Musk was born to a South African father and a Canadian mother. He displayed an early talent for computers and entrepreneurship. At age 12 he created a video game and sold it to a computer magazine. In 1988, after obtaining a Canadian passport, Musk left South Africa because he was unwilling to support apartheid through compulsory military service and because he sought the greater economic opportunities available in the United States.
Musk attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and in 1992 he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he received bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics in 1995. He enrolled in graduate school in physics at Stanford University in California, but he left after only two days because he felt that the Internet had much more potential to change society than work in physics. That year he founded Zip2, a company that provided maps and business directories to online newspapers. In 1999 Zip2 was bought by the computer manufacturer Compaq for $307 million, and Musk then founded an online financial services company, X.com, which later became PayPal, which specialized in transferring money online. The online auction eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
Musk was long convinced that for life to survive, humanity had to become a multiplanet species. However, he was dissatisfied with the great expense of rocket launchers. In 2002 he founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) to make more affordable rockets. Its first two rockets were the Falcon 1 (first launched in 2006) and the larger Falcon 9 (first launched in 2010), which were designed to cost much less than competing rockets. A third rocket, the Falcon Heavy, is designed to carry 53,000 kg (117,000 pounds) to orbit, nearly twice that of its largest competitor, the Boeing Company’s Delta IV Heavy, for one-third the cost. It was scheduled for launch in 2014, but was delayed until 2017 due to the investigation of Falcon 9 failures. SpaceX also developed the Dragon spacecraft, which carries supplies to the International Space Station and is designed to carry as many as seven astronauts. Musk sought to reduce the expense of spaceflight by developing a fully reusable rocket that could lift off and return to the pad it launched from. Beginning in 2012, SpaceX’s Grasshopper rocket made several short flights to test such technology. In addition to being CEO of SpaceX, Musk was also chief designer in building the Falcon rockets, Dragon, and Grasshopper.
Musk had long been interested in the possibilities of electric cars, and in 2004 he became one of the major funders of Tesla Motors, an electric car company founded by entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. In 2006 Tesla introduced its first car, the Roadster, which could travel 394 km (245 miles) on a single charge. Unlike most previous electric vehicles, which Musk thought were stodgy and uninteresting, it was a sports car that could go from 0 to 97 km (60 miles) per hour in less than four seconds. In 2012 Tesla introduced the Model S sedan, which was acclaimed by automotive critics for its performance and design. In 2012, Tesla unveiled an SUV crossover, named Model X, and began deliveries in 2015. The Model 3, a premium, all-electric sedan is scheduled to begin production in 2017, and deliveries in 2018.
Dissatisfied with the projected cost ($68 billion) of a high-speed rail system in California, Musk in 2013 proposed an alternate, faster system, the Hyperloop, a pneumatic tube in which a pod carrying 28 passengers would travel the 560 km (350 miles) between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 35 minutes at a top speed of 1,220 km (760 miles) per hour, nearly the speed of sound. Musk claimed that the Hyperloop would cost only $6 billion and that, with the pods departing every two minutes on average, the system could accommodate the six million people who travel that route every year. However, he stated that, between running SpaceX and Tesla, he could not devote time to the Hyperloop’s development.
