Who is Elon Musk?

Elon Musk was a multi-millionaire by the time he reached the age of thirty-one thanks to his creation of the company that became PayPal, the popular money-transfer service for Web consumers. Musk has become one of a new breed of what the New York Times called “thrillionaires,” or a class of former high-tech entrepreneurs who are using their newfound wealth to help turn science-fiction dreams into reality. Musk is the founder of Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, a company based in El Segundo, California. In 2005 SpaceX was busy building the Falcon rocket, which he hoped could someday make both space tourism and a colony on the planet Mars realistic goals for humankind. Musk is a native of South Africa, born in 1971 to parents who later divorced. His father was an engineer and his mother—originally from Canada—was a nutritionist. Musk was fascinated by science fiction and computers in his adolescent years. When he was twelve, he wrote the code for his own video game and actually sold it to a company. In his late teens, he immigrated to Canada in order to avoid the required military service for white males in South Africa. It was still the era of apartheid, the South African legal system that denied political and economic rights to the country’s majority-black native population. Musk was uninterested in serving in the army, which was engaged at the time in a battle to stamp out a black nationalist movement. Thanks to his mother’s Canadian ties, he was able to enroll at Queen’s University in Kingston, one of Ontario’s top schools.

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