He was bullied as a young child at school, before becoming a junior employee of a company, and eventually today is the CEO of two of the largest companies in the world.
Between space rockets, electric cars, solar batteries, and the billions he made throughout his life, Elon Musk's story seems like a lesson in how some simple rules, applied relentlessly, can yield amazing results.
Difficult upbringing
Elon Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa to model and nutritionist, Mae Musk, and electromechanical engineer, Errol Musk, whom Elon described as a ”terrible human being“.
Elon Musk is the eldest of his parents ' three children, he holds the citizenship of three countries: South Africa, Canada and the United States.
Musk spent his childhood and nose in books and computers. He was an introverted boy, ostracized by his classmates and regularly beaten by bullies in class, until he became old enough to defend himself.
At the age of Seventeen, Musk moved to Canada to study physics and economics, before heading to the United States in 1992 to continue his studies.
After graduation, Elon Musk went to Stanford University to study for a PhD, but he didn't start the program until he decided to leave, postponing his papers just two days after arriving in California, when he decided to try his luck in the web world that had just begun, and never returned to complete his studies at Stanford.
His first companies
The internet world had just taken off in the mid-1990s when Musk and his brother Kimball founded Zip2, which provided city travel guides to newspapers such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, and the fruits of hard work came when Zip2 was sold for $341 million, giving Elon Musk $22 million.
Musk then started the X.com project, the e-banking company, taking advantage of $10 million in revenue he received from the sale of Zip2.
Nearly a year later, X.com merged with rival Confinity to establish the popular e-payment company PayPal, which was soon bought by eBay to earn Musk a net profit of $165 million from the total $1.5 billion deal.
He has money what's next
Elon Musk has since risked his early fortune entirely to build companies all focused on addressing what he called existential risks to humanity's long-term survival: three:
- Climate risks
Tesla Motors aims to address climate risks by accelerating the transition to clean electricity and electrified transportation.
- The dangers of relying on one planet
According to Musk, humanity's long-term survival is at risk if it remains confined only to this planet. Sooner or later, some disaster-maybe a meteorite, a massive volcano, or a nuclear war-will end our time here on Earth, so Musk founded a space travel company.
- Risks of obsolescence of the human race
Musk and other thinkers argue that Super general artificial intelligence is smarter than humans and will pose a huge existential threat to the future of humanity.
For this reason, Musk co-founded the non-profit company RIA to develop a ”friendly artificial intelligence“.
The company provides free access to the results of advanced AI research to deploy those technologies and prevent powerful groups from monopolizing Super general AI.
Pitfalls and Hard Times
Elon Musk is not a perfect and infallible hero. He is a great creative with extraordinary vision and ability, but he is also, according to some former employees, a very difficult man: he works about 100 hours a week, expects his employees to work as crazy as he, sometimes losing his temper and firing them for very minor mistakes.
In his life, he has always stirred controversy with strange and surprising actions, for example smoking cannabis in a live broadcast in 2018.
After all, Elon Musk'sl H.and. companies have overcome the fragility of the early years of growth and are now making big money.. There is now little to slow down Elon Musk as he strives to take to the streets with his electric car, conquer space with vehicles and rockets, and even communicate directly with our brains with smart chips.