Visionary
entrepreneur Elon Musk is the co-founder of PayPal (PYPL),
Tesla Motors (TSLA), and SolarCity (SCTY), and
is the founder of SpaceX. His astounding success has given rise to
comparisons of Musk and Steve Jobs, Howard
Hughes, Henry Ford, and Bill Gates. Amid an often difficult
childhood, Musk developed a relentless work ethic (he is known to work as many
as 80 to 100 hours per week) and a tenacious single-minded vision.
On September 7, 2018 Musk appeared to be smoking
marijuana while interviewing for a podcast. Coupled with the exit of
Tesla's head of human resources and chief accounting officer, that news saw the
stock drop in trade.This was just
another addition to the string of bad news for the company, including a
shareholder lawsuit against Musk and the company for his infamous tweet on
August 7. Musk had tweeted that
he is considering taking Tesla private. The company later decided against the
move.
We look at the early life and education of the man
behind a string of companies that have disrupted multiple industries.
KEY
TAKEAWAYS
- Elon Musk is the charismatic founder and CEO
of electric car maker Tesla as well as SpaceX and the Boring Company.
- Born and raised in South Africa, Musk spent
time in Canada before finally moving to the U.S.
- Educated at the University of Pennsylvania in
physics, Musk started getting his feet wet as a serial tech entrpreneur
with early successes like Zip2, X.com, and PayPal.
Family Background and Youth in South
Africa
Elon Reeve Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria,
one of South Africa's three capital cities. His father was an
engineer and his mother was a model and nutritionist. He is the oldest
of three children in an ambitious family. His brother Kimbal Musk is currently
a venture capitalist and environmentalist.
His sister Tosca Musk is an award-winning producer and director.
After his parents divorced when he was a child,
Musk lived mostly with his father. Musk started
school a year early, attending the private Waterkloof House Preparatory School
and later graduating from Pretoria Boys High School. He read
voraciously and was also an avid fan of comics. Self-described as
a bookworm and something of a smart aleck, he was bullied in school and
withdrew to his books at the expense of his social life.
At the age of 10, Musk was introduced to computers
with the Commodore VIC-20. He quickly learned how to program and at the age of
12 sold a game called Blastar to Spectravideo for $500.
In one telling incident at that time, Musk, along
with his brother, planned to open a video game arcade near their school.
Ultimately, their parents nixed the plan. But apparently the only thing
stopping them was the need for a city permit which had to be applied for by an
adult.
Bullied as a Child
Musk’s intellectual aptitude did him few favors as
a child. He found few friends in the tough-minded Afrikaner culture he
encountered in school.
"I had a terrible upbringing. I had a lot of
adversity growing up. One thing I worry about with my kids is they don't face
enough adversity," he would later say in an interview.
Musk attended the English-speaking Waterkloof House
Preparatory School, and later graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. The
years were lonely and brutal, from his descriptions.
“They got my best friend to lure me out of hiding
so they could beat me up. And that hurt,” Musk said. “For some reason they
decided that I was it, and they were going to go after me nonstop. That’s what
made growing up difficult. For a number of years there was no respite. You get
chased around by gangs at school who tried to beat the (expletive) out of me,
and then I’d come home, and it would just be awful there as well.”
If there was a point of bright escape for Musk; it
was technology. When he was only 10, he became acquainted with programming via
the Commodore VIC-20, an inexpensive home computer. Before long, he had become
proficient enough to create Blastar – a video game in the style of
Space-Invaders. He sold the BASIC code for the game to a magazine called PC and
Office Technology for $500.
Moving to Canada
At 17, Musk moved to Canada to avoid serving in the
South African military, whose main duty in the late 1980s was enforcing
apartheid. He would later obtain Canadian
citizenship through his mother.
After emigrating to Canada, Musk enrolled
in Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. It was there that he met
Justine Wilson, an aspiring writer. They would marry and have five sons
together, twins and triplets, before divorcing in 2008.
Musk's Education in the U.S.
After two years at Queen's University, Musk
transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. He took on two majors, but his
time there wasn’t all work and no play. With a fellow student, he bought a
10-bedroom fraternity house, which they used as an ad hoc nightclub.
Musk graduated with a Bachelor of Science in
Physics, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the Wharton School. The two majors
speak to the direction Musk’s career would take later, but it was physics that
made the deepest impression on his thinking.
“(Physics is) a good framework for thinking,” he’d
later say. “Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from
there.”
Musk was 24 years old when he moved to California to pursue a PhD in
applied physics at Stanford University. With the internet exploding and Silicon
Valley booming, Musk had entrepreneurial visions dancing in his head. He left
the PhD program after just two days.
In 1995, with $28,000 and his younger brother
Kimbal at his side, Musk started Zip2, a web software company that would help
newspapers develop online city guides. The company got
bought out, and Musk used his Zip2 buyout money to create X.com, which he
intended to shape into the future of banking. X was merged with a company
called Confinity and the resulting company came to be known as PayPal. Musk was then
ousted from the company before it was bought by eBay.
After PayPal slipped away, Musk helped generate
funding for an electric car startup called Tesla. You probably know the
rest.
The Bottom Line
His early interest in reading philosophy, science fiction, and fantasy novels is reflected in his sense of idealism and concern with human progress. He aims to work in the areas he has identified as crucial to our future, specifically the Internet, the transition to renewable energy sources, and space colonization. With his work with PayPal, Tesla Motors, SolarCity, and SpaceX, he has defied critics and made advances in all three of these frontiers.
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