Elon Musk

About Elon Musk

Elon Musk (born 28 June 1971) is an entrepreneur and a co-founder of PayPal and SpaceX. He is chairman of Tesla Motors and SolarCity.

Musk was born and grew up in South Africa, the son of a South African engineer and a Canadian-born mother who has worked as a New York City dietitian and modeled for fun. His father inspired his love of technology and Musk bought his first computer at age 10 and taught himself how to program; by the age of 12 he sold his first commercial software, a space game called Blaster.

He left home in 1988 at the age of 17, without his parents' support, and in part because of the prospect of compulsory service in the South African military: "I don't have an issue with serving in the military per se, but serving in the South African army suppressing black people just didn't seem like a really good way to spend time,". He headed toward the US, saying: "It is where great things are possible. I am nauseatingly pro-American." Leaving South Africa he first went to Kingston, Ontario where he enrolled at Queen's University, barely scraping by on as little as $1 a day with part-time and summer jobs. He then landed a prestigious scholarship to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "Tuition costs are outrageous ... Fortunately, they gave me a scholarship ... so I only had to cover living expenses, books, etc., by working." From Wharton he received an undergraduate degree in economics and stayed on another year to finish a second bachelors degree in physics. His undergraduate degrees behind him, Musk then considered three areas he wanted to get into that were "important problems", as he said later, "One was the Internet, one was clean energy, and one was space."