We love talking about incredible entrepreneurs who change the planet in their lifetime. Today is an honor for us to cover Elon Musk the South African born businessman, engineer, inventor, real-life iron man, and probably savior of the human race. He has done an incredible amount in his 49 years. He’s the 16th richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of 59.3 billion dollars that’s rapidly growing. And is the brains behind what are today some of the most exciting technology companies in the world. we have to place this out there’ll be completely biased today and that we don’t really care as we are very big fans of his. Thereupon said here are 15 facts you didn’t know about Elon Musk.
1. He started out young. Coded his first game when he was 12 and sold it for five hundred dollars basically making him a prodigy. The game was called blast star and he created it using Commodore VIC-20. The web version of the game is still available online so you can play it to this day. Much like Bill Gates, he started coding when he was very young. He’d been reading for five hours per day most of the days during his childhood and quickly assimilated knowledge. One of the most memorable things he cured his own fear of the dark by studying basic physics. He understood that darkness is the absence of photons in the visible wavelength and that it’s silly to be scared of the lack of photons. Because he was pretty small and into science, the school was terrible for him as he was bullied every day. So be careful whom you bully in school they might turn out to be a future billionaire.
2. When Musk was at college he fed himself for less than one dollar a day. He might have come from a reasonably fortunate background but he lived on almost nothing while he was studying. He said he used to prevent scurvy and illness by adding a dash of red pepper to his cheap ramen noodles. Something you guys might not know is that so as to form some money and buy college he and his ally turned their house into a nightclub. They rented a ten-bedroom house and threw massive parties during the weekend. Sometimes up to 5 hundred people would show up and they’d pay five dollars per person while his friend made sure the party was lit Musk remained sober to take care of control of the party.
3. Musk dropped out of his applied physics Ph.D. course after two days to pursue his entrepreneurial visions. After completing two degrees in both physics and economics he enrolled on a Ph.D. course at Stanford in 1995. When he was 24, after two days he got bored and started a business with his brother called zip2. He borrowed $28,000 from his father and founded a software company designed as a city guide for newspaper publishers that was before Google Maps in a day and age when Yellow Pages were still a thing. Not sure how many of you know what that is just a couple of years later he sold it for twenty-two million dollars.
4. He bought a McLaren f1 and didn’t insure it and then wrote it off he bought it in 1999 when he was 28 years old for $1,000,000 it’s probably quite difficult to get an insurance quote for a McLaren so he didn’t bother and then he crashed it he even made fun of himself at that age but his passion for cars was clear he also owns the Lotus a straight from the 1977 Bond film The Spy Who Loved me he bought the car at auction in 2013 for nearly 1 million dollars and intends to convert it into a submarine for real as a pet project he loved the film as a child and was quite disappointed to learn that it can’t actually transform into a submarine.
5. Robert Downey Jr. modeled his Tony Stark character on Musk. The eccentric genius billionaire playboy philanthropist Tony Stark in the Marvel films was flatteringly based on Elon. Downey jr. and the franchise’s director said Tony Stark’s character was just more or less a more flamboyant version of Elon Musk. Elon Musk got a cameo in Iron Man 2 as a thank you for letting Downey jr. pick his brain.
6. Musk was a co-founder and member of the PayPal mafia. After his zip2 success, it didn’t take long for Elon to pick his next target. The banking industry so he started X.COM. X.COM and PayPal went head to head for a couple of years until they decided to join forces. Unfortunately, though he was ousted from his CEO role in 2000 because of leadership disagreements. When they sold PayPal his cut was 165 million dollars. But what is the PayPal mafia? You’d think that cashing in on PayPal money would be enough but the people who created PayPal all went on to create other companies of humongous success. Three of them went on and created YouTube, one of them created LinkedIn which was recently acquired by Microsoft for twenty-six billion dollars, another created Yelp, another founded Kiva and a few others have become some of the most respected investors in Silicon Valley with very early investments in Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Uber and more. Along these guys was Elon who went ahead and is changing the world with Tesla and SpaceX.
7. He went through what we call it moksha moment where he was all in. Moksha or the monk moment is more or less when someone puts everything he owns on the table and success is that the only option for survival after the sale of PayPal with all of his savings he had 180 million dollars he put 100 million in space X 70 million in Tesla and 10 million in Solar City at that point he had to borrow money to pay rent.
8. Like Elizabeth Taylor, he married someone, divorced them, and then remarried them again. Musk married British actress Talulah Riley in 2008 and they announced their separation in 2012. It all seemed quite amicable and then they remarried in 2013 and filed for divorce again in 2014 their divorce was finalized in 2016 and hopefully, they won’t do it again it’s clearly not working. Elon is sacrificing his family life for his goals and ambitions and we will even compare him to a modern-day Ford or even to the original Tesla.
9. His basic Tesla salary is just $1 a year. Few people know that he wasn’t a founder at Tesla he discovered the company and bought himself in. After arguing with the CEO he fired him and installed himself. A couple of weeks ago a magazine ranks the foremost expensive electric cars within the world and Tesla has two of them in the top 10. You would possibly want to see it out but we’re most excited about finally getting our hands on the model three deliveries can start in time for us.
10. Musk has said that he wants to die on Mars, not Earth. Musk’s SpaceX is planning an ambitious mission to Mars with a view to making our lives interplanetary. He is spearheading a movement to colonize the planet Mars. His main goal is to drop the cost of interplanetary travel too close to $100,000. The current price is around 10 billion dollars. So there’s a long way to go but he’s serious about it he wants to put people on Mars in six years from now before that he’ll be sending several rockets filled with resources in order to get the colonization process started. Mars has already proven to be our best option and Elon even came up with a few theories on how to terraform Mars. One would be to nuke the North and South Pole of Mars in order to heat up the planet and begin creating an environment. His personal goal is to send 1 million people to Mars so as to form sure our species gets a far better shot at survival.
11. Musk thinks that AI is the most serious threat to the survival of the human race and believes the world is coming after AI in the wrong way. It’s easy to assume that a tech entrepreneur would be head over heels crazy with the thought of AI but musk is seemingly not one among them. Confusingly however he’s invested in various AI firms and even founded a non-profit AI research company. He believes that creating a neural network which basically means we all connect our brains to the Internet is the way to go. That way we can democratize the artificial intelligence and if we’re all a part of it they cannot kill us he’s compared traditional AI to summoning a demon.
12. He’s building the second largest building in the world from a footprint point of view it’s called the Giga factory. Because he’s serious about shifting the world from fossil fuels to sustainable energy he’ll be needing tons of batteries quite the remainder of the planet combined could produce. So he built his own factory this place is very large when completed and running at full capacity it will be able to create more batteries in one year than the entire world ever created. To put things into perspective if there were 99 more Giga factories the whole planet would be completely sustainable from an energy standpoint.
13. You can go completely off-grid from an energy point of view because of him. A few months ago he unveiled a new type of solar panel. These look like traditional roof tiles but have the capacity to capture sunlight. Add that to the tesla power wall an advanced battery that could power an entire house and a Tesla car and you don’t need to be on the grid anymore. The best thing is that the price of buying the model 3 is cheaper than buying a petrol car and paying for petrol for one year. The worth of the magical rooftop that captures solar power is going to be less than that of a traditional roof. That’s insane! oh! you would like more if you buy a Tesla car you will get free energy for life from his supercharging stations that he’s building all over the world.
14. He’s had three official nationalities. Musk was born in South Africa but left for Canada when he was 19 and became a citizen he then became an American citizen in 2002 and has described himself as passionately patriotic about his adopted country.
15. He’s donated money to both Republican and Democrat presidential candidates. Musk has described himself as between Republican and Democrat so he’s fittingly donated to both parties. There are some noticeable discrepancies in terms of amount though he contributed $100,000 to Obama’s re-election campaign and just $2000 to George W Bush’s. In a recent statement, he said Tesla’s future is not threatened by the Trump presidency despite Trump saying he does not believe in climate change. In an interesting turn of events, Peter Thiel member of PayPal mafia and a friend of Elon’s is currently in Trump’s cabinet helping Trump with the transition.
