Elon Musk's Legacy of Innovative Projects

Elon Reeve Musk is a Canadian-American business magnate, engineer, inventor and investor. He is the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors, and chairman of SolarCity. He was born in South Africa on June 28, 1971

He is well-known as the founder of SpaceX and a co-founder of Zip2, PayPal, and Tesla Motors. He has also envisioned a conceptual high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop and has proposed a VTOL supersonic jet aircraft with electric fan propulsion.

Musk was born in Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa, the son of Maye, a model from Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada; and Errol Musk, a South African-born electromechanical engineer. His paternal grandmother was British, and he also has Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk lived mostly with his father in locations in South Africa.

At age 10, he discovered computing with the Commodore VIC-20. He taught himself computer programming and at age 12 sold the code for a BASIC-based video game he created called Blastar to a magazine called PC and Office Technology for approximately $500. A web version of the game is available online.

Musk was severely bullied throughout his childhood, and was once hospitalized when a group of boys threw him down a flight of stairs, and then beat him until he blacked out.

Musk was initially educated in private education, attending the English-speaking Waterkloof House Preparatory School. Musk later graduated from Pretoria Boys High School and moved to Canada in June 1989, just before his 18th birthday, after obtaining Canadian citizenship through his Canadian-born mother.

ZIP2
In 1995, Musk and his brother, Kimbal, started Zip2, a web software company, with $28,000 of their father's money. The company developed and marketed an Internet "city guide" for the newspaper publishing industry. Musk obtained contracts with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and persuaded the board of directors to abandon plans for a merger with a company called CitySearch. Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options in 1999

PayPal
In March 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company, with $10 million from the sale of Zip2. One year later, the company merged with Confinity which had a money transfer service called PayPal. PayPal's early growth was driven mainly by a viral marketing campaign where new customers were recruited when they received money through the service. In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, of which $165 million was given to Musk

SpaceX

In 2001, Musk conceptualised "Mars Oasis"; a project to land a miniature experimental greenhouse on Mars, containing food crops growing on Martian regolith, in an attempt to regain public interest in space exploration. In October 2001, Musk travelled to Moscow with Jim Cantrell (an aerospace supplies fixer), and Adeo Ressi to buy refurbished ICBMs (Dnepr-1) that could send the envisioned payloads into space. The group met with companies such as NPO Lavochkin and Kosmotras, however "Musk was seen as a novice", was consequently "spat on by one of the Russian chief designers", and the group returned to the US empty-handed. In February 2002, the group returned to Russia to look for three ICBMs, bringing along Mike Griffin, who had worked for the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and was just leaving Orbital Sciences, a maker of satellites and spacecraft. According to early Tesla and SpaceX investor Steve Jurvetson, Musk calculated that the raw materials for building a rocket actually were only 3 percent of the sales price of a rocket at the time. By applying vertical integration and the modular approach from software engineering, SpaceX could cut launch price by a factor of ten and still enjoy a 70 percent gross margin.

With $100 million of his early fortune, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, in June 2002. Musk is chief executive officer (CEO) and chief technology officer (CTO) of the Hawthorne, California-based company. In 2006, SpaceX was awarded a contract from NASA to continue the development and test of the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft in order to transport cargo to the International Space Station,[58][not in citation given] followed by a $1.6 billion NASA launch contract on December 23, 2008 for 12 flights of its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft to the Space Station, replacing the US Space Shuttle after it retired in 2011. 

Tesla Motors
Tesla Motors was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who financed the company until the Series A round of funding. Both men played active roles in the company's early development prior to Elon Musk's involvement. Musk led the Series A round of investment in February 2004, joining Tesla's board of directors as its chairman. Musk took an active role within the company and oversaw Roadster product design at a detailed level, but was not deeply involved in day-to-day business operations.

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