Elan mask the genius of the 21 century

By the age of thirty-one Elan mask was a multi-millionaire thanks to his creation of the company that
became PayPal, the popular money-transfer service for Web consumers. Musk has become one of a
new breed of what is called "thrillionaires", or a class of former high-tech entrepreneurs who are
using their newfound wealth to help turn science-fiction dreams into reality. Musk is also the founder
of Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, a company which he hoped could someday make both
space tourism and a colony on the planet Mars realistic goals for humankind. He is also the founder
of Tesla motors an automobile company which specialize in the making of electric cars, and SolarCity
a company which designs, finances and installs solar_energy systems. He has also envisioned a
conceptual high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop.

Sells homemade video game

Musk was born in South Africa in 1971 from an engineer father and a nutritionist mother originally
from Canada. Musk was fascinated by science fiction and computers in his adolescent years. When
he was twelve, he wrote the code for his own video game and actually sold it to a company.in the
age of 17 he emigrated to Canada in order to avoid the the required military service for white males
in South Africa. Thanks to his mother's Canadian ties, he was able to enroll at Queen's University in
Kingston, one of Ontario's top schools. Midway through his undergraduate education, he transferred
to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor's degree in economics and a second
bachelor's in physics a year later. From there, he won admission to the prestigious doctoral program
at Stanford University in California, where he planned to concentrate on a Ph.D. in energy physics. He
moved to California just as the Internet boom was starting in 1995, and he decided he wanted to be
in on it, too. He dropped out of Stanford after just two days in order to start his first company, Zip2
Corporation. This was an online city guide aimed at the newspaper publishing business.

Musk was only twenty-for when he started the company and he devoted all of his energy to make it
succeed, “Failure is an option here, If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

he rented an office which was where he lived too , working all day , sleeping in the couch at night
and showering in the public showers , which "was cheaper than renting an apartment," he explained.

Still, the company struggled to fulfill its contracts and meet the payroll and other costs, and he
looked for outside financing.

In the end, Musk's decision was a smart one. In February 1999 Compaq Computer Corporation
bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash, which was one of the largest cash deals in the Internet business
sector at the time.

Starts online bank

He used the money to start another company, which he called X.com. This was an online bank with
grand plans to become a full-range provider of financial services to consumers. He used a smart idea
to help bring consumers to the company, he offered a $20 card for each subscription and a $10 for
inviting a friend within two months he had one hundred thousand customers. But consumer
skepticism about the security of online banking was X.com's biggest obstacle to success.
Buys paypal

In March 2000, X.com bought a company called Confinity .Musk believed that its online-transfer
technology, which was known as "P2P" for "person-to-person," had a promising future. After that He
changed the name of the company to paypal.

The company had an enormous growth through 2001, thanks to its presence in ebay the online
auction Web site. Later that year ebay bought the company for $1.5 billion.by then Elan had already
began in the foundation of a new company called spaceX.

The beginning of SpaceX

All began with a phone call that he did late at night to his mother, she said “He called me at 2 am and
he said mom I’m going to go to mars before I’m dead “.musk was known for his fascination with
space and specially mars , one night he was up at night searching in the NASA site web for project
about mars and he didn’t found anything he checked the technology used for the rockets and he
realized that they are still using a technology that is 40 years old, and in that night that he made the
call and he decided to start his own private company for exploring space with one main purpose is to
send a rocket to mars and reduce the cost of space exploring to help achieve space tourism for the
ordinary people because he believe that life in earth is limited and we should start looking for
alternatives.

He contacted some of space exploring innovators and technicians to help him build two falcon
rockets that he designed. He had a much more difficult time attracting venture capital for this idea,
"Space is pretty far out of the comfort zone of just about every VC on Earth," he admitted. Instead,
he was forced to put up his own money to build what would become the first reusable rocket in the
private sector.
In September 2009, SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket, became the first privately funded liquid-fuelled vehicle
to put a satellite into Earth orbit. And many achievement by the company had seen the light from
that day .this month spaceX had failed to return a rocket after lunching it in order to reduce the cost
of building a onetime used rocket. But the company is not dead yet and it will correct the errors that
it had been made and it will make us another achievement by the end of this year.

Tesla motors

Elan musk is also fascinated with electric cars , and he founded Tesla motors a company which is
trying to build an electric car for day to day use, he began building a sport electric car to change the
idea of the slow electric car that we have in our mind and he called it “the Tesla Roadster “,after
gaining the trust of many car makers he had contract with major ones to supply them with batteries
and electric motors , to help encourage the electric car industry he made all of his project in Tesla
motors open source. he also lunched “The Tesla Model S “a family car with luxury design and he will
launch by the end of this year the long awaited 4*4 car called “ the Tesla Model X” .

Elan musk has also provided the initial concept for SolarCity and he remains a shareholder in it. and
he designed a high speed transport way called “Hyperloop” .Elan musk is considered by many the
savior of our time, because of his open source projects that are greed free and seek the
development of mankind , and because of the solutions that he propose for the major problems that
threaten our life .

Anouar chatit GE N°10

Sources : http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/Li-Ou/Musk-Elon.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

http://www.spacex.com/

documentary : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh45igK4Esw