Elon Musk is the richest person in the world with a fortune of $262 billion (240 billion), but it wasn’t plain sailing for the South-African entrepreneur. There were multiple bumps along the road.
Despite being at the helm of companies like Tesla and SpaceX, he was ousted multiple times from his own enterprises, had numerous rocket crashes and it was a slow start before his electric vehicles (EVs) really took off.
Here’s a look back at the various failures and successes underpinning his controversial image.
Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa.
His first business venture was at the age of 12 when he sold the code for the PC space-fighting game Blastar for $500 (460) to the magazine PC and Office Technology. "[It was] a trivial game... but better than Flappy Bird," Musk said.
After graduating high school in South Africa, he moved to Canada, where he studied at Queen’s University in Kingston in Ontario for two years.
But he finished his studies in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree in physics and economics.
To pay for rent while he was a student in Pennsylvania, Musk and a classmate rented a 10-bedroom frat house and transformed it into a nightclub.
Musk then studied for his PhD at Stanford University but dropped out of the programme just two days after it began and decided to work in the dot-com bubble.
Musk then founded Zip2 with his brother Kimbal in...
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