Elon Musk is one of the most successful businessmen in the modern era. Born in South Africa, Musk moved to Canada during his growing years and eventually to the United States, where he gained global fame for his innovative ideas and exciting business ventures in different fields.
Musk is a proponent of Mars colonization and advancement in technologies and is one of the world’s wealthiest people. However, like most people, he also started out small and eventually became a billionaire. So let us find out what his first business venture was.
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The First Enterprise Elon Musk Ever Got Into
In 1995, Elon Musk was accepted for a Ph.D. program in materials science at Stanford University. However, he dropped out of the program two days later and applied for a job.
Later, Musk’s father Errol Musk gave him $28,000 to start his business. In the same year, Musk along with his brother Kimbal, and Greg Kouri started Zip2. It provided licensed online city guide software and yellow pages to newspapers.
All three of them worked from a small rented office in Palo Alto, California where Musk spent every night coding the website rigorously. The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune gave them contracts later on.Â
The company successfully ran for three years during which they canceled a merger with CitySearch by convincing the board of directors. In February 1999, the company was bought by Compaq for $307 million with Musk receiving $22 million for his seven percent share.
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Becoming A Billionaire
After the Zip2 chapter came to an end, Musk co-founded an online financial services company called X.com. More than 200,000 customers joined the website in its initial months.
However, he was replaced by the investors because of his inexperience in the field. The company got merged with online bank Confinity in 2000 and was eventually named PayPal which was acquired by eBay.
In May 2002, Musk founded spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX and subsequently co-founded or headlined other companies like The Boring Company, Neuralink, Tesla Inc., OpenAI, and Twitter. These companies made a revenue in billions which established him as one of the world’s richest individuals.
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