ELON MUSK: THE BILLION-DOLLAR ROCKET MAN |
He’s the maverick tech tycoon who captivated the world by firing two Nasa astronauts into orbit, but who’s he really?
EXCEPT for one sticky moment when US astronaut Doug Hurley appeared to clobber his head on an entry hatch as he crossed the threshold of the International Space Station, it all went like a dream.
At teatime on Sunday, a 19-hour flight followed by a flawless piece of zero-orbit parking saw the Space X capsule reach its destination some 420km above Earth.
Watching was an audience of tens of millions, bearing witness to a new chapter in space exploration: not only are Hurley and his crew mate Bob Behnken the first Americans to fly from their own soil into space for almost nine years (in the interim, colleagues have been hitching pricey rides on Russian spacecraft) they are also the first astronauts to reach the ISS in a privately built rocket.
The pioneering duo blasted off from Titusville, Florida, on Saturday, watched by President Donald Trump and his deputy, Mike Pence.
En route, they enjoyed an eighthour sleep, ate dinner and sent a short film back to Earth with footage of a “stowaway”: a toy dinosaur named Tremor the Apatosaurus, sent by their sons (aged six and 10) to keep them company.
They will now spend up to four months at their destination.
To some, the so-far-successful mission recalls the heyday of American space exploration.
Yet the man behind this brave new era is no ordinary Nasa boffin.
Space X is the brainchild of Elon Musk, a highly eccentric Silicon Valley tycoon who brought the world PayPal and Tesla cars, and is now devoting his $37 billion (R645bn) fortune to going where no man has gone before.
Musk launched the firm in the early 2000s, announcing that he intends, within a few decades, not only to have put an astronaut on Mars, but also to be taking the first steps to establish a human colony there, thus ensuring mankind’s future, should Earth one day become uninhabitable.
Declaring himself “overcome with emotion”, he has, for now, managed to silence the doubters.
So who is this eccentric rocket man?
Nicknamed “genius boy”,
Musk purportedly read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica in early childhood and learned to “code” at the age of 10, within days of acquiring a computer. By 12, he’d created and sold his first tech product, a video game called Blastar, for £500 (R11 000).
It was not, however, a happy childhood. The 48-year-old was born in South Africa, one of three children of engineer Errol Musk and his author wife, Maye. His parents divorced when he was eight.
At school, he was badly bullied, once beaten so badly he spent a fortnight in hospital. At home, things were barely better.
Errol, from whom he’s been estranged for years, was a strict disciplinarian.
In 2018, it emerged that Errol had fathered a child with his stepdaughter Jana. Musk told Rolling Stone magazine that Errol is “a terrible human being”.
By the age of 17, Musk was desperate to escape South Africa and his overbearing dad, so decided to head for Canada, where his mother Maye had grown up.
He arrived without a penny to his name, relying on the generosity of relatives for accommodation and living for weeks at a time off economy-size bags of hot dogs.
Eventually, he won a place at the University of Pennsylvania to study Economics and Physics. After graduating, Musk headed west, to Silicon Valley, where in 1995 he was accepted onto a PhD course at the prestigious Stanford University. However, he dropped out during his first week to start a business called Zip2, which developed software for media companies.
Stuck in a traffic jam just before Christmas 2016, Musk took to Twitter to declare: “I am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging”, to create an alternative transport network deep underground in his home city of Los Angeles.
He duly launched The Boring Company, a firm designed to pursue that very aim. The timing could not have been better: Zip2 rode the internet boom and was sold in 1999 for an astonishing $341 million, netting Musk a $22m cut.
Musk proceeded to join the ranks of the global super-rich via his next bet: an online bank called X.com, which was eventually sold to eBay in 2002, earning him roughly $180m – after tax.
The cash allowed him to dream big. That year he founded SpaceX, announcing that his end goal was to build a “BFR” – or “Big F ***** g Rocket” – to help mankind colonise Mars before over-population renders Earth uninhabitable.
In 2003 and 2004, Musk also made timely bets on the alternative energy sector, founding a company called Solarcity, which is now America’s largest installer of solar panels, and Tesla, the luxury electric car firm, which has revolutionised the motor industry.
His logic was that helping to wean the world off oil would buy us extra time to address global warming, should the colonisation of Mars take longer than expected.
Wealth and success appear to have made the once geeky Musk very attractive to women.
His first wife, Justine Wilson, a fantasy novelist whom he’d met at university, grew tired of spending all day at home with their five sons – a set of twins and triplets.
She divorced him in 2008.
After a year-long dalliance with actress Amber Heard, Musk began stepping out with a Canadian indie musician known as Grimes.
Their son, who was born earlier this month, made headlines after the couple attemptedto register his name as “X AE A-12” (pronounced “Ex ash A twelve”).
Californian authorities refused to play ball, on the grounds that it’s illegal to use numbers in a name, so the couple had to eventually make do with “X AE A-Xii”.