To call Elon Musk, the man behind the first private company to launch a spacecraft into orbit and retrieve it, a high achiever would be an understatement.
Musk was born in South Africa in 1971. His father is an engineer and his mother, Maye Musk, is an author, nutritionist and model who appeared on the cover of New York Magazine last year at the age of 63.
Maye Musk says her son read the Encyclopedia Brittanica when he was eight. He bought his first computer when he was 10 and began teaching himself how to program. Two years later, he developed a computer game and sold it for around $500.
Musk started to make his way to the United States when he was 17. He left South Africa after graduating from high school – partially because he didn’t want to face compulsory military service in an army that suppressed the black population.
He stopped briefly in Kingston, Ont., where he spent two years at Queen’s University. It wasn’t his only Canadian connection: his mother was born in Saskatchewan.
In 1992, Musk moved on to the University of Pennsylvania where, on a full scholarship, he studied business and physics. In 1995, he enrolled in a graduate program in applied physics and materials sciences at Stanford University in California. He dropped out after two days to start a company with his brother. Zip2 provided content publishing software for online news organizations.
Four years later, they sold the firm to Compaq’s Alta Vista division for $307 million and $34 million in stock options.
Freed from the need to worry about finances, Musk wanted to focus on the things that really interested him: the internet, clean energy and space.
In March 1999, Musk co-founded a company called X.com. A year later, the company acquired the company that operated PayPal, which at that time was an auction payments service. Within two years, Musk had shifted PayPal’s focus to a global payments system.
In October 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock. Musk was the company’s largest single shareholder, controlling 11.7 per cent of PayPal’s shares.
Just before the PayPal deal, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX).
He’s poured millions of his own money into the company with the goal of launching manned spacecraft.
The company developed the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, with the intent of ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), just as NASA announced it would be ending the Space Shuttle program.
In December 2008, NASA awarded the company a $1.6 billion contract for 12 flights to the ISS.
Two years later, SpaceX became the first private company to launch a spacecraft into orbit and retrieve it. That test flight of a Dragon capsule paved the way for the current mission, which also is meant to culminate with a splashdown of the capsule in the Pacific.
Space and the internet aren’t Musk’s only passions. He also co-founded Tesla Motors, a company that makes all-electric cars. He’s also the head of product design. He led development of the Tesla Roadster, the first electric sports car ever produced.
Later this year, the company will begin shipping its four-door Model S sedan and is expected to begin production of an electric vehicle aimed at the SUV/mini-van market late next year.
Tesla also sells electric powertrain systems to Daimler and Toyota.
Musk has been married twice and has five sons – a set of twins and a set of triplets – whom he fathered with his first wife, Justine Musk. They met while they were both students at Queen’s. He lives in the exclusive Los Angeles suburb of Bel Air in a 20,000 square foot mansion.
Comments