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CAN YOU GUESS WHO THIS IS?
He is a South African and he is a successful iScatterling. Read on (courtesy of Wikipedia)
Musk was born and grew up in South Africa, the son of a South African engineer and New York City dietitian and model. He left home at 17 for Kingston, Ontario where he enrolled at Queen’s University. He left South Africa without his parents’ support, in part because he wished to avoid compulsory service in the South African Defence Force. He was awarded a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received an undergraduate business degree from Wharton, staying on another year to finish a second degree in physics.
Musk lives in Bel-Air, California, with his wife Justine.
In 1995, Musk went on to a graduate program in energy physics at Stanford, in which he stayed exactly two days before dropping out to start Zip2, which provided online content publishing software for news organizations. In 1999, Compaq’s AltaVista division acquired Zip2 for US$307 million in cash and US$34 million in stock options.[2] Elon and his brother Kimbal held about 12 percent of Zip2 at the time.
In March 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and email payments company. One year later, X.com acquired Confinity, originally a company formed to beam money between Palm Pilots, and the combined entity focused on email payments through the PayPal domain, acquired as part of Confinity. In February 2001, X.com changed its legal name to PayPal. In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for US$1.5 billion in stock. Before its sale, Musk, the company’s largest shareholder, owned 11.7% of PayPal’s shares.
In June 2002, Musk founded his third company, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), of which he is currently the CEO and CTO. SpaceX develops and manufactures space launch vehicles, with an emphasis on low cost and high reliability. The company’s first two launch vehicles are the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets.
In addition to his business activities in entrepreneurial space, Musk is an early round investor in and Chairman of the Board of Tesla Motors, a high performance electric sportscar startup company. He is also an early round investor in and Chairman of the Board of SolarCity, a photovoltaics products and services startup company.
Musk’s fortune is estimated at US$328 million.
I find it fantastic to know that two of todays toprated online payment systems, (Thawte and PayPal) are where they are due to South African grown entrpreneurial enterprise.
2 comments ↓
looks a bit nerdy - okay a lot nerdy - but a damn wealthy one at that.
With that kind of cash in the bank it matters not a hoot what you look like!
If only I had 1% of it!
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