Elon Musk: Facts, The incredible journey, How he Became the richest man, His companies and facts.

The Incredible journey of Elon Musk.

Elon Musk is working to revolutionize transportation both on Earth, through electric car maker Tesla and in space, via rocket producer SpaceX.

He owns 21% of Tesla but has pledged more than half his stake as collateral for loans.

He stepped down as chairman in 2018, after making alleged "false statements" about a plan to take Tesla private, triggering an SEC probe.

SpaceX, Musk's rocket company, is now valued at $46 billion.

He grew up in South Africa, then immigrated to Canada at age 17. 

He landed in the U.S. as a transfer student to the University of Pennsylvania.

Some facts and Background of Elun musk

#1. Elon Musk was born on June 28th, 1972 in South Africa.

#2. At the age of 10 musk developed interest in Computers.

#3. Musk created a game called Blastar and at the age of 12 he sold it to a magazine for $500.

#4. He studied physics and Economics at the university of Pennsylvania, USA.

#5. With $28,000 of his father’s Money, Musk and His brother Kimbal started Zip2. Which is a Web Startup that provided city travel guides to newspapers.

#6. Later in 1999, they sold Zip2 to Compaq Computers for $307 million, Earning musk $22 million.

#7. He Invested more then half of his earnings to confound x.com, an online banking service.

#8. The company Quickly merged with it’s rival and became PayPal with Musk as the majority shareholder.

#9. In 2001, Musk conceptualized a project to land a miniature experimental greenhouse on Mars.

#10. In 2002, eBay bought PayPal and musk walked away with $180 million.

#11. Musk travelled to Russia to buy refurbished intercontinental Ballistic Missiles also know as ICBMs to send colony of mice to Mars.

Russians offered to sell one rocket at $8 million USD. Musk felt it was artificially Overpriced. they even taunted Elon Musk.

They said, “Oh, Little boy, You don’t Have the Money?”. Musk replied “ I think we can build a rocket ourselves.” and then stormed out of the meeting.

On the flight back from Moscow, Musk realized that He could start a company. that could build the affordable rockets he needed.

Musk calculated that the raw materials for building a rocket actually were only 3 percent of the sales price of a rocket at the time.

#12. SpaceX could cut launch Price by a factor of ten and still enjoy a 70 percent gross margin.

#13. With $100 million USD, Musk founded SpaceX, in May 2002 with the intention of building spacecraft for commercial space travel.

#14. In 2006 The first SpaceX Rocket failed in Just 33 seconds after lift-off.

#15. In 2007 and in 2008 the 2nd and 3rd chance to establish company’s credibility also ended in failure. The 3rd failure almost Killed the company. Musk had money that could only fund the 4th launch.

#16. on 28th sep, 2008. the 4th Falcon 1 launched and achieved earth orbit. History was made. Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to orbit the earth.

#17. In March 2017. spaceX relaunched the used rocket and brought it back by landing it in the ocean. it was a perfect landing.

Musk Believes a fully and rapidly reusable rocket is need to reduce the cost of space travel. And in time musk wants to build a city on the red planet.

How elon musk became a billionaire ?

Elon Musk was a self-made billionaire. Forbes Magazine has ranked him as the 31st richest person on this earth. He was introduced to computers at the age of 10, and he quickly learns how to program when he was 12 years old, he also sold a game called Blastar to Spectravideo for 500$.

He became a millionaire in 1999 when he was 27 years old when he sold his web Software company sold zip2 for around $340 million. He got 22$ for this deal with a 7% share of the company. He reached the billionaire status when he was 40 years old in 2012. 

He made his first fortune by becoming the Co-founder of Paypal, which was an American E-commerce company an online payments system that was later sold to eBay for over 1.5$ billion in the year 2002. At his first startup, he barely left his office, he used to sleep on a bean bag working 7 days a week.

He believes in working 100 hours per week. For this, he gave a reason that if people are working for 40 hours a week and you are working for 100 hours, then you will learn something in four months what others would learn in a year. 

After four years, he sold his business for 22$million. Musk owns residential property worth more than 70$million in Los Angeles.

If we take a look at how this man became a billionaire in such a short span of time, then have a look at his successful journey. 

In 1995, Elon and his brother and his business Mentor Co-founded a company called Zip2, a company that provided and licensed city guide software for Newspapers. This company was founded with the help of Angel Investors.

Then in 1999, Compaq Computer Corporation acquired Zip2 for around $300million dollars. In November 1999, Elon Musk founded X.com, one of the first FDIC insured online banks in the entire world. 

In the year March 2000, X.com and one of its biggest competitors Confinity merged together. Confinity later became the popular money transferring online payments system known as Paypal.

In the month of October 2002, Ebay acquired Paypal for 1.5$dollars and Elon Musk netted $180 million. 

In the month of May 2012, Elon Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies, which was a privately held aerospace manufacturing company.

The goal of SpaceX is to reduce the expensive cost of space travel and to further the mission of enabling humans to eventually live on planet Mars.