Tech Billionaires: Elon Musk

There's so many things that make people sad

or depressed about the future,

but I think becoming a space-faring civilization is one

of those things that makes you excited about the future.

Space is one of those things that I think

almost everyone is inspired by and if you asked people

what was the most inspiring event in history,

it was probably landing on the moon.

You know, I think all transport,

with the exception of rockets, will go fully electric.

Owning a car that is not self-driving in the longterm

will be like owning a horse.

You would own it for,

and you would use it for sentimental reasons,

but not for, you know, not for daily use, really.

Our generation has seen incredible advancements

in technology.

For that we can thank one of the most successful,

influential and notorious entrepreneurs of the 21st century.

Elon Musk, the mind behind PayPal,

founder of Tesla and SpaceX,

the second richest man in the world

after Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos,

with an estimated net worth of 163 billion US dollars.

He is the ambitious genius, intellectual

and eccentric tech billionaire who shook the entire world

with groundbreaking inventions.

This man is an engineer, a charismatic leader,

a philanthropist.

Elon Musk is so many things.

Today he has a dream, one that many believe unreachable,

at least during his lifetime,

space colonization.

This is the story of an individual

whose inventions revolutionize the tech industry.

After creating space rockets, electric cars,

solar batteries, and robots,

his astounding success puts him on top of the rank

of the world's wealthiest men.

They are masterminds,

ambitious, competitive and ruthless, not afraid of failure,

dedicated to their mission of bettering the world.

Always reaching for excellence, they lead by example.

Unlike many industries,

the tech billionaires are mostly self-made.

It is through their genius

that they revolutionize the industry

and together they change the world.

Join us in this series as we take a look

at some of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the modern world,

the tech billionaires, Bill Gates, Elon Musk,

Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.

Together they're worth a collective

of more than 900 billion US dollars.

They will be remembered in history

as the most influential people of the 21st century.

Elon Reeve Musk was born on the 28th of June 1971,

in Pretoria, South Africa.

His father, Errol, was a wealthy,

successful South African engineer

and his mother, Maye Musk, was a Canadian model.

Elon was the oldest of three children

and he spent all of his childhood with his brother, Kimbal,

and his sister, Tosca, in South Africa.

They could be one beautiful, happy family,

everything looked amazing on the surface,

but the reality was much different.

Elon grew up in a tumultuous household

and had a difficult and lonely childhood.

His father was abusive towards his mother

and denied Elon any help to begin a career in business.

He wasn't interested in his children's happiness or success.

His parents would divorce when Elon was 10 years old.

Elon was different.

From the age of three,

he was already showing signs of ingenuity.

His mother called him a nerd.

In her autobiography published in 2019,

"A Woman Makes A Plan,"

she shared some humble photographs of his childhood

and wrote, "When Elon was young,

I noticed that he read everything."

She realized that he had something special.

Elon was bullied at school and he struggled

with having social life, unlike his sibling.

He was short and introverted.

He liked to read, which didn't make him popular

among the other children.

He said, "I was this little bookworm kid

and probably a bit of a smart aleck

so this is a recipe for disaster."

He described these years as lonely and brutal.

His only bright escape, technology.

He was so consumed in his daydreams of inventions

that his parents had a test done

to check his hearing abilities.

He soon developed an interest in computers

and electronic devices.

After finally getting his first computer,

he learned to code at only 10 years old.

He taught himself programming

after realizing the classes weren't helping

because he was ahead of his teachers.

He did not always get good grades, especially in subjects

where he couldn't see the point learning them,

like learning Afrikaans.

Rather he would spend his time playing video games,

reading books, or coding.

But for the subjects that were important to him,

such as physics and computers,

he would get the highest grade.

To this day, he still uses reading

to become an expert in a field that interests him.

Even comic books would eventually inspire him

to push humanity forward

as the stories in them were always about saving the world.

Elon quickly figured out

that if he could write and sell a better software,

than he could buy better computers.

So he created his first piece of space-gaming software,

called Blastar.

He sold it to a magazine for $500.

At 12 years old, he had sold his first commercial program.

In his college days, he would sell computer parts

out of his dorm room to earn some extra cash.

At this point, he had no plan of becoming a billionaire,

but it seems that he was born with a creative superpower.

Not afraid of experimenting and figuring things out,

he was already thinking like an entrepreneur

at a very young age and was born to innovate and create.

His childhood was tough, but it gave him an important asset,

the ability to adapt

and overcome the most difficult challenges.

In June 1989, the second part of his life began.

At 17 and against his father's wishes,

he decided to embark on a plane to Canada,

leaving South Africa and his childhood behind forever.

He had in mind the American dream.

Elon remembered thinking

that America's where great things are possible,

more than in any other country in the world.

He didn't have a concrete plan,

but he knew that staying in his home country

wouldn't get him where he wanted to go.

Growing up during apartheid,

he knew he had to make a decision

and joining the mandatory service in the army

was out of the question.

He described the apartheid as surreal

and he didn't believe in the government.

After arriving in Canada,

he went to Queens University in Ontario,

where he met his first wife, Justine Wilson.

They got married in 2000 and would have five children.

He then moved to the US

to attend the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia

where he graduated with BA degrees

in economics and physics in 1997.

He was 24 when he moved to the Bay Area, California

to pursue a degree in energy physics at Stanford,

but he dropped out after only two days

and went on to bigger things.

Musk is not the first big name in Silicon Valley

to have dropped out of college and gone on to find success.

Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs,

and two of the world's richest men,

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg,

all dropped out of school to start their own company.

Since it was the dawn of the internet,

Musk wanted to work on new technology

and he decided to move to Silicon Valley in California,

the promise land for any entrepreneur in the tech world.

That is where he thought he would thrive the most.

It was soon revealed that Musk was a problem solver.

By the time he had moved to Silicon Valley

he had a grand vision, ensuring the future of humanity.

But first, he knew that he wanted

to make useful things happen on the internet.

In 1995, he created his first company, Zip2,

with his brother Kimbal,

which was an online version of the yellow pages,

however, he had no idea

how difficult the first years would end up being.

Having moved from South Africa

and having huge student college debt,

Musk was so poor that he was unable to afford both a home

and an office for his company.

He ended up having to sleep on the couch

of his small office space and showering at a local gym.

The first few months were a lot of excitement

but after several months,

it started to get really difficult.

Reality was kicking in.

With only just one computer

he was working seven days a week,

running the website during the day and coding at night.

He has declared that in order to have success

you have to have a high pain threshold.

Building a company from scratch is painful.

Eventually his company took off and grew.