money-transfer service, called PayPal.
It quickly became clear that PayPal was the most important element of the company. X.com focused on the service and renamed itself PayPal in 2001. It soon became the online-payment system of choice, with a few thousand users multiplying to more than 1 million in a few months. Its fast adoption has been credited to a marketing campaign that recruited new customers when they received money through the service.
But boardroom troubles dogged Musk, who was ousted from the CEO’s chair over technical arguments concerning the future architecture of the service. Again, those battles were followed by a sale, this time to eBay in October of 2002. At the time of the sale, one in four eBay transactions were completed using PayPal. This sale was enormous by Internet-company standards of the time, with $1.5 billion in stock changing hands. Musk received $165 million for his 11.7% stake in PayPal.
Before the PayPal sale had closed, Musk had begun to dream up a miniature experimental greenhouse that he could land on Mars. The greenhouse, which he called “Mars Oasis,” would contain crops and would, he hoped, rekindle faded public interest in space exploration. (For more, see: Elon Musk’s Ventures-Bringing His Visions to Life.)
Musk in Space
In 2001, Musk took steps to realize this vision, taking a trip to Moscow to shop for Soviet Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) that could be refitted to deliver payloads into space. Musk and his advisors, however, failed to see eye-to-eye with the Russian aerospace companies, who didn’t take them seriously. In 2002, he tried again, this time bringing along a former CIA venture capitalist, but the Russian aerospace firms wanted too much money for their rockets and Musk moved on.
On the flight back, Musk decided to start a company that would build affordable rockets, using vertical integration and the modular approach of software engineering. Those ideas culminated in his launch of SpaceX in 2002, whose mission, Musk said, was to create a “true space-faring civilization.”
It was clear that SpaceX was more than a hobby to Musk, who invested $100 million to get it started. The company named its first launch vehicle Falcon 1, after the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. The Falcon 1 made the history books in 2009 as the first privately-funded, liquid-fueled rocket to put a satellite into Earth’s orbit.
Since that fateful launch, SpaceX has continued to make history. When its SpaceX Dragon vehicle docked with the International Space Station in 2012, it was the first commercial company to ever do so. It once again made headlines in December of 2015, when the company was able to successfully land the first stage of the Falcon rocket back at the launch pad, a first for rocket science and a feat that would be replicated multiple times in the months to follow.
The company has also made money. In 2006, NASA gave SpaceX a contract to develop the Falcon 9 launch vehicle, which it followed up with another $1.6 billion contract in 2008. But beyond headlines and profits, Musk sees SpaceX as filling a vital need. “There’s a fundamental difference, if you look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that’s out there exploring the stars… compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event,” he said. In September of 2016, Musk outlined a plan to explore and eventually colonize Mars. (For more, see: The Reality Of Investing In Space Exploration.)
Source: