Elon Musk is a well known business man with many professions he established throughout his career. Some of his most popular businesses include Tesla, X, formerly called Twitter, SpaceX, and PayPal.
But how did he create so many successful enterprises?
Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971 in South Africa. He grew up wealthy, since his mother was a model and his father was an engineer.
Even as a kid, he loved reading and was a prestigious self taught learner; he researched everything from science fiction to whole encyclopedias.
His self directed learning style allowed him to develop a different kind of wisdom and a unique perspective of the world.
At the ripe age of 24, Musk created his first business in 1995, called Zip2. Zip2 was a directory that was basically an internet version of the yellow pages or maps.
Musk described the company by saying, “Everyone ought to be able to find the closest pizza parlour and to be able to figure out how to get there.” Despite being a successful enterprise, Zip2 ended in 1999 due to incompatibility with new technology.
PayPal was Musk’s rebound company, founded right after Zip2 failed, in March of 1999. PayPal gives the option of digital payment for businesses and consumers.
It really kicked off in 2002, when Ebay started using it to make transactions. PayPal is still around today, and has a net worth of $1.5 billion.
One of the most popular of his enterprises has to be X. It was originally co-founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Noah Glass, and Evan Williams in 2006, and was off to a slow start.
Over time, the company benefited in popularity, when people started sharing stories and everyone responded with “tweets”. They even profited $18 million.
However, X slowly started losing money in 2014, due to different platforms like Instagram and YouTube becoming more popular and successful.
Elon Musk was aware of this and took charge in 2022 when he bought the platform for $44 billion. After he made the purchase, the company immediately skyrocketed.
Musk saved X from bankruptcy and changed the whole structure of the site to better fit individuals.
Perhaps the most popular of all Elon Musk’s successful businesses is Tesla. This electric car company was founded as early as 2003, but didn’t really become popular until the COVID years.
At first, work started out slow, as everyone was still figuring out the details of making the electric car a reality. It took a long time, but it was finally released to the public in early 2008.
Elon Musk was one of the main collaborators to Tesla, and actually used PayPal to help the company with payments. He also helped improve the design of the car to make it more efficient.
Musk has improved many parts of technology, and brought us new inventions and platforms.