Man who wants to change the world started small
High ambition and modest roots set Tesla chief on road
ABU DHABI // Elon Musk simply wants to change the world and humanity.
Through the companies he has founded and leads, the business magnate aims to revolutionise transportation on the ground and in space, reduce global warming by producing and consuming energy in a sustainable manner, and avoid human extinction by colonising Mars.
It is little wonder that Robert Downey Jr based the Iron Man movie character, Tony Stark, on the 45- year- old billionaire engineer after the actor was impressed during a tour of Mr Musk’s SpaceX headquarters in California.
The celebrity entrepreneur’s recent astronomical rise has been fuelled in particular by two of his enterprises, Tesla and Space X, but his ascent in the high-tech industry began long before.
Born to a South African father and Canadian mother in Pretoria in 1971, Mr Musk showed an early gift for computers and entrepreneurship, which was demonstrated by creating and selling a video game to a computer magazine for US$500 when he was 12.
After acquiring Canadian citizenship through his mother, Mr Musk moved to Canada at 18, where he started his undergraduate degree, transferring and completing it in physics and economy at the University of Pennsylvania by the age of 24. In 1995, Mr Musk made the move to the heart of Silicon Valley to pursue a doctorate at Stanford University in California, the state that would become his and his enterprise’s home. However, Mr Musk’s time as a Stanford student lasted a few days, and he opted instead to ride the internet wave of the 1990 by launching his first company, Zip2, with his brother with $28,000 of their father’s money.
Four year later, they sold the web- based online city guide company, which had been providing content for the New York Times and Chicago Tribune websites, for $ 307 million in cash and $ 34m in stock options, of which Mr Musk received $22m.
This was followed by greater success after the multimillionaire’s next projects led to the money transfer service PayPal, which was acquired by eBay in 2002 for $ 1.5 billion in stock, of which Mr Musk received $165m.
He became a US citizen in the same year. Mr Musk founded a third company, Space X, in 2002, with the aim of developing commercial space travel.
Six years later, the company was awarded a Nasa contract to transport to the International Space Station and in 2012 the company made history when its Falcon 9 rocket delivered 1,000 pounds of supplies to the crew.
This marked the first time a private company had sent a spacecraft to the station.
The engineer also co- founded Tesla in 2003, which initially sold electric sports cars, but now offers electric saloons and minivans.
Another venture the entrepreneur is attempting is the Hyperloop concept of high-speed transport. Proposed in 2013 by Mr Musk, it involves propelling a magnetically levitated pod through a near-vacuum tube at speeds of up to 1,200kph.
With feasibility studies to connect Abu Dhabi with Dubai and Al Ain under way, the UAE could become a first- adopter of the technology.