Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal made their entrepreneurial debut in 1995 with an online city guide called Zip2, which was acquired by Compaq in 1999 for $307 million with $34 million in stock options. Elon took $10 million out of the $22 million he got for his 7 per cent stake in Zip2, and founded X.com, which specialised in online payments and financial services. X.com subsequently merged with Confinity and was renamed PayPal, for which Musk received $165 million when eBay acquired it in 2002.
A young Elon Musk at the start of a career unlike any other
From here, Elon Musk began to pioneer with eye-catching projects ranging from electric vehicles to rocket manufacturing for outer space exploration. After visiting Russian rocket engineers and being shocked by the price of space travel, Musk devised revolutionary approaches to rocket manufacturing with the ultimate goal of cutting the costs of space travel by a factor of 10, in order to make humanity a true space-faring civilisation.
In addition to this, Musk got involved with a motor company named Tesla in 2003. Assuming leadership of the company along with the role of product architect in 2008, he oversaw the creation of iconic Tesla models such as the Tesla Roadster, the Model X and the Model S whilst also selling electric powertrain systems to Daimler and Toyota for some of their leading models. Perhaps most surprising of all is Musk’s annual salary: one dollar, as many other CEOs before him such as Steve Jobs have received, with the remainder consisting of performance and stock-related bonuses.
Elon Musk’s projects range from underground drilling to outer space
With subsequent projects such as SolarCity, Hyperloop, OpenAi, Neuralink and the Boring Company pushing the boundaries of human progress under Musk’s direction, South Africans continue to both be proud of and to look up to Elon Musk as a shining example of what can be achieved through unrestrained willpower and the ability to imagine a better humanity.