Elon Musk has launched many multibillion-dollar firms, such as PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX, over the past two decades. However, his success as a serial entrepreneur follows an eventful childhood in which a young Musk played with homemade rockets, programmed his video games and experienced both school and home hardships.
Here are 15 amazing facts about Elon Musk.
1. At the young age of 12, Elon Musk developed a video game. Similar to the famous game Space Invaders, it was a simple computer game called ‘Blastar.’ For $500, he sold the rights to the game. It can still be found online today.
Image Source: shridhay.medium2. Musk was Tony Stark’s, i.e. Ironman inspiration. In the role of Ironman, Tony Stark is at least a little bit based on Musk. To get inspiration for the position, the actor who plays him, Robert Downey Jr., reportedly wanted to sit down with Musk. In SpaceX, parts of Iron Man 2 were also filmed, and Musk made a cameo appearance in the film.
Image Source: sackoftroy3. In order to start graduate school in physics at Stanford University, Musk moved to California after graduating. After just two days, he quit Stanford, choosing instead to take advantage of the Internet boom, which had been in full swing.
Image Source: fortune4. In 2015, Musk made a guest appearance on the famous The Simpsons show. In the episode, entitled “The Musk Who Fell to Earth,” the charismatic CEO starred in which he (voiced by Elon Musk) comes in a spaceship to Springfield and gets Homer Simpson’s inspiration. The same year, Musk also appeared in an episode of the famous sitcom The Big Bang Theory. In the show, he played himself.
Image Source: geekwire5. Musk was born to Errol and Maye Musk in Pretoria, South Africa, where he lived till the age of 17 and then moved to Canada. He holds citizenship from South Africa, Canada, and the U.S. He has been living in Los Angeles, California, since 2020.
Image Source: cnbc6. Musk, his brother Kimbal and their cousins travelled around the affluent parts of the South African capital while growing up in Pretoria, selling homemade chocolate Easter eggs. Door-to-door, the daring party moved, selling the sweets for 20 times the cost of producing them.
Image Source: dailymail7. While Musk is Tesla Motors’ CEO, he is actually not the company’s founder. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning formed the company in July 2003 (although the company now considers Elon, JB Straubel, and Ian Wright as Co-founders).
Image Source: finboldMusk did not join the board of directors of Tesla until one year later when he led the financing round of Series A in 2004. Elon then became the controlling investor in Tesla as he offered a significant share of the $7.5 million round from personal funds.
8. It might be challenging to believe, but Elon Musk, a young man, was the target of extreme bullying. Musk claimed that, as a young child growing up in South Africa, he was bullied during his childhood. He was also hospitalized once after he was pushed down a flight of stairs by a group of mean lads.
Image Source: aifs.gov.au9. According to Vance’s novel, Musk had the idea of opening an arcade near his high school. He and his brother joined up. At the city planning department, they got as far as signing a lease, setting contracts together and filling out paperwork. But when the city told them they were too young, their plans were foiled.
Image Source: techinasia10. The Musk Foundation, a group, dedicated to space exploration and the discovery of renewable energy sources, was founded by Elon Musk. The Foundation runs the Musk Mars Desert Observatory telescope in Utah. The Musk Foundation also operates a virtual Mars ecosystem that allows tourists to experience what life might be like on Mars (complete with waste-burning toilets).
Image Source: theguardian11. The billionaire CEO says he is influenced by the famous rapper, Kanye West. In 2018, Musk was asked, “Everyone in this room is inspired by you, who are you inspired by?” during a Q&A session at South by Southwest. “Well, obviously, Kanye West,” he said. For years, Musk has been openly praising Kanye West. In 2015, in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people, he wrote a short bio about Kanye.
Image Source: theverge12. As a child, Musk was so contemplative that his parents and physicians ordered tests to check if he was deaf. Eventually, his mother, Maye Musk, discovered that this was his way of daydreaming about his inventions.
Image Source: upriserHe gets into his head, and then you see that he’s in a different world. He’s doing it now. “I’m just leaving him now because I know he’s designing a new rocket or something,” Maye Musk recalled in Vance’s novel.
While this annoyed his friends, who could allegedly scream at him and do jumping jacks beside him and he would not care, Musk’s reflective moments allowed him to imagine projects that he would hope to tackle.
13. Elon dropped out of a PhD at Stanford University after attending it for only two days, to profit in on the internet boom of the 90s. This was followed by the establishment of his first Zip2 company, a provider of online newspaper maps and business directories, which he sold for $307 million in 1999 and became a millionaire at the age of 28.
Image Source: universitywebinars14. Frustrated with highway traffic, Musk conceptualized a technology called Hyperloop and patented it. Essentially, Hyperloop is a pod-like vehicle going through a tunnel. The Hyperloop would reportedly carry passengers at a whopping 1,200 km/h speed. Although it has not been developed, Musk has developed an open-source framework to enable others to build the design.
Image Source: intelligenttransport15. Musk was married three times, to the same woman twice. Musk married the actress Talulah Riley in 2010. In 2012, the two divorced, married again in 2013, and then divorced also in 2016.
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