Tomorrow, SpaceX will launch two satellites to test internet for the entire planet. What was the hero of all the latest news, Elon Musk, like as a child and why is he launching the Internet, rockets, building electric cars and planning to colonize Mars?
Elon Musk won't succeed - that's what the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, said. But so far the most innovative technologies are associated with Musk’s name: the largest online payment system, an auto company that has challenged industry giants, the Internet for the entire Earth, and even the colonization of Mars.
Elon's ancestors were Swiss Germans
They moved to the States during the Revolutionary War and from there to Canada. In 1950, Musk's parents moved to South Africa. Elon was born and raised there.
He started programming and business as a child.
One of the most successful businessmen of our time was a typical nerd as a child: he read a lot and was reluctant to make contact with his peers. Plus he had a photographic memory like Sheldon Cooper. They didn’t like him at school, once the guy was beaten and broken nose.
When Elon was 10, his father gave him a computer. The boy taught himself to program and two years later, at the age of 12, he sold his own computer game for $500. Musk later invested in shares, and when he sold them, he was able to afford to move to Canada. There he lived with relatives until he entered Stanford University. True, he soon dropped out of school for business.
Even as a young man, Musk wanted to change the world
While studying in college, he decided that he would do what would most change the fate of humanity. Grandiose plans required money, and while Musk was launching his first company, Zip2, he lived in the office and went to the local stadium to shower. This saved money on rent and supported the startup.
PayPal has changed online payments
The company was created as a result of the merger of Musk's startup X.com and its competitor Confinity. The company appeared in the early 2000s, when business on the Internet was synonymous with technology, and the possibilities of non-cash payments were limited to bank cards.
Although the partners had different views on the management and development of the project, the cooperation was so productive that in 2002 the company bought it on eBay. Elon Musk used the proceeds to prepare for his main dream - a flight to Mars.
Tesla Motors challenges auto giants
Elon Musk was not the founder of the company, but it was he who made it successful and famous throughout the world. Musk believes that the world is too dependent on hydrocarbons and seeks to rid humanity of this dependence. From the very beginning, the company was conceived as the first serial manufacturer of electric vehicles and an alternative to oil energy.
Musk participated in the development of the company's first electric car, the Tesla Roadster, and when it turned out that due to miscalculations the model would be twice as expensive as planned, production costs and even fired the company's founders. To support the company financially, he had to sell his beloved McLaren F1 car. The investment of effort and money was not in vain: in 2010, Tesla held its first automobile IPO in the United States in 50 years.
Hyperloop: train at airplane speed
Another ambitious project by Musk. If flying is expensive and the train ride is long, you can fly by train. The speed of the new type of transport is already being tested , which is comparable to the fastest magnetic levitation trains. In the future, the maximum speed will be about 1200 km/h.
Hyperloop is a pipe standing on supports with evacuated air to reduce drag. A sealed capsule with people inside is moving in the pipe. All necessary energy will be generated by solar panels installed along the route.
Musk will use the developments of his other projects in the Hyperloop: Tesla electronics, SolarCity solar panels and SpaceX durable alloys. Many of the solutions that will be used in Hyperloop are already used, for example, in magnetic levitation trains.
Twitter Bet: Musk Built a Giant Battery
Last year, Australia declared an energy emergency due to gas shortages and rising energy prices. Then Musk argued on Twitter with the Australian government that he could build a huge 100 MW battery, costing $390 million, in a hundred days, which could store and redirect electricity in case of power outages. If he doesn’t meet the deadlines, he promised, he will implement the project for free.
The battery was designed ahead of schedule, and at the end of December 2017 it was tested in action. After an accident at a local power plant, the battery lack of electricity.
SpaceX: reusable rockets and spacecraft
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. The company's main goal is to make space flights cheap enough to colonize Mars. To do this, the company designed reusable Falcon launch vehicles and the Dragon spacecraft. The company uses components of its own design, which allows it to reduce prices and control quality.
The first three launches of Falcon rockets ended in failure. But in April 2016, a Falcon 9 rocket landed on a floating platform for the first time. This opened a new era in space exploration because it made it possible to reuse rockets.
And on February 6 of this year, Falcon Heavy rockets capable of launching into orbit successfully landed (almost three times more than the shuttle).
This is the first high-lift rocket capable of returning to Earth. Its launch costs $90 million - two and a half times cheaper than launching the shuttle.
Starlink: Internet for the whole Earth
The idea to provide the entire planet with Internet appeared in 2015. Musk plans to first launch 800 satellites that will cover the US territory, and bring their number to 4,425, combining them into a system called Starlink. It will provide access to the World Wide Web in places where the Internet was previously unavailable: in remote areas or in the mountains. In this case, the system will be able to redirect the signal to areas with heavy traffic.
The satellites will be in low-Earth orbit, lower than conventional geostationary satellites. This is necessary to speed up signal transmission: modern satellite providers have a delay of about 600 milliseconds, and Musk expects 25-35 ms and a speed of 1 Gbit/s.
Of course, the businessman is not doing all this out of pure philanthropy: if the Starlink project succeeds, it will bring the company $30 billion, which is twice as much as today’s high-speed Internet industry leader Comcast earns. Part of Musk's funds focus on its most ambitious project - the colonization of Mars.
What is this all for: populating Mars
In June 2017, the businessman announced that he was going to colonize Mars. In his opinion, necessary in order to protect us from a possible global catastrophe. That is, the businessman decided to diversify risks as usual, but now across different planets: if something happens to one, people on the other will survive.
For this purpose, an Interplanetary Transport System with reusable ships will be created. Nowadays, most rockets are disposable. Imagine if for each new trip you would have to buy a new car.
The flight to Mars will be divided into two phases: first, a reusable launch vehicle will launch spacecraft into low-Earth orbit. There will be about 100 people on board each of the thousand ships. There they will wait for the closest approach between Earth and Mars, which happens every 26 months, and then take off. The first man could land on Mars as early as 2024, and in 50-100 years the population of the Red Planet could reach 1 million people.
To prevent the flight to Mars from turning into a voluntary exile, they will also establish movement in the opposite direction. For this they will use Martian resources: they will produce fuel from methane. The ships can be refueled directly in orbit. Thanks to this and repeated use, the cost of the flight will be in the region .
Even his colleagues didn’t believe in his achievements
As Tesla began to compete with gasoline cars and challenge the oil industry, the traditional auto industry said electric cars would forever remain a hobbyist fad.
Today, the largest auto giants produce electric cars and hybrids; at the end of last year, their number in the world exceeded , and by the end of this it will exceed 5 million. Already today, a third of the cars on the roads in China and Norway are electric cars.
Astronaut Neil Armstrong opposed commercial space flights, and famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that SpaceX will not be able to make a flight to Mars, primarily due to a lack of money: Musk does not have the necessary funds, and the flight itself does not promise benefits for which investors would be interested in investing in the project.
Be that as it may, the recent launch and successful landing of two of the three Falcon Heavy super-heavy rockets has already changed ideas about the cost of space flights, and has collapsed orders for Russian Proton rockets.
How did he do it?
From early childhood, little Elon infuriated his parents with doubts in any of their words and arguments, trying to get to the bottom of things and asking endless questions. His education as a physicist and economist made him a techno-perfectionist with an entrepreneurial spirit.
Musk is good at finding unusual solutions to problems and believes that people's habit of thinking in standard patterns is the main obstacle to innovation. When he needed a theodolite to level the rocket, he bought a used one on the Internet and saved $25 thousand. And he got the idea to build his own rockets when it turned out that it was very expensive to deliver cargo to Mars using existing spacecraft.
Elon Musk's recipe for success is as simple to define as it is difficult to follow. A good education. Ability to ask the right questions. Meticulousness and an unconventional view of the world. The ability to go ahead, despite criticism. And most importantly, a big dream that has become a goal.
Elon Musk is an American entrepreneur and engineer. He took part in the creation of the PayPal payment system, which was sold to EBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. He heads the board of directors of SolarCity and Tesla Motors. According to Forbes, Musk's net worth is $2.4 billion.
short biography
Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971. The place where Elon Musk was born is an administratively developed scientific city. His father, an engineer, and his mother, a former Canadian model who later worked as a nutritionist, lived there. The family had three children.
At the age of 10, Musk was given his first computer, and already at the age of 12 he sold his first game for $500. The teenager invests the money he receives in a pharmaceutical company that he followed in the newspapers. He later sold the shares for several thousand dollars. At the age of 17, Musk moved to Canada with this money, where he learned what poverty is. For example, he tried to live on $1 a day without getting an upset stomach.
In 1992, Musk moved to the United States and entered the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied physics and business. He is writing his doctorate at Stanford University, but does not attend lectures. Together with his student friends, the future entrepreneur founded the company Zip2. In 1999, it was bought by Compaq Computer for $307 million, of which Musk receives $20 million. He uses it to buy a McLaren F1 plane and move into a condominium.
Solar power plant for everyone
Elon Musk, whose biography is full of amazing events, founded X.com in 1999. In 2001, the company was renamed PayPal, which a year later was sold for $1.5 billion. The entrepreneur owned 11.7% of the shares.
In 2006, Musk opened SolarCity, a company of which he is still the owner and engineer. The company installs small power plants for personal use on the roofs of houses and companies. However, the main idea is not to create power plants yourself, but to lease them on a long-term basis. The client can calculate the benefits of using such a power plant and receives a personal solar power plant almost free of charge. Buyers, as a rule, are ordinary Americans.
Elon Musk, whose biography contains both ups and downs, hit the nail on the head with an innovative idea. Nowadays, the company is growing faster than its competitors. It has more than 30 operating centers in the United States, a new customer every five minutes and a huge queue of those who want to use solar energy. SolarCity has already installed such panels on several tens of thousands of buildings and is considered the largest company in this segment.
The path to colonization of Mars
Elon Musk, whose biography teaches not to give up, opens the rocket company SpaceX in 2002, the main goal of which is to reduce the cost of space flights and the Company has already developed several space rockets and the Dragon spacecraft.
In 2010, Dragon was the first spacecraft to be successfully launched, put into orbit and returned back. Later, in 2015, it became the first spacecraft to dock at the International Space Station.
In 2006, the company won a NASA competition to deliver cargo to space stations and received a prize fund of $278 million. To date, five successful flights have already been completed.
Other achievements and awards
In 2010, shares of Tesla Motors, which had never shown a profit since its founding, were placed for public sale. However, the offer turned out to be so successful that on the first day of trading the share price soared by 41%. Forbes named them the best-performing stocks of the year.
Many awards have been given for what Elon Musk invented. In 2008, Musk was included in Esquire magazine's list of the 75 most influential people of the year. In 2011 he received the Heinlein Prize for outstanding achievements in the commercialization of space. That same year, Forbes added him to its list of the 20 most influential young executives.
Elon Musk is the second businessman to create three companies worth more than $1 billion. Many have tried to repeat this success. It seems that an entrepreneur lives by different rules. However, the businessman does not hide the fact that there are several simple points that he follows.
Ask the right questions
As a teenager, Musk read a lot of philosophical and religious literature. However, his greatest influence was the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. According to the entrepreneur, he realized that he needed to ask the right questions. When Musk entered college, he thought about how exactly he wanted to influence the fate of humanity. There he decided that he would be engaged in the resettlement of people from Earth to other planets. The businessman decided that he would do everything possible to contribute to this industry. And he started looking for money.
Dissect reality
Elon Musk, whose biography teaches not to be like everyone else, believes that innovation is hampered by people's ability to think in analogies. Therefore, they do not create something new, but try to improve the existing one. An entrepreneur believes that it is necessary to dissect reality to its core and create something fundamentally different.
For example, space seems out of reach for business. To develop it you need a huge budget. However, Musk is confident that costs can be greatly reduced if a new flight goal is set. So he founded SpaceX, whose goal is colonization. The businessman says that if you need to resettle the Earth's population to another planet, you need to do it economically.
I don't think he's lying, but I don't believe him
In 2012, Musk expressed confidence that within a few decades all cars would be electric. He began working in this direction and in 2008 released the first electric car that went into mass production. Analysts, however, are skeptical of Musk's statement, which does not bother the entrepreneur at all.
Musk is often compared to Steve Jobs. The latter used the term “reality distortion field,” convincing himself and others that the impossible was possible. Musk's colleagues claim that he selects facts so that they correspond to his reality. Many people say that the entrepreneur doesn’t seem to be lying, but it’s impossible to believe him.
His company, Tesla Motors, was often on the verge of bankruptcy, although Elon Musk achieved amazing business success. The biography of Tesla, the creator, shows that the entrepreneur tried by all means to keep the company afloat. Things got better over time. According to the businessman, the world is too dependent on oil. This is leading to climate change, and Musk believes that using electricity will correct the situation.
One of the company's achievements is Gemeral Motors' decision to create the Chevy Volt. This is a small car with electric charging capabilities. In electric mode, it can travel 65 km. During the release, 33 thousand people signed up to buy this car.
Elon Musk, whose photos are always cheerful, became successful by embodying ideas that seemed crazy at first glance. Not only did he become independent and provide for his family, but he also made history. The entrepreneur strives to change life for the better and works on projects that can save humanity in the future.
For now, however, he is pleased that he has helped bring about many changes in the energy, automobile and rocket industries.
Musk even acted in films. In 2008, the film “Iron Man” was released, the prototype of which was Elon Musk. Later, in 2013, he played a small role in Machete Kills, but his name is not in the credits. He also played himself in episode 9 of season 9 of The Big Bang Theory.
Elon (also erroneously used as Elon) Reeve Musk is a Canadian-American entrepreneur, innovator, engineer-inventor, business tycoon investing in grandiose innovative projects.The founder and head of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, co-founder of SolarCity and PayPal, this technomessiah, as he is often called in the press, personally participated in the development of new technologies in alternative energy, the design of environmentally friendly electric vehicles and economical solar power plants.
He was involved in the creation of superhuman-level artificial intelligence OpenAI, a conceptual high-speed (twice as fast as an airplane) Hyperloop transport system, and the design of spaceships designed to realize his main goal - the creation of a human colony on Mars.
The recognized genius of our time is characterized by such personal qualities as perseverance, well-developed critical thinking, accurate analysis of events and one’s own actions, high diligence and efficiency. It is reliably known that Musk devotes up to one hundred hours a week to work.
Forbes placed Musk in 21st place on the list of the most influential people in the world, and he was one of the youngest people in this ranking, behind only Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Eun and the inventor of the Uber service Travis Kalanick.
According to data for January 2018, Elon Musk's fortune was estimated at $20.9 billion, which makes him the 53rd richest person in the world.
Childhood and family
Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971 in Pretoria, one of the three capitals of South Africa. He was the eldest of three children in the family of South African-born English engineer Errol Musk and Canadian-British model and nutrition expert Maye Musk. 
Elon has a younger brother, Kimbel, born in 1972, and a sister, Tosca, born in 1974. Kimbel, although not as successful as his older brother, still made a million-dollar fortune in the restaurant business, and Maya became a film producer.
After his parents' divorce in 1980, Elon and his brother and sister stayed with their father in a suburb of Pretoria. He rarely saw his mother. Errol had several houses, a farm with thoroughbred stallions and a yacht.
The family traveled a lot: the trip could begin in Europe, then they flew to Hong Kong, visiting the States along the way. Since Elon’s father had a pilot’s license, he sometimes rented a plane when he flew somewhere for work and took his children with him. So, as a child, Elon visited the emerald mine - the head of the family helped equip the face. Already in adulthood, Elon also received a pilot’s license, but he simply does not have time for this hobby.
Elon learned to read early and spent most of his free time reading books. At the age of 3, he dumbfounded his father with the question: “Where does the world begin and where does it end?” The boy grew up as an introvert, avoided his peers and did not get along very well with people. At the private boys' school he attended, he often had to endure bullying from his classmates. Once he was beaten until he lost consciousness and was hospitalized.
At the age of 9, Elon received his first computer as a gift - a Commodore VIC-20. He independently studied the popular programming languages of those years and became interested in creating programs. At the age of 12, he himself wrote the shooter video game Blastar in BASIC, which he sold for $500 to PC & Office Technologies, which published the code in one of the issues.
Game developed by 12-year-old Elon Musk
Education
In 1988, Musk graduated from school and entered the University of Pretoria, but due to political instability in South Africa, he moved to Canada just before his 18th birthday. Since his mother is a native of Canada, Elon also obtained citizenship of this country. Here began the strangest period of his life: Elon entered a bachelor's degree at Queen's University in Kingston (Ontario), while changing many jobs in different parts of Canada, and he had something to tell about each of them. 
He first picked fruit and carried baskets of grain on his relatives' farm in Waldeck, then got a job as a lumberjack in Vancouver. He was paid mere pennies for cutting logs with a chainsaw. After quitting, he went to the labor exchange and asked to find a job with a better salary, and he got a job... as a boiler room cleaner at a sawmill. For $18 an hour (actually good money in 1989), he crawled around the floor in a suit made of heat-resistant but toxic material, scooping up trash in extremely high temperatures.
At this time, his younger brother also moved to Canada. Having united, Elon and Kimbel decided to make useful contacts. By hook or by crook, they found the phone numbers of successful entrepreneurs and called them, inviting them to lunch. One of those who agreed was the head of the Bank of Nova Scotia, Peter Nicholson. Impressed by the persistence of the young people, he met them personally and decided to take Elon, as the more gifted of the Musk brothers, under his wing. Elon worked at his bank for the whole summer, earning, however, less than in the boiler room - $14 an hour.
In 1992, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, located in the American state of Philadelphia. He studied simultaneously at the Faculty of Arts and Science and at the Wharton Business School at the university. Having stayed at the university a year longer than ordinary students, in May 1997 he received two bachelor's degrees at once: in physics and economics.
While studying at the University of Pennsylvania, Musk became friends with the future founder of TheFunded, Adeo Ressi. The friends rented a ten-bedroom house and turned it into an underground nightclub, which was very popular with students. While everyone was getting drunk, Musk remained sober to keep order. But in one night he could earn enough money to cover a month's rent for this gigantic mansion. He spent the rest to pay for college.
In 1995, 24-year-old Elon moved to California, where he became a graduate student at the legendary Stanford University to obtain a doctorate in physics. But just 2 days later he changed his mind and decided to continue working on his developments. He had many ambitious ideas from the fields of IT, renewable energy and space exploration.
First business projects
In 1995, in partnership with his brother Kimbel and business coach Greg Kauri, Elon founded his first company, the Yellow Pages site Zip2, which specialized in developing maps and catalogs for online publications. His father offered him starting capital, $28 thousand, but Elon refused to take it. Musk worked from early morning until late at night and lived in a rented office to save on rent and invest all the money in the company. 
His perseverance and tenacity paid off handsomely. The Internet was then experiencing a boom, and in 1999 the brothers sold their startup for $307 million in cash (and $34 million in securities) to the search engine AltaVista, which was later acquired by Compaq. Elon, who at that time owned only 7% of the company, earned $22 million from the sale.
Musk invested 12 million of this amount in the online bank X.com, believing that electronic payment systems were the future. In 2001, X merged with rival company Confinity. The new venture was named PayPal. As the majority shareholder (and taking advantage of the conflict in the Board of Directors after the merger), Elon Musk took the place of PayPal's CEO.
In 2002, against Musk's advice, the Board of Directors approved the sale of PayPal to trading giant eBay for $1.5 billion. After taxes, Musk received $180 million, giving him enough money to pursue his plans for solar energy and space.
Creation of SpaceX
Back in 2001, Musk developed a project to create an experimental greenhouse on Mars, which would mark the beginning of a closed and independent ecosystem on the regolith, which in the future would help with the colonization of the Red Planet. He hoped to restore public interest in the space industry, which had seriously declined after the collapse of the USSR and the end of the space race between the two superpowers.In October 2001, Musk traveled to Moscow with Adeo Ressi and space equipment engineer Jim Cantrell. The purpose of the trip was to purchase refurbished Dnepr intercontinental ballistic missiles, which he needed for experiments with delivering cargo into space. They met with aircraft designer Semyon Lavochkin and the management of Kosmotrans, the company that developed these Dneprs. However, the purchase fell through - they refused to sell missiles to Elon, considering him insufficiently experienced in this matter. The second attempt also failed - six months later Musk tried to buy rockets again, and he was allowed to buy one for $8 million.
The history of SpaceX and the Falcon-1 rocket
The price seemed unreasonable to Elon. He refused, and during the flight home the idea came to the inventor: he could found a company that would provide him with the same rockets, or even better. According to calculations, it turned out that the cost of one missile during production would be only 3% of the price asked at Kosmotrans. In addition, he intended to reduce the cost of each launch by 70% by using reusable media.
In May 2002, Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX for short, was launched. Musk invested $100 million in the enterprise, then attracted a number of large investments from the US Department of Defense agency DARPA, SpaceDev, Celestis, ATSB and others. The first two models of launch vehicles: the lightweight carrier Falcon-1 and the medium-heavy carrier Falcon-9 (“Falcon-1” and “Falcon-9”). The name is a reference to the Millennium Falcon, Han Solo's ship from Star Wars. The first aircraft developed by Musk’s company was called Dragon.
In 2006, NASA entered into a $1.6 billion contract with SpaceX to send 12 cargo shipments to the ISS. In September 2008, for the first time in history, a launch vehicle, the development and creation of which was financed from private sources, successfully delivered cargo into Earth orbit. It was Falcon-1. Elon put almost everything on the line - if the launch was unsuccessful, the company would most likely cease to exist. On June 4, 2010, Falcon-9 was successfully launched. On May 25, 2012, Dragon, launched into space by a Falcon-9 rocket, docked with the ISS for the first time. In the same year, Musk’s company received its first commercial order: the launch of the Intelsat satellite using the Falcon Heavy rocket, which was still in development at that time.
On December 22, 2015, Falcon-9 made its first vertical landing at the Cape Canaveral Space Center. Before this, the rocket fell into the Atlantic Ocean twice, but the third attempt was successful and opened a new milestone in the history of space exploration - reusing the carrier meant colossal savings.
First successful landing of Falcon 9 (behind the scenes)
In February 2018, SpaceX made another breakthrough: the Falcon Heavy rocket, designed to transport multi-ton cargo (in the case of delivering cargo into Earth orbit, the carrier could withstand more than 60 tons), launched a Tesla Roadster into space with an installed camera recording everything that happens outside cabins
The significance of the launch of Flacon Heavy for humanity
The launch was successful, but during landing the central of the three boosters was unable to slow down and crashed into the ocean. The two side boosters landed exactly at the designated location.
Other projects of Elon Musk
In July 2003, Musk invested in Tesla Motors, which had just been founded by inventors Martin Eberhard and Mark Trapenning and was positioned as a pioneer among manufacturers of mass-produced electric cars. 
Musk personally took part in the development of the Tesla Roadster electric sports car based on the English Lotus Elise. At the initiative of the inventor, the weight of the model was significantly minimized, the battery compartment was improved, and new design elements were introduced into the headlight design. For this work, Elon received the Global Green 2006 environmental award and found investors who invested $100 million in Tesla.
Despite the difficulties in business development and miscalculations that forced Elon to fire some of his employees, the company avoided bankruptcy thanks to a 50 million investment from the German automobile corporation Daimler, as well as the provision of a preferential loan to Tesla at the initiative of the US Department of Energy.
The success of Tesla spurred the “electric segment” of the automobile market: every self-respecting automobile company began developing its own electric car or at least a hybrid. In 2010, Tesla became the first American car company in more than 50 years to go public (Ford did so in 1956).
The financial success of the enterprise was facilitated by the release of the premium S sedan. The billionaire provoked public interest in the development by participating in a debate with a New York Times correspondent. He said that in 20 years, more than 50% of cars coming off the assembly line will be equipped with an electric motor. As a result, 10.5 thousand Tesla S were sold in the first half of 2013 alone.
When Henry Ford created cheap and reliable cars, people said, "No, thanks. What's wrong with horses?" Ford risked everything and it worked.
The successful entrepreneur is also developing charging stations for electric vehicles, work on which is being carried out under the auspices of the SolarCity project, the founders of which were his cousins. 
The company specializes in the installation of solar power plants for both production and home use. These include platforms for charging Tesla cars and home stations for converting solar energy. By the beginning of 2018, SolarCity's capitalization was estimated at $3 billion.
Elon Musk conference
In August 2013, Musk presented a plan to create a grandiose transport network called Hyperloop (“Hyperloop”). The project represented a completely new type of transport, which would be 2 times faster than an airplane, powered by solar energy and not tied to a specific schedule, but set off at short intervals, like subway trains.
The Hyperloop was a closed elevated highway made of two tubes parallel to each other, with giant solar panels along the route. It was promised that the route would connect San Francisco and Los Angeles: the distance between the cities is 560 km. Musk promised that his invention would cover this route for 35 minutes, and estimated the cost of the project at $6 billion.
How does Hyperloop work?
However, Musk did not intend to implement the Hyperloop himself (although SpaceX and Tesla subsequently jointly created a capsule that demonstrated a speed of 355 km/h). As a result, further development was undertaken by the company Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, which operates through volunteer engineers and crowdfunding, as well as Virgin Hyperloop One. The latter tested a model of a vacuum capsule in December 2017, which accelerated to 387 km/h.
The millionaire inventor has repeatedly called on society to control research in the field of artificial intelligence and neural networks. He is convinced that AI poses a threat to humanity, since sooner or later machines will gain too much power over people.
The role of a pet for machines is the future of humanity.
However, in 2016, Elon founded the neurotechnology company Neuralink. It was planned that its employees would treat brain diseases (in the short term) using neural interfaces and “improve people” by creating a connection between the brain and the computer. Musk promised to create by 2027 the so-called “neural lace” - microimplants that improve cognitive abilities.Elon Musk in movies
Like many famous billionaires (just remember the appearance of Donald Trump in the movie “Home Alone”), Elon Musk sometimes appears in popular television projects. Even in those where they make fun of him. 
Thus, the founder of SpaceX appeared in the animated series “The Simpsons” (the “Musk That Fell to Earth” series) and “South Park” (the “Handicar” series), as well as in the trash action movie “Machete Kills” with Danny Trejo.
He also played a cameo in the second part of Iron Man with Robert Downey Jr. (in fact, Elon is often called the prototype of the main character of the film, inventor Tony Stark). He also appeared as himself in the TV series “The Big Bang Theory” and his prequel “Childhood of Sheldon.” In one of the episodes of the latter, the story of the creation of the “reusable” Falcon carrier is amusingly played out.
Elon Musk in The Big Bang Theory
The businessman, who aims to usher in an era of affordable space tourism, owned a Czech-made Aero L-39 jet trainer. He then purchased a Dassault Falcon 900, which was used in 2005 during the filming of No Smoking Here. The millionaire not only produced this film, but also played a cameo role in it as a pilot who opens the door to the captain played by the famous Robert Duvall. Musk was also the owner of the Wet Nellie car-submarine (created on the basis of the Lotus Esprit from the film “The Spy Who Loved Me” about the British agent 007 James Bond). Elon Musk's second wife - Talulah Riley
“Amber constantly lied to Elon. She said that she spent the night at home, although in fact she was partying at a club. When she went to Australia to film, she acted like she didn't have a boyfriend. But while shopping, she did not hesitate to use Elon’s credit card,” a source close to the billionaire claimed to Metro.
In May 2018, Musk appeared in public with his new girlfriend, 30-year-old singer Grimes (real name Claire Boucher). They attended the annual Met Gala together in New York. The couple met on the Internet: Musk wanted to tweet the phrase “Basilisk Rococo,” combining the name of the virtual reality thought experiment “Basilisk Roco” and the Rococo architectural style, but it turned out that Grimes had already used it in one of her videos. They started communicating, then users noticed Musk’s strange comments on Grimes’ Twitter (about the fact that comets are actually made of cocaine).
The entrepreneur became the founder of a charitable foundation named after him. He donates part of his fortune to eliminate the consequences of natural disasters (hurricane in Alabama, tsunami in the Japanese city of Soma).
Elon Musk now
Elon Musk's main goal remains the creation of a human colony on Mars. In a 2011 interview, he stated that the first settlers would travel to the Red Planet within the next two decades. By 2040, Musk predicts, 80 thousand people will live on Mars.Work continues on the BFR - Big Falcon Rocket - a launch vehicle and spacecraft with a payload of 150 tons. The BFR is expected to replace previous generations of Falcon and become the primary instrument for transporting cargo and people to Mars.
He is called the Tony Stark of the real world, a worthy heir to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs rolled into one. An entrepreneur who made a fortune from internet startups has turned into a visionary who thinks about a better future for humanity. With little understanding of online banking, rocket science or electric cars, Elon Musk has time and again broken into a new industry with the confidence that he knows better than anyone what customers want. And it turned out that he really knew!
African childhood
Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa. His father Errol was a successful engineer from a respected family. May's mother was a model in her youth and then a successful nutritionist. Elon was the first child in the family. Next came brother Kimbal and sister Tosca (future director and producer). Although Elon's parents knew each other since childhood and Errol sought May's hand for many years, their marriage was not happy. When Elon turned seven, the couple filed for divorce.
At first, the children stayed with their mother, but then Elon moved in with his father. As he himself later recalled, his mother had three children left, and his father had no one; he looked lonely and sad. Soon Kimbal moved in with his father. Subsequently, the brothers more than once doubted their decision: Errol turned out to be strict and demanding, it was difficult for him to please. Nevertheless, he gave his sons a good education and instilled a love for the exact sciences.
Elon was different from other children. He was smarter than his peers and did not share their interest in sports and entertainment. The boy often “disconnected” from the outside world, plunging into himself. His classmates bullied him. Musk changed several schools, but never made real friends.
Problems at school and at home led Musk to seek refuge in books from an early age. In his youth, he read the novels of Verne, Asimov, Heinlein and Tolkien. “The Academy” and “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” awakened his interest in space, and Douglas Adams’s novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” helped him cope with an identity crisis at the age of fourteen. Since then, Musk has been guided by the principle “The main thing is to ask the right questions.”
Musk's second hobby was computers. As soon as he encountered this miracle of technology, he begged his father for his first computer - a Commodore VIC-20, a popular model in the early eighties with as much as five kilobytes of memory. Musk mastered programming himself and, at the age of twelve, wrote the video game Blastar, which he sold to one of the local magazines for five hundred dollars.
Although Errol bought his son a computer, he himself was skeptical about Elon’s hobby, considering computers just expensive toys. He wanted Elon to become an engineer like himself. The lack of support and prospects made Elon think about emigrating. He dreamed of America, which seemed to him a country of unlimited opportunities for the smart and resourceful. Taking advantage of the fact that his mother was a native of Canada, Musk received Canadian citizenship and at the age of seventeen set off to conquer America.
American Dream: Zip2
At first it was not easy in the new place. In the first years, Elon constantly moved, doing menial work until he settled on a farm with relatives. Soon May and Kimbal moved to Canada. Elon entered Queens University in Ontario, where he continued to study programming. According to him, he chose Queens because among his listeners there were the most girls. The calculation was fully justified - at the university, Elon met his future wife, Justine.
After receiving his diploma, Musk entered the University of Pennsylvania master's program in physics and economics. At that time he was already interested in space, alternative energy and Internet startups. After Pennsylvania, Musk went to Stanford (California) to get his doctorate, but two days later he dropped out and opened his first business in Silicon Valley with his brother.
In the mid-nineties, shares of Internet companies grew by leaps and bounds, and Musk simply could not stay away. Elon came up with the idea of creating Zip2 - a digital analogue of the Yellow Pages, which allowed, as he put it, to find the nearest pizzeria in any area of San Francisco and find out how to get to it.
At first, the Musks faced a problem: no one wanted to invest money in their endeavor. Most companies still had no idea why they needed their own website and why advertising on the Internet was worth it. The father helped the brothers by sending twenty-eight thousand dollars. This was enough to rent a small office, purchase equipment and the necessary licenses. For the first three months, Elon and Kimbal lived in the office: they had no money to rent housing. The only furniture they had was a couple of mattresses.
The brothers divided powers: Elon almost never left the office, spending all his time on improving products, while Kimbal was looking for clients. At first, he simply walked around the area and offered his services to hairdressers, car dealerships, restaurants and shops. Someone managed to get interested. They started talking about Zip2, the company got investors, and things took off.
But the new shareholders doubted the young entrepreneur’s ability to manage his own venture and invited a more experienced manager, Rich Sorkin. Sorkin decided to place emphasis differently: now Zip2 mainly supplied software for newspapers, and Musk himself wanted to focus on working with consumers. He tried to remove Sorkin and take his place, but the board of directors did not support Elon.
The point of fighting soon disappeared. The large company Compac acquired Zip2 for $307 million, of which Elon personally went to $22 million. At twenty-seven years old, he became a millionaire. Of course, he bought an apartment and a luxury car, but he spent most of the money on a new project.
If you have millions of dollars, it changes your lifestyle - those who say otherwise are blatantly lying. I no longer need to work to survive. But I work every day, even on weekends, and I haven't been on vacation for several years.
Elon Musk
X.com and PayPal
Working on Zip2 taught Elon a lesson. He gained self-confidence and turned from a timid programmer into a confident businessman. But most importantly, Musk realized that he should no longer lose control over his projects. After selling Zip2, he was attracted to an industry where there was a lot of money and problems that could be fixed with the help of the Internet. It was about the banking industry, which at that time was cumbersome, clumsy and short-sighted and did not understand the possibilities of the digital era.
Having spent his own 12 million, Elon created the first ever online banking service with the pornographic name X.com. Musk was not afraid that many technologies had to be invented from scratch. He was confident that he would revolutionize the banking industry, and his confidence attracted investors, and then clients, to him. The ability to transfer money with a couple of mouse clicks without filling out long payment orders attracted two hundred thousand people to the service in just a few months.
Robert Downey Jr. admitted that his portrayal of Tony Stark was partially based on Musk, and persuaded Elon to make a cameo in Iron Man 2.
Soon X.com had its first serious competitor in the person of the equally young and ambitious startup Confinity, which was run by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel. Companies spent a lot of effort and money fighting until they came to the conclusion that it was easier to join forces. The largest shareholder and manager of the new company was Elon Musk, who never learned to get along with people. Quarrels began between Elon and Levchin and Til. The reason was the name of the merged company - everyone liked the name PayPal proposed by the founders of Confinity, and only Musk clung to X.com.
As a result of the conflict, Thiel left the company, and Levchin began to threaten that he would follow him. Technical problems also began: the servers could not cope with the influx of clients, “holes” were discovered in the programs, which threatened fines from banks. Dissatisfaction with Musk was brewing within the company. Taking advantage of the absence of Elon, who finally married Justine and went on his honeymoon, the board of directors removed him from his position and appointed Peter Thiel to this place.
Musk interrupted the trip and tried to fight, but soon cooled down, realizing that Levchin and Thiel really knew their stuff. He remained a shareholder of the company and continued to invest money in it. When the largest online auction site eBay wanted to acquire PayPal, not a single board member had any doubts that they had to agree, but Musk advised them to remain patient and wait. Finally, after a series of refusals, in June 2002, eBay offered one and a half billion dollars. As the largest shareholder, Musk received 250 million.
The X.com story had a double impact on Musk's reputation. On the one hand, he earned the reputation of a genius who created a unique product from scratch. On the other hand, he again could not get along with his partners and made a number of mistakes in managing the company. Some say that if Elon had remained at the helm for a few more months, the company would have collapsed. Others argue that he didn't have enough time - although many of Musk's ideas seem absurd at first glance, time proves him right.
SpaceX and Tesla Motors
After leaving PayPal, Musk resumed his honeymoon. On the trip, he contracted a dangerous form of malaria and almost died. It took six months to fully recover, during which time Elon lost twenty kilograms.
Shortly before the PayPal sale, Elon and Justine had their first child. But the parents' happiness was short-lived - the child died from the so-called sudden infant death syndrome. Musk dealt with grief in his typical manner - he threw himself into work. Colleagues later recalled that work difficulties sometimes brought tears to Elon’s eyes, but he endured this loss in silence. Musk did not like to put his personal life on display.
Having finally become convinced of the dangers of rest, Musk returned to work. As his influence at PayPal dwindled, Elon recalled his childhood fascination with space. Musk felt that the world had lost faith in a better future, and wanted to inspire humanity to new achievements. At first, Musk's plans were very naive - he was going to buy an old Russian ballistic missile and use it to send a ship to Mars. The project failed - Musk did not agree on a price with the sellers. Then he came up with the idea of producing small, cost-effective rockets that could conquer the market for commercial transportation to orbit due to low launch costs.
At that time, Musk knew nothing about rocket science. He had little idea of the scale of the work, so he set himself overly optimistic deadlines that were impossible to meet. Critics often accused Musk of lying, but Musk sincerely believed in his words and worked tirelessly to put his words into practice. He expected the same attitude from his employees, so people who were not ready to work twelve to sixteen hours a day did not stay long with Musk.
In June 2002, he founded Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX). At first, Musk wanted to produce only engines and purchase other parts from third-party suppliers. But he quickly became convinced that acceptable quality could only be achieved by himself.
At the same time, Musk became interested in electric cars. Two acquaintances prompted him to do this - first, Elon met the talented engineer Jeffrey Strobel, who was working on an economical battery for an electric car, and then crossed paths with Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpenning, the founders of Tesla Motors, whose goal was to create a new generation electric car. Musk fell in love with the idea and invested seven million in Tesla, becoming the largest shareholder. At the same time, the operational management of the company remained in the hands of Eberhard and Tarpenning.
The first two Tesla Roadster prototypes were met with enthusiasm, and orders began to pour into the company. But the attempt to move from piece production to mass production almost led to collapse.
Musk financed both enterprises from his own pocket and therefore found himself on the verge of bankruptcy. Funds in Musk's accounts were dwindling, and work on SpaceX's first rocket, the Falcon 1, was four years behind schedule. The first three Falcon 1 launches ended in failure. A series of launch failures is not uncommon in the space industry, but SpaceX could not afford such luxury. The engineers corrected all the shortcomings and the fourth launch was successful, but there was no money left for the fifth.
NASA has a stupid policy that says mistakes are not tolerated. In my company, failure is possible. If things don't fall apart, you're not inventing well enough.
Elon Musk
Tesla founder Martin Eberhard (Nicki Dugan / Flickr)
Things were even worse at Tesla. Contractors constantly disrupted the supply of parts, costs rose, and the public began to lose patience. The cost of one car, according to optimistic forecasts, was 170–200 thousand dollars, and Tesla planned to sell the Roadster for 85 thousand. Musk became disillusioned with Eberhard's leadership and ousted him. Martin took the dismissal hard and launched a media campaign against Musk. Their relationship remained tense, but Eberhard later admitted that without Musk, Tesla would have gone bankrupt at the very beginning.
Difficult times have come in Elon's life. No one seriously believed in the success of his endeavors, and the constant failures of SpaceX and Tesla did not strengthen his reputation. Rumors about the companies' financial problems leaked to the press.
Personal life also went downhill. For Elon, family always came second after work. Although Elon and Justine had known each other for many years and raised five children, she always felt that she was something of an accessory for her husband. Their marriage reached a dead end, and Elon filed for divorce. Musk treated the divorce process as a business project and sought the most convenient result for himself. The press was perplexed why the multimillionaire was arguing with the mother of his five children about the amount of compensation. But Elon could not afford unnecessary expenses.
In December 2008, Musk ran out of money. If Elon had not found the necessary funds by January, Tesla could have been declared bankrupt, and SpaceX employees would have had nothing to pay their salaries. Musk figured that he would have to sacrifice one of the companies to preserve the other, but could not make a choice.
Breakthrough
Musk found the money at the very last moment. He invested the rest of his funds in Tesla and convinced investors to believe in it one more time. And with SpaceX he was just lucky. Musk has long tried to convince NASA that his company could become a contractor for transporting cargo into orbit. And on December 23, 2008, the space agency signed a one and a half billion dollar contract with SpaceX for twelve flights to the ISS.
And here Musk’s undertakings began to work at full capacity, and from a man who for many years promised, promised and promised again, he turned into a man who began to do. Now SpaceX owns several records at once, and Musk does not intend to stop there.
Tesla is also doing well. The Tesla Roadster sold well, but the real hit was the Model S, released in 2012. Tesla Motors positions it as an “iPhone on wheels.” Even distribution is based on the Apple model - Tesla sells cars via the Internet and special sales points located in large shopping centers. Model S owners have virtually no maintenance costs. Programs are automatically updated via the Internet, and owners can charge their cars for free at any Tesla gas station. Or, if they are in a hurry, they can change the battery, but for money. In addition to cars, Tesla produces batteries for electric vehicles of other companies, and the sale of batteries brings in even more income.
Even if the zombie apocalypse happens, you will still be able to travel thanks to gas stations and the Tesla Supercharging system.
Elon Musk
Another of Musk’s undertakings is also succeeding – the SolarCity company, created by Elon and his cousins. SolarCity is one of the largest providers of solar energy in America, last year its assets were valued at $7 billion.
However, Musk’s life cannot be called carefree. He says he has three goals: to provide humanity with clean transportation and energy sources and to help build colonies on other worlds. Elon dreams of dying on Mars. And if the first two tasks are close to completion, then the third is still a long way to go.
Musk considers SpaceX’s main goal to be the conquest of other planets in the solar system. He plans to start with Mars. The Dragon V2 spacecraft, which SpaceX is currently developing for NASA, would ideally be the basis for flights to the Red Planet, but Musk's ambitions extend much further. The tycoon recently recalled that to create a colony on Mars, the planet needs to be terraformed. For these purposes, Musk proposes using... thermonuclear weapons. According to his calculations, the explosion of two thermonuclear bombs in the atmosphere near the poles of Mars will trigger a reaction to heat the planet and ultimately turn it into a more favorable place for people.
I would like to die on Mars. Only, of course, not in case of an unsuccessful landing.
Elon Musk
According to Musk’s calculations, Hyperloop will cost several times less, the capsules will move at short intervals, and the journey between cities will take only half an hour. However, Musk himself does not intend to engage in construction and plans to make the project drawings publicly available. Today, there are several teams ready to bring Elon’s vision to life.
What is he like?
Despite all his successes, Musk is often criticized. The press estimated that since the founding of SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity, they have received a total of $5 billion in government orders, subsidies and tax breaks. Musk is accused of not having achieved anything without the help of Uncle Sam.
However, even with the help of the state, he achieved what no one else could achieve. And I would hardly have been able to do this if not for my strength of character. Friends say that Musk is strict and sometimes cruel with employees and partners. He doesn't consider other people's feelings at all. Still, SpaceX and Tesla employees are loyal to their boss and say that while he is a social asshole, he knows what he wants and has a knack for inspiring optimism in others. Elon does not tolerate excuses, justifications and delays, but when difficulties arise, he is the first to volunteer to help.
Musk's work week exceeds one hundred hours. He practically lives at work and constantly flies between company offices on a private jet to save time. He strives to be aware of all the problems of his subordinates, and it is normal for him to respond to an email from employees within half an hour, even if it arrives late at night.
* * *
Elon Musk’s ideas seem crazy, but time after time he turns out to be right, it’s just that society does not keep up with his train of thought. In another world, Elon Musk would be perfect for the role of a villain in the next Bond series, but his passion for science, space and science fiction makes it difficult to see him as an unprincipled businessman. He remains a visionary, concerned with a better future for all humanity, living in an era when the brightest minds are thinking about how to cram more photos of cats into a social network post.
I love being involved in projects that change the world. The Internet did it, and space will probably change the world more than anything else. If humanity can move beyond the Earth, it is clear that its future lies there.
Elon Musk
In our cynical and calculating age, there are few such ideological dreamers left. Therefore, I want to keep my fingers crossed for Elon Musk and believe that he will succeed.
If the article is not enough for you...
At the beginning of 2015, American journalist Ashley Vance’s book “Elon Musk. Tesla, SpaceX and the road to the future." While working on the book, Vance interviewed Musk's family and friends, former and current employees of Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal and Zip2.
Musk himself at first did not want to help Vance with the work, but then agreed - provided that he could offer his own versions of the events described. Vance refused, but Musk suddenly accepted the reporter's terms and met with him regularly throughout the work on the book. Vance himself believes that Musk was convinced by the journalist’s determination and confidence in how to work.
There are many funny moments in the book - for example, Musk said that his family was afraid that representatives of the Russian space industry would hire killers to eliminate a competitor.
Elon Musk. Photo incimages.com
As the CEO of two of the largest companies in the world - Tesla and SpaceX - and the co-founder of OpenAI, Musk seems to believe in being involved in every field he can get his hands on. Once he even stated that he would not be happy until humanity moved from Earth to Mars.
Success awaited him in almost any business. Now Elon Musk is new, ambitious young people who know what they want look up to him. Elon Musk is the “Iron Man” of our time (it is no coincidence that he even appeared in a cameo role in the second film about this character).
But was the path to success easy? Elon Musk has experienced a lot in his lifetime - and today “Rubik” invites you to familiarize yourself with the biography of this unusual person.
Pretoria, South Africa. Photo: Wikimedia Commons His father, Erron Musk, an engineer by profession, describes his son this way: “Elon has always been . Therefore, it is not surprising that at parties, when everyone was discussing rugby, Elon would find the owner’s library and leaf through the books.”
Elon as a child. Photo Bloomberg News
Elon's mother, Maye Musk, is Canadian by nationality. She is a professional nutritionist and model, and has appeared on Special K cereal boxes and even on the cover of Time magazine.
Maya Musk. Photo by Business Insider In 1979, Erron and Maye divorced. Nine-year-old Elon and his younger brother Kimbal decided to stay with their father.
Elon with his brother Kimbal. Photo by Bloomberg News In 1983, at the age of 12, Elon sold a simple game, Blastar, to a computer magazine for $500. Musk once said: “It's an unremarkable game... but better than Flappy Bird (Flappy Bird is a game for mobile devices developed by Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen, in which the player must control the bird’s flight between rows of green pipes without touching them by touching the screen - ed.) “.
Elon's school years were difficult. According to the book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Elon was once hospitalized after bullies pushed him down the stairs and beat him until he lost consciousness.
After graduating from high school, Musk moved to Canada with his mother, sister Tosca, and brother Kimbal. He studied at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario for two years.but completed his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving a degree in physics and economics.
Elon at a meeting with Caltech students in 2012. AP Photo While studying at the University of Pennsylvania, Musk and fellow student Adeo Ressi rented out a 10-bedroom house and turned it into an informal nightclub. It was an early entrepreneurial experience.
The house that Elon rented out. Photo AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar After graduation, Musk went to Stanford University to pursue his Ph.D. He stayed in California for only two days, deciding first to try his luck in the growing Internet business (the so-called dot-com bubble, which was formed as a result of the rise in shares of Internet companies, as well as the emergence of a large number of new Internet companies and the reorientation of old companies to Internet business at the end of the 20th century. These new business models turned out to be ineffective, and the funds, spent mainly on advertising and large loans, led to a wave of bankruptcies - ed.) Elon never completed his studies at Stanford.
Musk and his brother Kimbal used their father's money—about $28,000 in total—and founded Zip2, a Web startup that provided city guides to newspapers like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.
Elon Musk's brother, Kimbal. Photo: Wikimedia Commons When Zip2 first began its development, Elon practically lived in the office and at the YMCA volunteer organization. His work paid off when Compaq bought Zip2 for $341 million in cash and stock, netting Musk $22 million.
Of this money, Elon Musk invested $10 million into his new online banking company, X.com. In 2000, X.com merged with Confinity, a startup co-founded by Peter Thiel. Thus a new company appeared called
Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Photo: PAUL SAKUMA/AP Musk was appointed CEO of the new company. But the happiness did not last long: in October, Elon began pressuring the co-founders of PayPal to migrate the servers from Unix to Microsoft Windows. PayPal co-founder and then CTO Max Levchin did not ignore this.
Max Levchin. Photo Getty/Drew Angerer At the end of 2000, Elon decided to go on vacation for the first time. While Musk's plane was still in the air en route to Australia, PayPal's board fired him and appointed Peter Thiel as new CEO.
At the same time, the company did not leave Elon Musk completely penniless: he continued to be the largest shareholder of PayPal. When the company struck a $1.5 billion deal with eBay in 2002, Elon received $165 million.
But even before the deal with eBay, Musk, who has always been interested in science fiction, conceived a grandiose project: to launch mice or plants into space, to Mars. For these purposes, he even planned to buy old rockets from the Russians, but they asked a fabulous $8 million for each rocket, and Musk decided that it was easier to build his own spaceships.
Therefore, in early 2002, Musk founded the company Space Exploration Technologies, which is better known as SpaceX. Its goal is to reduce the cost of space flights tenfold.
Elon Musk at SpaceX. Photo: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters SpaceX's first rockets were the Falcon 1 and 9, named after Han Solo's famous ship, the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, and the Dragon spacecraft, named after the song "Puff" the Magic Dragon.”
Falcon 9 rocket. Photo Flickr/spacexphotos SpaceX's long-term goal is to colonize Mars.
However, Musk also has goals on Earth. In 2004, he made his first investment in electric vehicle company Tesla Motors, founded by startup veteran Martin Ebergart.
Musk has been active in the company's development and helped develop the all-electric Tesla Roadster, the company's first car, which was released in 2006.
Tesla Roadster. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images But this was not enough for Musk. In 2006, he came up with the idea of SolarCity, a company that produces solar energy. This is how Musk fights global warming. He gave his cousins Peter and Lyndon Reeve working capital to get the company off the ground. In 2016, Tesla entered into a deal with SolarCity worth $2.6 billion.
Let's return to Tesla. Under Ebergart's leadership, Tesla suffered heavy losses, and Musk staged a coup and ousted Ebergart.
In 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, Elon Musk saved Tesla from bankruptcy by investing $40 million in the company and giving it another $40 million for financial stability. In the same year, he was appointed CEO of the company.
But 2008 still turned out to be extremely difficult for Musk; he calls it his worst year. Tesla continued to suffer losses, SpaceX had problems launching the Falcon 1 rocket. At the beginning of 2009, Elon Musk lived off personal loans.
During the same period, Musk’s wife Justine, with whom he had six children, also divorced.
Justin Musk. Photo cdn.co But at Christmas 2008, a miracle happened: SpaceX signed a contract for space supplies with NASA worth $1.5 billion, and Tesla unexpectedly found the investors it needed so much.
By 2010, things started to look up. Tesla issued its first shares worth $15 million.
Elon Musk's meteoric rise and amazing career have not gone unnoticed in circles where he wasn't particularly keen. The character of Iron Man, played by Robert Downey Jr., was partially based on Elon Musk. And in the film “Iron Man 2” Musk even starred in a cameo role.
At the same time, Musk's personal life left much to be desired. In 2008, he began dating actress Talulah Riley, whom he married in 2010. They divorced in 2012, got married again a year later, and a year later Elon filed for divorce again, but eventually changed his mind. But Talulah did not change her mind - in March 2016, she finally divorced Elon Musk.
Elon Musk with his wife Talulah Riley and children. AP Photo But everything went well with Musk’s companies. By the end of 2015, SpaceX had already completed 24 successful launches to the International Space Station, and in 2016, the company made its first successful water landing of a reusable orbital Falcon 9 rocket.
Musk never stops bursting with ideas. In addition to the colonization of Mars, electric vehicles and solar energy production, he conceived a device called . This is the kind of vehicle that will take you from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes.
Hyperloop. Photo by Hyperloop Transportation Technologies At the end of 2015, Musk launched OpenAI, a non-profit organization he created to conduct research on the dangers of artificial intelligence to humanity. This issue seriously worries him.
And at the same time, he continues to introduce the “autopilot” function into Tesla cars, assuring that this is the future.
At the end of 2016, Musk posted a joke on Twitter that he was going to build a network of tunnels under the bridge to reduce traffic flow. Everyone then thought it was a joke. However, the companyThe Boring Company recently completed the first section of the tunnel under Los Angeles.
Is this not enough for you? Musk loves to surprise. Therefore, he created, one of the goals of which is to introduce computer chips into people's brains. Elon believes that this is the only way people will be able to cope with the threat from artificial intelligence.
Despite all this, Musk cannot hide from criticism. Thus, the public was outraged by his participation in the board of directors of technology companies created for Donald Trump. Musk ultimately withdrew from that council when Trump pulled the US out of the Paris climate accord.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images And everything is fine with Musk. Tesla recently released a new electric car, the Model 3, which Rubik already talked about. The car was created for mass production and its cost is $35,000. Time will tell what will come of it.
As the CEO of two of the largest companies in the world - Tesla and SpaceX - and the co-founder of OpenAI, Musk seems to believe in being involved in every field he can get his hands on. Once he even stated that he would not be happy until humanity moved from Earth to Mars. In almost any business, his [...]