Elon Musk: How he came to develop rockets and electric cars

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve definitely heard of or seen a Tesla car, and more than likely you’ve heard of SpaceX launching a self-landing rocket into space. If you have heard of these, then you definitely have heard of Elon Musk, the brains behind it all, and so much more. Musk was born in South Africa and attended high school, then 5 months of university there. He moved to Canada to attend the Queen’s University in order to avoid mandatory South African military service, and because it would make it easier to obtain American citizenship. By 1992, Musk had left Canada to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. Initially, he planned to go into a PhD program at Stanford University in Physics, however, the Internet Boom had started to occur and Musk decided to form his company Zip2 with his brother in order to make the most of the opportunities presented to him.

Zip2 acted as an online city guide, and provided content for the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. Zip2 was acquired by Compaq for $307 million, of which Musk received $22 million for his stake in the company.

Musk went on to found X.com, acting as a financial services/payments company, which eventually lead to the creation of PayPal.

Musk earned his first billion when PayPal was bought out for $1.5 billion in stock.

From here on, we know Musk founded SpaceX, intending to build spacecraft in order to travel through space commercially. SpaceX made history when their spacecraft successfully launched into space.

Musk also formed Tesla, a car brand that is well known, in which one of the cars is able to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.7 seconds.

This is how Elon Musk came to be the inventor and mogul as we know him today.