Elon Musk is an American entrepreneur, but not everyone knows that he was born far from the United States of America on the distant African continent.
The parents of the future celebrity were engineer Errol Musk and model May Haldeman. Elon was the first child in the family, he was named after his great-grandfather – his mother’s grandfather. Later, the boy had a younger brother and sister, they were named Kimbal and Tosca.
On June 28, 1971, the firstborn was born in the Musk family and was named Elon Reeve. The boy had interesting roots: his ancestors belonged to Swiss Germans and Canadians who emigrated to the Republic of South Africa. Ilona’s grandfather was an aviator, he traveled a lot with his family, and his grandmother was a teacher. In 1950, the Haldeman family moved to South Africa, where May became a successful model at the age of fifteen.
In the city of Pretoria, where the family settled, the man who became the father of Elon Errol Musk also lived, he worked as a builder at the time when they met the mother of the future billionaire. After getting married, May and Errol Musk remained to live and work in Pretoria, South Africa, where their first son would be born. He was a closed boy, he was often offended at school, but he had a craving for education and quickly grasped new knowledge.
After the divorce of his parents, Elon and his younger brother and sister lived with their mother in the city of Durban, but then the brothers moved to their father. It was life with his father that instilled in the boys the skills of an engineer, they helped him with his work and absorbed the skill of his father. Although, by nature, he was a rather difficult and demanding person.
For his first ten years, Elon receives a computer as a gift, on which he learns to program and successfully masters this skill. At twelve, Elon had already become a young entrepreneur, created his own video game, he sold it and received five hundred dollars for his creation. The young man began to buy shares, and by selling them when the price of them increased, he earned a trip to enter the university in the homeland of his ancestors in Canada.
Chronology of important events in the life of Elon Musk
- The year 1989 was marked for the young entrepreneur by entering the Canadian Queen’s University at Kingston in Kingston.
- 1991 – Elon transfers to the University of Pennsylvania, which is located in the United States of America, the city of Philadelphia. Here he received a bachelor’s degree in physics and economics.
- 1995 – Musk enters another university – Stanford, located near the city of Palo Alto. He did not study here, since at that time the shares of companies working via the Internet soared sharply. Elon decides to start his own Zip2 Corporation.
- 1999 – Elon sells his company Zip2 and becomes a co-founder of X.com, which later created the PayPal payment system.
- 2000 was the year of the wedding of Elon Musk and Justine Wilson – she will be the first wife of an entrepreneur, but not the only one.
- 2002 – the third company is born, founded by Elon Musk – SpaceX.
- 2003 is the founding of Tesla Motors, which later became just Tesla.
- 2008 – NASA signed a contract with SpaceX to launch Falcon 9 and Dragon to the International Space Station. In the same year, the businessman and Wilson divorced, Musk starts a relationship with Talulah Riley, an actress from the UK.
- 2010 – Elon and Talulah decide to get married.
- 2011 – Awarded the Heinlein Prize for achievements in the aerospace field.
- 2012 – Musk receives the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Aeronautics. Another year became a period of temporary break in relations between the spouses, they get divorced, but in 2013 they get married again.
- 2013 – Fortune honors Musk as Entrepreneur of the Year and Wall Street Journal honors Musk as SEO of the Year.
- 2016 – participates in the forum under the government of Donald Trump. Musk and actress Riley finally end their relationship. The International Astronautical Congress became the starting point for the businessman to develop his space program for the exploration of Mars. He presented a project by which it is possible to create a completely new spacecraft to deliver people and cargo to the red planet.
- 2018 brought the entrepreneur the right to membership in the Royal Society of London, which recognized his services to science. Also this year was the beginning of a relationship with Claire Boucher, a singer from Canada, she is better known to the world under the pseudonym Grimes.
- 2020 – The first flight of Crew Dragon took place, which successfully docked with the ISS. Musk and Bush have a child who will receive from his parents the unusual name of Ex Ash Hey-Twelv, which in the original looks like X A-12. Parents say that in this “name” the names of the reconnaissance aircraft, the mathematical variable and artificial intelligence are encrypted.
- In 2021, Elon Musk becomes the richest person on Earth, as his fortune has become equal to almost two hundred billion dollars. The entrepreneur also expressed a desire to sell his expensive property in order to create a colony on Mars.
Entrepreneur’s personal life
In union with his first wife Justine Wilson, the billionaire had five children. The children’s names are: Damian, Griffin, Xavier, Saxon and Kai. Ilona’s first-born – Nevada Alexander, unfortunately, died having lived only up to ten weeks of age. Musk dated actress Amber Heard, with whom he was later brought together once again in a trial. He was a witness on Heard’s side in a domestic violence case against Johnny Depp.
The billionaire loves to collect all kinds of equipment. Among his acquisitions were the following noteworthy specimens: the Aero L-39 Albatros aircraft, the Dassault Falcon 900 jet aircraft, the McLaren F1 car, and the Wet Nellie submarine car, which starred in the famous Bond film. He participates in flights in which the aircraft achieves zero gravity, called Zero Gravity. The name of the child Ilona and Grimes is declared illegal in the state of California, as the symbol “” is not a letter of the English alphabet.
Businessman, innovator, billionaire
Elon Musk is the man thanks to whom NASA was able to abandon the use of Russian rockets to deliver astronauts and cargo to the ISS. Having extensive knowledge in the field of engineering, technology and artificial intelligence, the entrepreneur successfully develops his companies. Tesla, SpaceX, and PayPal are competing in the marketplace and generating good returns. Tesla electric vehicles have become a new technical novelty of an environmental orientation.
