“I would be happy if you died on Mars, unless it was from a collision!”

(Elon Musk)

On the twenty-eighth of June of this year, Elon Musk turned 51 years old and entered his fifty-second year. Controversial in our time, whether with his amazing achievements or his most astonishing statements, or even the amount of attack on him.

He is the founder of SpaceX, the CEO of Tesla, the electric vehicle company, a former co-founder of PayPal, a payment systems company, an investor partner and a board member of eight companies, all working to create unprecedented technological breakthroughs.

On his birthday, we ask an important question: what was this person's childhood like?

What exactly was he doing during his adolescence and youth?

How did he reach this global position?

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A child is being bullied

Elon Musk, at about eight years old, was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, which made him struggle with social interaction

In Pretoria, the third largest city in South Africa, Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971. The mother is "My Musk", a Canadian nutrition model, while the father is a white South African electromechanical engineer, of British Dutch origin, He worked as a pilot, sailor and owner of a mining mine in Zambia.

Musk's mother will appear with him a lot later, as she is the closest to his heart, while his father will not have a good relationship with him for long.

Elon is the eldest of his siblings, and a year later his brother Kimball was born, and then his younger sister Tosca was born in 1974. In his childhood, Musk underwent surgery to remove the nasal appendix, because his doctors suspected that it affected his hearing ability, but his mother later assured them that the matter It has nothing to do with the adenoid, and that her son "lives in another world", which was later confirmed by his diagnosis of "Asperger's syndrome", an autistic disorder with which social interaction appears difficult.

In his early childhood, Musk showed an early interest in reading, especially to the famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.

He also showed great interest in the computer, which was a modern device in the seventies.

In his late childhood, the child Elon Musk was subjected to many incidents of bullying, and at one time was taken to the hospital after he was beaten by a group of his friends and thrown from the stairs, and he was reportedly beaten after being thrown to the ground until he lost consciousness.

Adolescence (10-20 years) .. Programming, study and transportation

1989 stories in my book:


January: @kimbal @ToscaMusk @elonmusk #Johannesburg


May: Elon (17) leaves for #Canada


October: Tosca (15) sells my home


December: We move to #Toronto # AWomanMakesAPlan link: https://t.co/LvptB4fjM3 pic.twitter.com/oLVd8stKOW

— Maye Musk (@mayemusk) June 11, 2020

Elon Musk with his brother "Kimbal" and his sister "Tosca" in the year 1989 - media

In 1980, at the age of nine, Musk's parents divorced, and Elon moved with his brother Kimball to live with his father in Pretoria based on their decision.

Later, two years after the divorce, Elon regretted staying with his father, and their relationship soured, that Musk later said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine that his decision to move to life with his father "wasn't a good idea."

However, in that particular period, Elon Musk became obsessed with developing games, as he was able to learn programming by himself, and at the age of twelve he was able to develop a programming code in the Basic language for a video game called “Blastar”, which he sold to a magazine specialized in Computer field for $500.

Elon Musk spent his entire basic education in South Africa, where he attended Waterkloof Preparatory School, then Pretoria High School, from which he graduated, and then moved in 1989 to Canada with the help of his Canadian mother, to live with one of his nephews in the border state of Saskatchewan with the United States, in A small village near Waldeck, where he spent a year working in agriculture and some manual tasks in the mills in the village.

Arriving in 1990, Musk enrolled at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, at the age of 18, ending his second decade as an eccentric college student obsessed with technology and science, and beginning his third decade by moving to the United States.

The twenties... the beginnings of the mask we know

Musk spent two years at Queen's University of Kingston, then moved to the United States to complete his education at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, graduating with two university degrees: a bachelor's degree in physics, and also a bachelor's degree in economics from the Wharton School of Business of the same university.

Musk studied physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania, which helped him a lot in his later career as an entrepreneur with interests in science and technology projects.

Elon Musk at the age of eighteen during his birthday celebration – media

While studying at the University of Pennsylvania, Musk had what some describe as his "first entrepreneurial experience," teaming up with a colleague to turn some college dorm rooms into a casual nightclub that brought him some profits.

When Musk turned 25, he moved to California - and that was in the mid-nineties - and attended a number of courses in physics and the properties of materials.

In 1995, Musk applied to a doctoral program in physics and properties of materials at Stanford University, where he was already accepted, and during that time he tried to get a job at Netscape, which was one of the most famous companies in Silicon Valley at the time, but he did not receive A response at all, either accepting or rejecting.

Although admission to Stanford University is a dream for any young man, given that the admission criteria in itself are very difficult, Musk, in that vacillating period between rushing to obtain a doctorate in physics, or searching for a job at an excellent company in Silicon Valley, ended up Withdrawing from university and fully devoted to his interests, he engaged in the implementation of some ideas related to the Internet projects that were rapidly rising globally.

Elon Musk started his first startup in cooperation with his brother Kimball and called it Zip2, a company that specializes in building a marketing guide for local newspapers.Musk was able to raise money from some investors, and his company succeeded in obtaining contracts from major newspapers in America such as The New York Times and others. Four years after the founding of Zip2, specifically in February 1999, Compaq acquired it for 307 million dollars, in which Musk's share was 22 million against 7% of its ownership.

Elon Musk (right) and Peter Thiel (left) were co-founders of PayPal, the electronic payment company

One month after acquiring his $22 million stake, Musk immediately co-founded a new company called Xdotcom with $10 million - from his share of the sale of Zip2 - that specialized in providing online payment services.

Musk held the position of CEO for a period, but the board of directors relieved him of this position due to ongoing disputes, while retaining him as a member of the board of directors.

Two years later, after its merger with Confinity, the company was renamed PayPal, which was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion, of which Musk's stake was $165 million.

Elon Musk, in his twenties, has a fortune of $165 million, and a wealth of experience in founding and managing two of the biggest Silicon Valley companies.

He could have retired and devote himself all his life to spend this wealth, but he entered a new, more exciting phase with the beginning of his thirties.

1930s.. Space rockets and electric cars

In 2002, Musk obtained US citizenship to become a tripartite (South African - Canadian - American), and in the same year, at the age of 31, he allocated $100 million of his fortune obtained from selling his stake in PayPal. To found a company called SpaceX, whose primary purpose was to “make space travel ten times cheaper.”

Two years after founding SpaceX and laying out its strategic plans to facilitate space travel and the colonization of Mars, in 2004 Musk began investing in a small startup founded by engineers in Silicon Valley, working to develop electric vehicles.

That company was Tesla, which launched its first electric car in 2006, while he was chairman of its board, before taking over as CEO.

Musk not only established a space company and invested in an electric car company, but also laid the foundation stone and the initial capital for Solarcity, a company specializing in solar energy, and assigned the management of the company to his cousins ​​Peter and Lyndon Rive.

Several years later, SolarCity became the second largest solar energy company in America, and was acquired by Tesla in 2016 with a $2.6 billion deal.

Between "SpaceX" and "Tesla" and "Solar City", and specifically in early 2008, when Musk was thirty-seven, everything almost collapsed.

With the outbreak of the global financial crisis, with investors reluctant to fund Tesla, and SpaceX's failure to launch its first rocket, Musk almost reached the brink of bankruptcy, even describing that year as "the worst year of his life", to the point that he began to rely on Personal loans to meet the requirements of his life.

Later, the rescue finally came with the signing of a contract by SpaceX with NASA worth one and a half billion dollars, and Tesla got the support of investors.

Finally, Musk exited the club of the thirties, and SpaceX achieved major achievements, Tesla was put up for public subscription, and the pace of Solar City's growth accelerated, to enter the club of the forties with the title of billionaire.

The forties... the mask we know

In the early forties, Elon Musk began to gain a large portion of the international media, including Hollywood.

Musk appeared in a number of famous works, it is true that most of them are fleeting scenes, but it was a widespread promotion of the young businessman who is making huge achievements in the fields of space and energy, and he was widely described as the real Iron Man, coinciding with the Marvel films.

In 2013, Musk revealed for the first time the blueprint for the Hyperloop project, a hypersonic transportation system that enables travel at supersonic speeds and makes it easier to move between cities in much less time than planes and trains.

In 2015, Musk founded Open AI, an artificial intelligence research company for the benefit of humanity, with a capital of one billion dollars.

Months after launching his artificial intelligence company, Musk announced in 2016 the establishment of one of the most controversial companies, the neurotechnology company "Neuralink", which aims to connect the human brain with artificial intelligence systems through a chip implanted in the brain that improves its performance in terms of performance. memory and thinking, and allows the human mind to communicate directly with automated systems.

At the end of 2016 and early 2017, Musk launched a fast tunnel drilling company called "The Boring Company", after he mentioned in one of his tweets that the crowds in Los Angeles inspired him to start the idea.

In the same period, Musk began promoting the "Starlink" project as a side project for "SpaceX" to launch a constellation of satellites that provide rapid access to the Internet around the world.

The fifties...the opening of a huge deal

Elon Musk (European)

In June 2021, Elon Musk completed his fiftieth year with a fortune of $300 billion, then returned to an average of $250 billion, becoming the businessman who suffered from bullying as a child, the richest man in the world ever.

Musk kicked off his first year after 50 with a controversial $44 billion takeover of his favorite Twitter platform, one of the most significant deals he's made in his bargaining life, if not the most important.

At the end of 2021, as he entered the Fifties Club, Musk was asked what he thought of aging and death.

Musk's answer was that he aspires to transform the human race into a multi-planetary species (Multi-Planet species), but he is not looking at all for ways to immortality or resist aging, on the contrary, Musk stated that he believes that "it is necessary that We die,” because humans seldom change their thoughts, and if they stay for a long time or forever means that humanity will not progress.

Each generation should give way to the next for more new ideas to emerge.

Musk's last statements about life were that he wants to live a healthy life for a longer period, but he does not wish to live forever, and is not afraid of death, but rather considers it a kind of "survival," as he put it.

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Sources

1 – Here's how the billionaire went from getting bullied as a child to becoming one of the most successful and controversial men in tech.

2 - Elon Musk's life story: the highs and lows of the Tesla and SpaceX boss

3 - Elon Musk says he wants to stay healthy, but he's not afraid of death

4- Elon Musk thinks you should die