At age 12, he sold the code for a game he had created, Blastar, for $500.
At age 44, Elon Musk now has a guiding hand in four major companies, is breaking barriers both on and off-world, and is worth over $12.4 billion.
BRUTAL BEGINNINGS
Revered as “Silicon Valley’s most driven entrepreneur since Steve Jobs” (Financial Times), Elon Musk suffered through a childhood familiar to anyone whose been branded as ‘too smart for their own good’.
When his parents divorced, Musk spent most of his time with his father, a South African electromechanical engineer. His young life saw him moving around South Africa during a time when the country was gripped by fierce protesting against the apartheid regime.
While the country was in crisis, so too was Musk’s schooling life. His small stature and natural inclination towards the sciences saw him become an easy target for bullies. Their brutality knew no bounds.
During one encounter, Musk was viciously beaten and thrown down a flight of stairs. He was in hospital for two weeks. When his father went to visit him, he couldn’t even recognise his own son.
The school refused to take action, and so Musk valiantly struggled through his bullying, aware that something better was on the horizon. At the age of 17, facing possible conscription into the South African Defence Force, Musk boarded a flight for his mother’s homeland: Canada.
While South Africa embraces Musk as one of their own, it is clear that he couldn’t wait to leave.
As Esquire notes: “(Musk) grew up in South Africa without ever really considering himself South African. Like the rest of his family, he was just passing through.”
When his alma mater, Pretoria High, contacted Musk for a donation towards their new stadium, he sent 1 million rand on the proviso that they never contact him again.
NEW FRONTIERS
After completing degrees at Penn’s College of Arts and Sciences, and the prestigious Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Musk founded his legacy on a string of successful businesses.
Along with his brother Kimbal, he started Zip2 in 1995 with $28,000. When the company was acquired by Compaq four years later, Musk received $22 million.
Only one month later he founded X.com, an online financial service. After a year, he merged with Confinity. The result? PayPal, which was sold to eBay in October of 2002 for $1.5 billion. $165 million of this went to Musk as the company’s largest shareholder.
Says Musk of his early success: “We could either watch it happen, or be a part of it.”
STANDING STRONG
Musk’s time as CEO of PayPal revealed the crippling bullying he had faced in his youth had made him no less headstrong.
During this period, he proposed transferring PayPal from its Unix platform onto Microsoft. To the anti-establishment team that had remained from the Confinity merger, this was nothing short of sacrilege. While Musk was on a rare vacation, he was removed from his position.
It’s not the only story that depicts Musk as a relentless pursuer of his vision. Former employees paint him as an arrogant know-it-all; an insecure destroyer of everything, and everyone, that stood in his way.
Scandalously, at the end of 2015, he referred to Apple as the ‘graveyard’ for those who weren’t good enough to make it at Tesla. While certainly meant as an affront to one of his biggest rivals, Musk’s statement is more than that. It is a reminder that Musk’s companies are very much an extension of Musk himself. Those that can’t align with his vision are nothing more as broken cogs in his grand plans, and are subsequently replaced.
This perseverance, this idealism in the face of what so many would consider insurmountable odds, is what has made Musk a household name in his post-PayPal years.
DEFINING THE FUTURE
In 2012, Musk was the CEO of Tesla Motors, a company focused on the creation of ‘sustainable transportation’: electrically-powered cars.
Leading up to the launch of their first vehicle, the Model S, it seemed the whole world was against him. The auto industry smelled blood, and so did Wall Street. Even Musk, in hindsight, gave the project only a 10% chance of succeeding.
The car was met with unprecedented acclaim from the press, and Tesla’s stock soared. It was the first clue to the general public that Elon Musk was a man set on defining the future.
As it was, the same time he was redefining ground transport, Musk was turning his head to the stars.
SpaceX, established in 2001, was the result of Musk’s vision of human colonisation on Mars by the year 2040. By 2016, it had become the world’s first successful commercial space program.
Musk hopes to have 1 million people living on Mars as part of his broader goal for SpaceX. He fears that by the next time humanity is threatened by mass-extinction, we will have done nothing to ensure the survival of our kind.
“I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness, to make sure it continues into the future”, he said in an interview with Aeon.
Meanwhile, Musk is chairman for the leading solar power company in the U.S., Solar City, is co-chairman of AI research company OpenAI, and in 2016 is constructing what is predicted to be the fastest public transport system in the world: Hyperloop.
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When you consider Musk’s achievements thus-far, it seems there is no stopping him. However, things has not always been so easy.
In 2008, he was broke. He’d blown through over $200 million, as well as three SpaceX rockets that had exploded before reaching orbit. He was newly divorced, and leaving off loans from friends.
His diet was composed primarily of coffee and Diet Coke, to the point where he started losing his peripheral vision and would get so fixated on his work, that people would have to shout his name to get his attention.
Today, Elon Musk is worth $12.4 billion, making him the 39th richest person in the world. It seems like nothing can slow this visionary down as he works to sculpt the future of humanity in his hands.
Follow Elon Musk on Twitter.
You can also play a web-version of his 1984 game, Blastar, here.
Musk calls it “…a trivial game…but better than Flappy Bird”.