Happy Birthday
Elon Musk

JUN 28, 2022

Elon Musk, founder, CEO and Chief Engineer at SpaceX, CEO of Tesla, Founder of The Boring Company and X.com – second company he founded after the success of Zip2, a company that developed an Internet city guide for the newspaper publishing industry, with maps, directions, and yellow pages. After Zip2’s acquisition Musk received $22 Million as per his 7 percent share in the company. He then went on to start X.com which was the first federally insured online bank.

“Elon Musk is the richest person in the world with a net worth of $224 Billion, as of June 2022”

At the time, Confinity was the major competitor of X.com and their product was PayPal, which was more popular and so to avoid competition both of these companies merged in the year 2000 with X.com shutting down all its operations of other financial services they provided and focused entirely on the development and promotion of PayPal. In 2002, PayPal was acquired by Ebay for a staggering $1.5 Billion in stock and Elon Musk was the largest shareholder with 11.72% of shares—received $175.8 million.

In 2001, Musk got particularly intrigued by a nonprofit organization, Mars Society which had plans to place a growth-chamber for plants on Mars. He then took it upon himself to fund the project but was faced with rejection from many organizations and countries while attempting to buy Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) that could send greenhouse payloads into space. The major reason behind him facing rejection was the fact that many considered him a novice.

“On December 9 2010, SpaceX became the first private company to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft.”

But that didn’t stop him and he founded SpaceX in May 2002 with the intention to build affordable rockets that could be launched into space. What led was a series of hard earned achievements and milestones that made the company what it is today. Initially, during 2006 SpaceX’s rockets suffered a failed attempt but it was still awarded the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program contract from NASA later that year and this decision proved to be of good because SpaceX succeeded in launching the Falcon 1 into orbit in 2008, making it the first private liquid-fuel rocket to do so.

In the same year Musk became the CEO and Product Architect of Tesla although he invested in it since 2004 and was the major shareholder of the company. But due to the 2008 financial crisis he became the face of the company after its CEO Martin Eberhard was ousted from the firm. Tesla built an electric sports car, Roadster in 2008. It was the first serial production all-electric car to use lithium-ion battery cells. Tesla’s Model 3 is the all-time best-selling plug-in electric car worldwide, and, in June 2021, became the first electric car to sell 1 million units globally. Tesla has come a long way since then and became the most valuable carmaker in summer 2020.

From X.com, PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla Elon Musk has had an amazing journey from which we all can learn and get inspired. From not being able to afford an apartment and sharing a computer with his brother to becoming the richest man in the world is as inspiring as the man himself.