From South Africa to Mars

07.03.2022

Born in 1971 in South Africa of a model and dietitian, Maye Musk, and an electromechanical engineer, Errol Musk, Elon Reeve Musk is the eldest of his parents’ three children, and a citizen of three countries: South Africa, Canada, and the US.

At about the time of his parents’ divorce, when he was 10, Musk developed an interest in computers. He taught himself how to program, and when he was 12 he sold his first software: a game he created called Blastar.

Musk moved to Silicon Valley in summer 1995. He registered in a PhD program in applied physics at Stanford University – but withdrew after only two days. His brother Kimball Musk, who is 15 months younger than Elon, had just graduated from Queen’s University with a business degree and come to join him in California.

The early Internet was heating up, and the brothers decided to launch a startup they called Zip2, an online business directory equipped with maps.

In 1999 Zip2 was bought by the computer manufacturer Compaq for $307 million, and Musk then founded an online financial services company, X.com, which later became PayPal, which specialized in transferring money online. The online auction eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

The companies he has founded, co-founded, and/or led since leaving PayPal – two of which, SpaceX and Tesla Motors, he risked his entire early fortune to build – are all focused on addressing three distinct existential risks to the long-term survival of humanity: Climate risk, single-planet dependency risk, and human species obsolescence risk.

On May 22, 2012, Musk and SpaceX made history when the company launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space with an unmanned capsule. The vehicle was sent to the International Space Station with 1,000 pounds of supplies for the astronauts stationed there, marking the first time a private company had sent a spacecraft to the International Space Station.

SpaceX is one step closer to replacing its Falcon line of active duty spacecraft: Its Starship prototype “SN8” achieved a major milestone in the ongoing spacecraft’s development program, flying to a height of around 40,000 feet at SpaceX’s development facility in southern Texas.