Hello. My name is Andre' Hartslief, I'm a South African, and I am immensely proud of Elon Musk, who is a fellow South African, busy rocking the world with his impressive array of innovative projects, not bad, for the kid who was bullied throughout his young life.
He was once beaten unconscious and hospitalized by a group of bullies at his Pretoria high school Alma mater after hurling him head first, down a flight of stairs.
Elon Reeve Musk was born in South Africa on June 28, 1971. in Pretoria, Transvaal, the son of Maye (née Haldeman), a model from Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, he went on, to acquire Canadian-citizenship and later became an American business magnate, engineer, inventor and investor.
He is presently the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors, chairman of SolarCity, and co-chairman of OpenAI.
Elon, being the founder of SpaceX, a co-founder of Zip2, PayPal, and Tesla Motors, he has also envisioned a conceptual high-speed transportation system referred to as the Hyperloop and has propounded a VTOL supersonic fighter jet, fitted with electric fan propulsion.
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As of January 2016, he is estimated as having a net worth of US$12.4 billion, effectively, making him the 39th wealthiest person in America.
Early childhood
At age 23, he became an electro-mechanical engineer. He has a younger brother named Kimbal (born 1972), and also a younger sister, Tosca (born 1974). His paternal grandmother was British, and he also has Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk lived mostly with his father in locations in South Africa.
At age 10, He discovered computing at age 10, with the Commodore VIC-20. He taught himself computer programming and at age 12 sold the code for a BASIC-based video game he created called Blastar to a magazine called PC and Office Technology for approximately US$500. There is a version of the game available online.
Image "Tesla Car Plant" wikipedia.com
Musk was initially educated at private schools, attending the English-speaking Waterkloof House Preparatory School. Musk later graduated from Pretoria Boys High School and moved to Canada in June 1989, just before his 18th birthday, after obtaining Canadian citizenship through his Canadian-born mother.
University
At the age of 19, Musk was accepted into Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, for undergraduate study. In 1992, after spending two years at Queen's University, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where, at the age of 24, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics at Penn's College of Arts and Sciences, and a Bachelor of Science degree in economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
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Zip2
In 1995, Musk and Kimbal, his brother, started Zip2, a web software company, with US $28,000 of their father's (Errol Musk) money. The company developed and marketed an Internet "city guide" for the newspaper publishing industry. Musk obtained contracts with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and convinced the board of directors to give up plans for a merger with a company called City Search.
While he was at Zip2, Musk wanted to become CEO; however, none of the board members were against it. The company, Compaq acquired Zip2 for US $307 million in cash and US $34 million in stock options in February 1999. Musk received 7% or US $22 million from the sale.
X.com and PayPal
X.com was co-founded by Musk in March 1999, who are an online financial services and e-mail payment company, with US $10 million from the sale of Zip2. A year later, the firm merged with a company called Confinity, which owned a money transfer service called PayPal.
Their merged company was mainly focused on the PayPal service and was renamed PayPal in 2001. PayPal's early growth experience, was driven mainly by a viral marketing campaign whereby new customers were recruited when they received money through the service.
Elon, was later ousted from his role as CEO because of disagreements regarding the future architecture of PayPal as a result of a proposition from Microsoft Windows. PayPal was acquired by eBay in October 2002 for US $1.5 billion in stock, of which US $165 million was paid to Musk, who before the sale, was the company's largest shareholder, having owned 11.7% of PayPal's shares
SpaceX
Musk conceptualized "Mars Oasis" in 2001, which was a project to land a miniature experimental greenhouse on Mars, containing food crops growing on Martian regolith, this was an attempt to regain public interest in space exploration.
Musk had traveled to Moscow in October 2001, with Jim Cantrell (an aerospace supplies fixer), and Adeo Ressi (his best friend from college), to buy refurbished ICBMs (Dnepr-1) that could send the envisioned payloads into space.
The group met with companies such as NPO Lavochkin and Kosmotras, however, according to Cantrell, Elon was seen as an amateur and was consequently laughed at by one of the Russian chief designers, and the group returned to the United States empty-handed.
In February 2002, the group returned to Russia to look for three ICBMs, bringing along Mike Griffin, who had worked for the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and was just leaving Orbital Sciences, a maker of satellites and spacecraft.
The group met again with Kosmotras, and were offered a single rocket for US $8 million, this was however seen by Musk as too expensive and he consequently stormed out of the meeting. While flying back from Moscow, he realized that he could start his own company that could build the needed affordable rockets.
According to an early Tesla and SpaceX investor Steve Jurvetson, Musk had calculated that the raw materials for building a rocket were actually only 3 percent of the sales price of a rocket back then.
By applying vertical integration and the modular approach from software engineering, SpaceX would be cutting the launch price by a factor of ten and still enjoy a 70 percent gross profit margin. Eventually, Musk ended up founding SpaceX with the long-term goal of creating a "true spacefaring civilization".
With the US $100 million of his initial fortune, Space Exploration Technologies were also founded, with SpaceX, in June 2002. Musk is chief executive officer (CEO) and chief technology officer (CTO) of the Hawthorne, California-based company.
SpaceX develops and manufactures space launch vehicles with a focus on advancing the state of rocket technology. The company's first two launch vehicles are the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets (a nod to the Star Wars' Millennium Falcon), and its first spacecraft is the Dragon (a nod to Puff the magic dragon).
In only seven years, SpaceX had designed the family of Falcon launch vehicles as well as the Dragon multipurpose spacecraft. SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket, had in 2009, launched the first privately funded liquid-fueled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit.
The SpaceX Dragon vehicle had berthed with the ISS on May 25, 2012, making history as the first commercial company to launch and berth a vehicle to the International Space Station.
