15 Things You DIDN'T KNOW About Elon Musk!
Amazing facts about billionaire Elon Musk! From his time at Paypal to Tesla electric cars to SpaceX rockets we look at incredible things about Mr. Musk
Number 14. "Drop-Out"
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, he set his sights on getting his doctorate in energy physics. He was accepted into one of the best graduate programs for science in the United States at Stanford University so he packed up and moved across the country to California. His attendance didn’t last long however, as after two days he grew bored with class and decided he’d rather get right down to business and dropped out to form the company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal.
Number 13. "Zip2"
The Musk brothers founded the company Zip2 in 1995, on the idea of creating an online version of yellowpages. They used a $28,000 loan from their father to start and after finally finding some prominent investors the company took off, becoming one of the main creators of business directories and maps for the websites of newspapers throughout the country. Only four years later, the Musk brothers had multiplied that initial $28,000 almost 11,000 times as they sold Zip2 to the computer company Compaq for $307 million. Elon’s cut of which was $22 million.
Number 12. "PayPal"
Musk used the money he made from the sale of Zip2 to help found the website X.com which would eventually merge with the company Confinity and become the online banking and money transfer service juggernaut PayPal. Three years after starting X.com, PayPal was sold to eBay for a whopping $1.5 billion. Notably, Musk wouldn’t be the only former employee of PayPal that would go on to further success, as the founders of LinkedIn, Yelp, Youtube and the current CEO of Reddit all worked there and are part of what is now referred to as the PayPal Mafia.
Number 11. "McCrashin F1"
Back in his days at PayPal, Musk purchased a brand new McLaren F1, which was at the time the fastest car in the world, and cost him around one million dollars. However, the thrills that come with owning one out of 106 of these cars that were made, didn’t last long. Only a couple of years later, during a reckless ride with fellow billionaire Peter Thiel, he hit an embankment and totaled the car. The worst part? He never insured the car, his reasoning? "I had read all these stories about people who made money and bought sports cars and crashed them. But I knew it would never happen to me, so I didn’t get any insurance”.
