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Elon Musk was born in South Africa in 1971 and moved to Canada upon completing high school. He had $2,000 when he arrived.
He studied economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania and after graduating founded a company called Zip2 with his brother and a friend. Their hard work paid off and they sold the company, earning Musk $22 million.
That funded his next startup (which became PayPal) that eBay bought for $1.5 billion in 2002. Musk was fantastically rich at the age of 31, but was was less interested in the fortune and “….more interested in trying to build and create a new company.”
These new companies of Musk’s early imagination have lived up to fundamentally reshape the physical world through thrusters, rocket engines, solar energy and electric power. Musk took over Tesla, started SpaceX; bought Solar City, and created the Boring Company to dig a network of high-speed transportation tunnels.
We would argue that we’re fortunate to have a scientific genius focused on our best interests as humankind and smart enough to leverage the financial markets to fund a better future.
