Iruni Kalupahana JadeTimes Staff
I. Kalupahana is a Jadetimes news reporter covering Business
Early Life and Education
Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. The oldest of three children, he was raised under the most unstable circumstances a childhood full of adversity and he described his dad as a "terrible human being." Despite this, Musk's aptitude for technology and entrepreneurship was remarkably obvious at an early age. At 10, he taught himself computer programming, at 12, he created his first software program an intergalactic video game called "Blastar." He sold the game code to a computer magazine for $500. At age 17, Musk moved to Canada to avoid compulsory military service in apartheid era South Africa. After two years at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated with dual bachelor's degrees in physics and economics. He briefly joined the Ph.D. program at Stanford University, but he has dropped out after two days to plunge into the emerging opportunities in the burgeoning tech industry.
Zip2 and PayPal
In 1995, Musk co founded the firm Zip2, an online city guide provider for newspapers. With an investment of $15,000 and joined by his younger brother Kimbal, Musk fostered the firm into success and eventually sold it to Compaq in 1999 for $307 million. Using proceeds from the sale of Zip2, Musk undertook another new venture, X.com, which was an online payment firm, known later as PayPal after the merger with Confinity. Although he was ousted as chief executive in 2000, Musk remained the company's largest shareholder and emerged victorious when eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002. Musk plowed most of his PayPal windfall into three new ventures, a space travel concern called SpaceX.
Revolutionizing Space and Transportation
In 2002, Musk started SpaceX to reduce space travel and expedite the human race to become a multiplanetary being. Under his leadership, SpaceX had developed several successful rockets, such as the Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy, which achieved multiple historic milestones for instance, the first privately developed rocket that reached orbit. SpaceX also won lucrative contracts with NASA and the U.S. Air Force, and its Crew Dragon rocket was the first commercial spacecraft to deliver astronauts to the ISS in 2020. Meanwhile, Musk took over Tesla as its CEO in 2004, transforming it from a startup into the world's most valuable automaker. Tesla's electric vehicles, such as the Model S, Model 3, and Cybertruck, create record breaking benchmarks for the automobile industry, they set performance, safety, and sustainable energy standards that many cars today are striving to keep up with.
Diverse Ventures
Other than SpaceX and Tesla, he has founded and led several other innovative companies. Neuralink was founded in 2016 to integrate the human brain with computers by developing high bandwidth brain machine interfaces capable of treating a wide range of neurological conditions and ultimately enhancing human capabilities. In 2016, The Boring Company was founded with a vision to reduce traffic congestion in cities by constructing low cost, high speed tunnel networks. He also initiated the idea of Hyperloop a concept for a high speed transportation system that would push pods through pressurized tubes at near supersonic velocity. Musk diversified his ventures to try and solve some of the most critical challenges facing humanity, from space exploration and energy sustainability down to human machine symbiosis and urban infrastructure.
