elon musk is currently the second richest man on earth and he could well become the first trillionaire too when he first founded spacex people laughed at his outlandish ideas and despite receiving numerous loans he almost went broke more than once you don't want to miss this a long time advocate of mars exploration musk has publicly talked about wanting to build a greenhouse on mars and even establishing a mars colony but where did these visionary ideas come from elon reeve musk was born on june 28 1971 in pretoria south africa musk had always been a dreamer as a child he was often so lost in his daydreams that his parents and doctors ordered a test to check his hearing musk's mother mei is a canadian supermodel while his father errol is a wealthy engineer elon had a close relationship with his brother kimball and sister tosca but when he turned 10 a big change took place in his family his parents got a divorce around the time of the divorce musk developed an interest in computers the curious kid that he was he taught himself how to program and when he was 12 he sold his very first software a game he created called blastar musk described it as a trivial game but better than flappy bird and it earned him his first 500 in grade school musk was short shy and bookish and he was bullied for several years at age 17 he moved to canada to attend university and avoid mandatory military service in south africa he obtained his canadian citizenship but this was in part because he believed it would make it easier to later obtain american citizenship in 1992 he left canada to study business and physics at the university of pennsylvania and after finishing his degree he headed to stanford university in california to pursue a phd in energy physics his move was timed perfectly with the internet boom however and wanting to test his luck he dropped out of college after just two days while dropping out of stanford may have seemed like a bad idea to many musk saw it differently and he once famously tweeted don't confuse schooling with education i didn't go to harvard but the people that work for me did would this decision turn out to be a mistake today musk is best known in space circles for launching spacex a private aerospace design and manufacturing company but this wasn't his first business venture it was his third after zip2 corporation and paypal musk launched a zip 2 corporation in 1995 with his brother kimball a group of silicon valley investors helped to fund the company which provided online city guides to newspapers like the new york times and chicago tribune while zip2 got off the ground musk lived in the office and showered at a local ymca but the hard work paid off when compaq bought zip2 in 1999. the price a whopping 341 million dollars in cash and stock and through it musk earned a nice 22 million dollars always looking out for the next big thing elon and kimball used their newly made fortune to found x. com an online banking company and about a year later x.
com merged with another company to form paypal musk was named the ceo but it wouldn't last long and after starting a fight among the co-founders he was eventually fired from his position while on route to australia for a much needed vacation that's the problem with vacations he once said about his ill-fated trip despite no longer being paypal's ceo things still worked out for musk though ebay bought paypal in late 2002 and as paypal's single biggest shareholder he netted 165 million dollars of the 1. 5 billion price ebay paid now musk finally had enough money to make his wildest dreams come true start a private space company after paypal was sold to ebay musk made around 165 million dollars while that's certainly an awful lot of money when it comes to sending rockets in the space it becomes quite a small budget at the time there wasn't much public interest in the idea of going to mars but when musk began his project mars oasis the idea really ignited in the public imagination there was just one problem though the mars-bound rocket that musk needed cost 65 million dollars which was way over budget so what do you do when you want something but it's currently too expensive you simply make it yourself this idea is what led to the creation of spacex space exploration technologies corporation aka spacex was founded with the intention of building spacecraft for commercial space travel musk's goal was to make spaceflight cheaper by a factor of 10 but while his ideas sounded interesting there was a lot of skepticism that he would be successful after working on it for 18 months spacex unveiled its first spacecraft in 2006. they named it dragon reportedly named after the song puff the magic dragon [Music] which was musk's jab at critics who said his space flight aims were impossible with the spacecraft ready it was also time to finish up the first rocket falcon 1.
musk wanted it to be the first privately built rocket to make it into orbit but little did he know it would take several years before it would be successfully launched for the next couple of years the project seemed to be a bit of a failure despite gaining sponsorship from the us naval research laboratory and the u. s air force academy spacex was in the red having around 100 million dollars of debt to top this off in 2006 the falcon 1 launch failed with the rocket crashing into the ocean things were looking bad and after another failure to launch the falcon 1 spacex was up against the ropes if the rocket didn't successfully launch on the next attempt they would have to close down although musk put up a tough front at the time he has since described 2008 as the worst year of his life tesla kept losing money and spacex was having trouble launching its falcon 1 rocket all in all the company experienced a steep learning curve on the road to orbit but while it took four tries to get falcon 1 flying successfully why successfully it eventually did then right around christmas of 2008 musk got two more pieces of good news spacex had landed a 1. 6 billion dollar contract with nasa to deliver supplies into space and tesla finally found more outside investors while the funding showed that nasa believed in spacex's ability to transport cargo supplies into space there was still a lot of work to do to get into space with a heavy cargo load the dragon spacecraft would require much more rocket power than what falcon 1 could provide so spacex began developing a next generation rocket that was much bigger falcon 9.
while working on the falcon 9 spacex also made history in 2012 when it launched its dragon spaceship with an unmanned capsule the vehicle was sent to the international space station with supplies for the astronauts stationed there marking the first time a private company had sent a commercial ship cargo to the iss speaking about the launch musk said i feel very lucky for us it's like winning the super bowl around this time musk started leading the headlines his extraordinary career was getting noticed and people began pegging him as the real-life iron man robert downey jr's portrayal of tony stark in iron man movies is at least partially based on musk and musk himself even had a cameo in iron man 2.
