Known as the man who determined the future, Elon Musk is an engineer, industrial designer, tech entrepreneur and philanthropist. Apart from his birthplace of South Africa, he is a Canadian and US citizen and currently lives in the USA, where he immigrated at the age of 20. Let’s take a closer look at the life of this genius man who fascinated millions.
Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, the capital of the Republic of South Africa.
Musk, who learned software languages with his own means, wrote a computer game when he was only 12 years old. He had his first commercial success by selling this game (Blastar) for $500.
In 1988, Elon was supposed to join the South African army. He was only 17 years old and chose to leave home instead of joining the army. His eye was on America; he described it as “It is the place where great things are possible”. He always dreamed of space!
After completing his secondary education at Bryanston High School, he started and graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. He first moved to Canada for university education and studied at Queen’s University for two years in 1992. After his education there, he left Canada and moved to the United States to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania.
There were times during his school life when he was bullied by his classmates, and it was never out of the ordinary. These were serious blows. So much so that Ellon had surgery on his deformed septum at the age of 41.
In addition to a bachelor’s degree in Economics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, he also received a minor in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania, School of Arts and Sciences. Although he moved to the Silicon Valley region to do his PhD, he abandoned his PhD.
Musk, who wanted to focus on clean air, Internet and Space issues, left his master’s degree in 95 and wanted to start the Zip2 project, an online content publishing software for new organizations, with his brother.
In 1999, Compaq’s AltaVista unit purchased Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock.
That same year, Musk founded X.com, the online payment systems and financial infrastructure. The following year, he acquired Confinity, an auction system of the same size as X.com, and created PayPal.
In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock.
Elon Musk first married Justine in 2000, but their marriage lasted 8 years.
Then he married with Talullah Riley in 2010, ended this marriage in 2016.
The names of Elon’s 6 children from these two marriages; Nevada Alexander, Xavier, Saxon, Griffin, Damian and Kai.
Elon Musk founded SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies’) in June 2002.
SpaceX is a company that manufactures launch vehicles for rocket technology focused on advancing the state of rocket technology. This company’s first launch vehicles, Falcon 1 and Falcon 9; The name of the first spacecraft is Dragon.
Elon Musk believes that space exploration is necessary. SpaceX made history as the first commercial company to send and dock a vehicle to the International Space Station.
Tesla Motors, which started its activities in San Carlos in 2003 with a small team of engineers named Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, included Elon Musk in the project in 2004.
The company, which expanded its staff with engineers from the informatics, electronics and automotive sectors in the future, opened the company shares to the public in 2014, enabling the development of electric motors. Tesla Roadster, the first car produced by the company, sold approximately 2500 units in 31 countries.
SolarCity, of which Elon Musk is the largest shareholder, is America’s largest solar system provider.
The director of the Iron Man movie, Jon Favreau, explained in an interview that they were inspired by Elon Musk in the formation of the character of Tony Stark, the protagonist of the movie. Later, in the second movie of the Iron Man series, the SpaceX factory was used as the location in the movie.
“After all, you can turn Mars into an Earth-like planet. You can increase its temperature,” said Elon Musk, and launched the Falcon Heavy missile, which is the production of SpaceX company, into space in the name of Mars exploration.
