Elon Musk Biography
Elon Musk is an American entrepreneur born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa.
As a teenager, how would he know the right steps to take in order help inspire the film depiction of Iron Man’s Tony Stark? Hard work and maybe a little luck thrown in.
He left home at age 17, then spent 2 years at Queens College, Kingston, Ontario. His undergrad degrees, economics and physics, were earned at the University of Pennsylvania, with the economics degree granted from the Wharton School. Elon entered Stanford for grad work in applied physics but left after a few days. They did not hold that against him, he is now a member of the Stanford University Engineering Advisory Board.
After dropping out of Stanford, Elon had three main areas of interest: the Internet, clean energy and space. As a self-taught computer programmer, he founded Zip2 with his brother. Then came X.com, which merged with the corporate parent of PayPal. PayPal was subsequently acquired by eBay. Talk about a string of winners – but that was only the beginning.
Using some of the profits from the buyout of PayPal, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies and serves as its CEO. SpaceX is the only private company to successfully dock a vehicle with the International Space Station. NASA has granted it a contract to supply the ISS, work formerly performed by the Space Shuttle. One goal of his is to reduce the cost of space travel by an order of magnitude.
Electric cars were the next nut to crack with the Tesla Motors’ Roadster which came out in 2006 and were produced through 2012. Production of this electric sports car may resume in 2014. Meanwhile, Tesla continues to produce 4-door sedans and will bring out a CUV Model X in 2014.
SolarCity was co-founded with a cousin. It provides solar power systems. Elon is the CEO.
Hyperloop was created by a team of SpaceX and Tesla Motors personnel led by Elon Musk. The open-source project grew out of a desire to show that California’s high-speed rail project could be supplanted with a green solution at about 1/10 of the expected cost of high-speed rail. The design document was published August 12, 2013.
What do you do with all that money after you’ve worked hard to make it? Give it away. The Musk Foundation focuses on kids’ health, science education & clean energy.