37 Interesting Facts about Elon Musk, One of the Most Innovative Entrepreneurs of Our Time

Entrepreneur Elon Musk is a man with a vision. The founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors, SolarCity and SpaceX - all extraordinary companies in four completely different industries. Here is a look at the life of Elon Musk.

1. Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971. His father was an engineer and his mother a nutritionist from Canada.

2. Musk was also interested in computers and by the age of 12, he had written the code for his own video game, a space game called Blastar, which was the first product he ever sold.

3. He emigrated to Canada in June 1989 at age 17 to attend. He left Canada in 1992 after getting a scholarship to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania.

4. He earned an undergraduate degree in economics and stayed on another year to finish a second bachelor's degree in physics.

5. In 1995, Elon Musk headed to Stanford University in California to pursue a PhD in energy physics. However, he only attended the school for two days before dropping out to start his first company, Zip2 Corporation, which provided online content publishing software for news organizations.

6. In hindsight, it was an excellent decision since the company was later acquired in 1999 by Compaq's AltaVista division acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options.

7. Out of that amount. Elon Musk's share was $22 million. Musk had become a millionaire at 28.

8. As a new millionaire and with time on his hands, Elon chose not to retire early, but went back to brainstorming new solutions for problems he saw in the world. That same year, he started X.com with $10 million dollars from the sale of Zip2. X.com was a financial services and email payments company.

9. In 2000, during the dot com boom, X.com was acquired Confinity.

10. Musk met his first wife, Justine Musk who is a Canadian author while they were both students at Queen's University. They married in 2000.

11. In February 2001, X.com changed its legal name to PayPal. In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for US$1.5 billion in stock. Before its sale, Musk, the company's largest shareholder, owned 11.7 percent of PayPal's shares.

12. In 2002, Musk founded his third company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, with the goal of building spacecraft for commercial space travel. SpaceX develops and manufactures space launch vehicles with a focus on advancing the state of rocket technology.

13. His entry into the automobile industry came in the form of Tesla Motors. Despite popular belief, Musk was not a co-founder of the company. A while after the company had been set up, Tesla Motors began their Series A round. It's Model S sedan is among the safest cars on the road.
14. However, the New York Times ran a bad review of the Model S in February 2013, which Musk responded by producing data from the test drive and said the article was 'fake.'

15. With a stake in the company taken by Daimler and a strategic partnership with Toyota, Tesla Motors launched its initial public offering in June 2010, raising $226 million.

16. In 2013, it was the most searched automaker on Google.

17. Musk has attended the Burning Man festival in 2004 and says that he first thought up the idea for SolarCity during the festival.

18. In 2006, Elon Musk co-founded SolarCity, a photovoltaics products and services company with his cousin Lyndon River.

19. He was named Inc Magazine Entrepreneur of the Year award for 2007 for his work on Tesla and SpaceX.

20. SpaceX was awarded a $1.6 billion NASA contract on 23 December 2008, for 12 flights of its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station, replacing the Space Shuttle after it retired in 2011.

21. In 2010, SpaceX became the first commercial company to successfully recover a spacecraft from Earth orbit with its Dragon spacecraft. And in 2012, SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial vehicle to successfully attach to the International Space Station and return cargo to Earth.

22. Musk and his first wife, Justine Musk, divorced in 2008.

23. Their first child was a boy named Nevada Alexander. Unfortunately, he died of SIDS when he was 10 weeks old. Musk has five children, all boys: a set of twins and one of triplets. He shares custody with Justine Musk.
24. Elon Musk's second wife was gorgeous British actress Talulah Riley. The couple got married in 2010 and divorced two years later. On 18 January 2012, Musk tweeted to Riley, "It was an amazing four years. I will love you forever. You will make someone very happy one day."
    

25. Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man movies, describes in his article how Musk was the inspiration for Favreau's film depiction of genius billionaire Tony Stark.

26. The SpaceX factory was used as a filming location for Iron Man 2, and Musk has a cameo in the movie

27. The world governing body for aerospace records, Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, presented Musk in 2010 with the highest award in air & space, the FAI Gold Space Medal, for designing the first privately developed rocket to reach orbit. Neil Armstrong has also won this prestigious award.

28. His mother, Maye Musk, a model and nutritionist, was 63-years-old when she was featured nude on the cover of New York Magazine in 2011. She appeared nude and photoshopped to make her appear nine months pregnant a la Demi Moore's Vanity Fair cover.

29. In February 2011, Forbes listed Musk as one of "America's 20 Most Powerful CEOs 40 And Under".

30. Elon was named as one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century by Esquire magazine.

31. Musk has described himself as a workaholic. With his passion for his work, Elon says he is able to work up to 100 hours per week running Tesla Motors and SpaceX if needed.
32. In 2013, Musk revealed the Hyperloop, his idea for a transportation system that could send people from San Francisco to Los Angeles in half an hour, using pressurized tubes. Then he said he'd build a prototype himself if no one else does.
    

33. According to Forbes, his net worth is $6.7 billion as of September 2013.

34. As CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk splits his time between the Tesla office in Palo Alto and the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

35. He has his own 12-seat Dassault 900 private jet.

36. In November 2013, Motor Trend named the Model S its car of the year.He took the opportunity to mock former presidential contender Mitt Romney, who called Tesla a loser during the campaign. Romney "was right about the object of that statement," Musk said, "but not the subject."

37. Elon was among TIME's 100 most influential people in the world in 2013.