Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. His mother, Maye Musk, is a Canadian model and the oldest woman to star in a CoverGirl campaign. When Musk was growing up, she worked five jobs at one point to support her family. Musk’s father, Errol Musk, is a wealthy South African engineer.
Musk spent his early childhood with his brother Kimbal and sister Tosca in South Africa. His parents divorced when he was 10. As a child, Musk was so lost in his daydreams about inventions that his parents and doctors ordered a test to check his hearing.
Around the time of his parents’ divorce, Musk developed an interest in computers and taught himself how to program. In grade school, Musk was short, introverted and bookish. He was bullied until he was 15 and went through a growth spurt and learned how to defend himself with karate and wrestling.
Education and Citizenship
At age 17, in 1989, Musk moved to Canada to attend Queen’s University and avoid mandatory service in the South African military. Musk obtained his Canadian citizenship that year, in part because he felt it would be easier to obtain American citizenship via that path.
In 1992, Musk left Canada to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with an undergraduate degree in economics and stayed for a second bachelor’s degree in physics.
After leaving Penn, Musk headed to Stanford University in California to pursue a PhD in energy physics. However, his move was timed perfectly with the Internet boom, and he dropped out of Stanford after just two days to become a part of it, launching his first company, Zip2 Corporation in 1995. Musk became a U.S. citizen in 2002.
Companies: SpaceX, Tesla, and More
Musk launched his first company, Zip2 Corporation, in 1995 with his brother Kimbal. An online city guide, Zip2 was soon providing content for the new websites of both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. In 1999, a division of Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options.
In 1999, Elon and Kimbal Musk used the money from their sale of Zip2 to found X.com, an online financial services/payments company. An X.com acquisition the following year led to the creation of PayPal as it is known today.
SpaceX
Musk founded his third company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, in 2002 with the intention of building spacecraft for commercial space travel. By 2008, SpaceX was well established, and NASA awarded the company the contract to handle cargo transport for the International Space Station—with plans for astronaut transport in the future—in a move to replace NASA’s own space shuttle missions.
