Elon Musk Is the founder of PayPal and CEO of Tesla Motors, Solar City and SpaceX. Due to its achievements, it has become a world icon and figure in which any young entrepreneur can be reflected.
Admired by many, a problem for many others. His creativity, passion for work and the desire to change the world are new airs in a society that advances technologically with overwhelming steps, but with a very marked delimitation.
His philosophy of life is based on improving the three crucial aspects, as he points out, that will help us in the future to grow as a society: the internet, renewable energy and space.
Here is an extensive biography of this peculiar visionary so you can know a little more about his interesting and complex life.
Children and youth of Elon Musk
Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Elon Reeve Musk was born in 1971 into a wealthy family with a father engineer and a mother-and-model nutritionist.
Musk acquired its first Commodore VIC-20 computer with only ten years. With it he learned to program in a self-taught way and sold only two years later a space-type game for $ 500.
By then, his hobbies were, in addition to computers, comics and role-playing - has already made public on several occasions his fondness for Dungeons and Dragons -.
Lover of theories and reflections of Nietzsche Y Schopenhauer , At the age of fifteen Musk suffered a vital crisis that led him to seriously rethink what he wanted in his life.
At age seventeen, he"escaped"not to serve in the South African army, of which he stated: "I have nothing against serving in the military itself, but serving in the South African army to repress black people did not seem like a good way to spend my time" .
Training and first years as a professional
His parents divorced and had to migrate with his mother to Canada in June of 1989. Musk wanted to go to the University, and at last fulfilled one of his biggest dreams: to reside in the United States. In 1992 he received a scholarship to study at the University of Pennsylvania to pursue a career and graduate in Business Administration. A year later he would do Physics.
One of his teachers was the director of Pinnacle Research, an electric vehicle company in Silicon Valley. Musk would work a whole summer for him and his company.
In 1995, Musk was a PhD candidate in Applied Physics and Materials Science at Stanford University. It only lasted two days.
The reason? Together with his brother Kimbal Musk and his friend Greg Curry, they would found a new company with Musk as the main head and executive director.
Consecration and companies
Zip2
Zip2 would focus on hosting and website development for media companies. In 1999 the success was latent, managing a total of 200 webs, something that took to him to sell it by 300 million dollars to AltaVista, subsidiary of Compaq Computer that same year.
PayPal
The next step would be X.com, a company that was dedicated to control financial services and payments through the network in simple steps. Its merger with Confinity - a company that allows the transfer of money between Palm Pilot devices - would give rise to the known Paypal Inc .
In just 5 weeks, Paypal had more than 100,000 customers, something that led to competition like Visa or Ebay taking legal action to close Paypal. This was not so and Ebay would buy Musk's new company for $ 1.5 billion by the end of 2002.
SpaceX
The next step for the young entrepreneur would be the conquest of space. His idea was to send a rocket to Mars so they could be built as reusable and where the cost of fuel was between 0.2% and 0.5% of the cost of the rocket.
In this way, the same year of leaving Paypal, Musk would create SpaceX , Where it would construct shuttles and a spaceship of low cost and high reliability.
The highlight of the company came in 2008 when it signed a $ 1.6 billion contract with NASA to make 12 flights with its own rockets and the Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station as cargo carriers.
A few weeks earlier, his rocket would miss its third launch. As it turns out, he managed to solve the problem to finally achieve success in his fourth release.
To this day, Musk is focusing all his work to achieve two objectives, not forgetting the construction and design of rockets and spacecraft:
The first is to be able to make trips manned by the space accessible to any type of person.
The second place send earthlings to Mars, something that seems to be the most ambitious of the objectives that has been proposed.
Tesla Motors
On a visit from Elon Musk to the company AC, he discovered that they were working on a prototype electric car that was capable of getting from 0 to 100 km in just four seconds. Musk, entranced by the product, proposed the possibility of contributing to a greater commercialization.
However, to Musk's disappointment, the company did not want to undertake and only set more exclusive and not so commercial possibilities.
Over time, AC changed his mind and proposed marketing to engineers and entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard And Marc Tarpenning, founding Tesla Motors.
Musk, warned by the change of strategy, decided to invest in 2003 an important amount of money, contributing to 98% of the financing and with it becoming CEO.
During the following years they patented Tesla Roadster , The first car to use lithium ions with an autonomy of 322 kilometers per load. His price was about $ 110,000.
With this prototype came to 2008, one of the worst years for Musk, where Tesla almost went bankrupt, something that forced him to fire a large number of employees.
The following models would be the Roadster Sport with a price of 128,000 dollars and the Tesla Model S , Of about 100,000 dollars. These went on sale in 2009 and 2012 respectively, and brought as improvements a shorter acceleration time along with an optimization of the battery life.
In this way, the year of departure of the Tesla Model S sold 2,100 electric sports cars for the price of 100,000 euros each. It was a two-seater.
In June of that same year they began to develop another new model. This time with five seats plus two child seats which currently produce 2000 units a year.
In September 2015 the sale of the Tesla Model X , An electric all-terrain that served as a bridge for a new generation of cars where the Tesla Model 3 , With a price that is around $ 35,000. With this, autonomous driving will be one of its priorities over the next ten years.
Likewise, Elon Musk presented in 2015, together with Tesla Motors Powerwall and Powerpack, two energy storage systems derived from the generation of renewable energy that are powered by lithium-ion batteries. Its function is to work in the style of solar and wind energy installations.
SolarCity
Co-founder with his cousin Lyndon Rive, Elon Musk chairs the board of directors of SolarCity To be the main investor of the company.
The function of the company is to create photovoltaic products and provide related services.
In 2011 it became the number one company in the United States to provide solar energy systems in order to be able to make the most of this little used energy.
Halcyon Molecular
In 2010, Musk invested $ 20.5 million in Halcyon Molecular, a biotechnology company that seeks to improve people's lives and improve average life expectancy.
Musk is on the board of directors along with the colleagues he founded in his day PayPal.
Present and future ideas
At the end of July 2016, Elon Musk published on the Tesla Motors blog an entry titled" Master plan, part two "(Link to English version), where he reflected on what has been, is and will be his companies until 2026.
On the one hand, he assumed that the first ten years have passed and that now we have to go for the next decade.
On the other hand, he talked about the automotive and solar future: he will look for the creation of trucks and vans for domestic use, always electric with a built-in sunroof, as well as an autonomous and efficient driving.
As for SpaceX, he said that colonizing Mars is the ultimate goal, and that sooner or later will get to the red planet.
Also, Elon Musk is working on Hyperloop , A project that aims to Create a new and novel public transport system. It consists of the route of some capsules, through tubes of air under pressure, in which passengers or merchandise could go.
The novelty and virtue would be that the capsules could travel 600 kilometers (journey between Los Angeles and San Francisco) in just 30 minutes. If this project is successful and successful, Musk says it would drastically improve the means of transport as we know it today.
Although that yes, everything is not rosy for the bargain magnate. During the first quarter of 2016 it lost 282.2 million dollars.
Currently the fortune of the well-known businessman is valued at 2,000 million dollars and is said to work 100 hours a week.
Donations and recognition
Musk currently chairs the Musk Foundation, where he focuses his activity on education, children's health and the creation of clean energy.
In 2010 it would create a program to donate solar energy systems to people who need it most. That same year also donated $ 10 million to the Future of Life Institute, a program that focuses on maintaining Artificial Intelligence"beneficial"for the human race.
In addition, without going any further, his philanthropy remains latent as he seeks the colonization of the planet Mars. It wants to guarantee the future of humanity.
Now, among his acknowledgments, we should point out the most important, because it is impossible to put all:
He was included in Forbes magazine among the 20 most powerful CEOs in the United States. Esquire named him among the 75 most influential people of the 21st century and has received the Index Design Award, Aviation Week and many more awards.
He also received an Honorary Doctorate in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Surrey (UK) and the Art Center School of Design.
Anecdotes and curiosities
With only 6 years traveled on foot 15 kilometers to go to the birthday party of his cousin. He lived on the other side of the city and his mother did not want to take him, since he had been punished. It took four hours to arrive and when he saw his mother climbed a tree and not down in hours.
Obsessed with changing the world, Musk thinks that holidays"are bad for health. If you want to change the world you can not take time off or go to see your newborn son.
During a vacation in South Africa in 2002, Elon Musk contracted malaria. This disease almost cost him his life. So maybe you think that holidays are not good for health.
In an interview revealed what are the ten essential rules of success for him:
1.Never surrender
2. That you really like what you do
3. Do not listen to small people
4. Take risks
5. Do something important
6. Look for people who solve problems
7. Find people who solve problems
8. Attracts the best
9. Make a great product
10. Work hard.
The year 2008 could be the worst in the life of the entrepreneur. On the one hand Tesla Motors almost goes bankrupt, while its new rocket and the Falcon 1 Missed his third pitch.
On the personal level Elon Musk has split up a couple of times.