American business magnate and engineer Elon Musk was born and grew up in Pretoria, South Africa. At the age of 17, he moved from there to Canada.
Tony Stark from the movie "Iron Man" is largely based on Elon Musk. By the way, Musk made a cameo appearance in Iron Man 2, and parts of the movie were even filmed at SpaceX.
In 2018, SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy with a Tesla Roadster belonging to Elon Musk and a dummy called 'Starman' in the driver's seat, as a creative way to draw attention to space exploration.
Elon Musk is one of the co-founders of the popular electronic payment system PayPal.
Elon Musk was badly bullied at school. One day he was hospitalized after a gang of boys brutally beat him unconscious. Nose injuries required corrective surgery.
Elon Musk earned his first money at the age of 12. He independently created his own video game called Blastar and sold it to a PC magazine for $500. Blastar is a fun space shooter.
Elon Musk has an interesting personal life. After divorcing his first wife in 2008, he married Talulah Riley (English actress) in 2010. They divorced two years later. And in 2013 they got married again. But in 2016 they divorced again.
After selling his first company Zip2 in 1999, Elon Musk bought a brand new McLaren F1 supercar, but the very next year he completely crashed it. Elon was not injured in this accident.
Elon Musk received $22 million from the sale of his first company Zip 2, then the sale of the second company has already brought him $176 million (eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion).
At the age of 10, Elon Musk learned the first programming language BASIC, and that too in the days before the internet. According to the manual it's supposed to take about 6 months, but Elon completed it in only 3 days without a break for sleep.
To involve in rocket science and become the chief engineer at SpaceX, Elon Musk studied tons of old Soviet rocket manuals. They were outdated, but laid an important foundation for future space exploration.
Elon Musk has visited Russia two times to buy refurbished intercontinental ballistic missiles that could send a greenhouse with plants to Mars, which would arouse public interest in space exploration. The rockets' price was too high, so he decided to start a company that could build affordable rockets. This is how SpaceX came into existence.
To encourage all automakers to accelerate the development of electric cars and move towards zero-emission vehicles, Elon Musk announced that Tesla will allow fair use of its technology patents to anyone.
It took Elon Musk $11 million, 10 years of waiting, and an "amazing amount of effort" to get the Tesla.com domain name.
During one rare vacation in 2000, Elon Musk contracted the most severe form of malaria, which almost killed him. During the illness, Elon lost 20 kg of weight. After that, he joked: "That’s my lesson for taking a vacation: vacation will kill you."
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