The ambition of 'space cowboy'

Living in austerity with no more than 1 USD / day as a student, but by 31 years old Elon Musk was an Internet billionaire. Now, he is at the forefront of the race to space with the ultimate goal of bringing people to Mars.

However, in front of his eyes, there is still a quieter project though no less ambitious: The world's first electric sports car can run faster than a Ferrari. After four years of hard work in research and development at a workshop in San Carlos, south of San Francisco, Tesla Motors, the first new car company in the United States for decades as president, is about to launch Roadster electric sports car is expected to change the whole car industry.

Bold projects

This project costs him about $ 27 million, and the Roadster 2-seater is expected to cost about $ 92,000. Mr. Musk said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once tried Roadster, while California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger strongly supported the project to produce this environmentally friendly vehicle. Roadster uses 6,831 lithium-ion batteries, running faster than F

Elon Musk (Photo: Economist)

errari and ' green ' double the Prius, Toyota's electric and gasoline powered car. The Roadster's ' green ' policy also extends to the noise of the car when the Roadster has no engine noise, as it has no engine at all. Mr. Musk did not hide his ambition to turn Tesla Motors into a Ford Motors company of the 21st century.

Musk is someone who likes big ideas. He not only sought to change the way we drive, but also to find out how people will live on Mars in the future. That's why he invested at least $ 100 million to create SpaceX - a rocket manufacturing company - in 2002 to bring people into space, with the final destination Mars. SpaceX received $ 278 million from NASA to develop a new ship in place of a space shuttle and signed a number of $ 122 million contracts with the Pentagon. Work at SpaceX currently accounts for about 80% of his daily work.

'10% of players, 90% of engineers'

Musk is no stranger to such bold projects. In 1999, he founded X.com Company, a precursor to Paypal online payment service, and sold it to eBay online auction website for $ 1.5 billion less than 3 years later. Musk was 31 at the time.

Fortune magazine currently ranks Musk at 12th in the list of the 40 most under 40-year-old Americans with an estimated assets of about 1.5 billion USD. Many see Elon Musk as both a cowboy and a space cowboy, an appreciation of the fact that he once owned a high-speed car collection and even a military aircraft. Soviet-era L39. However, Musk admits that he only has '10% of a player ', the remaining 90% is an engineer.

Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, a city in Northern Johannesburg (South Africa), whose mother is a model fluent in 6 foreign languages ​​and her father is an electrical and mechanical engineer. Musk probably inherited the blood of adventure from his grandfather - a Canadian who liked that adventure.

At the age of 12, Musk made his first small sale: selling a computer game code to a magazine for $ 500.

At the age of 17, Musk sought to convince his father to live in the US or Canada, where he believed he could achieve great achievements, but his father refused. Undeterred, Musk applied for Canadian citizenship and studied for two years at Kingston University, Ontario, before receiving a scholarship to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), where he once lived austerity with the amount of 1 USD / day.

(Photo: Carriedaway.blogs.com)

Never stop exploring

By 1995, Musk moved to California to study for a Ph.D. in high-energy physics at Stanford University, but did not attend any classes. Instead, Musk opened Zip2 Company, an Internet company that provides content for media companies. Four years later, Musk sold Zip2 to Compaq for $ 307 million in cash.

After becoming a billionaire thanks to Paypal, Musk started looking around to look for new adventures and suddenly remembered that NASA had always intended to explore Mars since the Apollo moon exploration program. However, when he visited NASA's website at that time, Musk was disappointed that he did not see such a plan. He was even more frustrated when he realized that the aviation industry was becoming more and more expensive - instead of cheaper - that efficiency did not increase at all. So, in early 2002, Musk gathered some of the world's leading space experts with the determination to improve the efficiency of the industry, and decided to establish SpaceX Company with great ambitions.

As a student, Musk often thinks that space exploration, clean energy and the Internet are the areas that will have the strongest impact on the world in the future. At that time, he probably did not expect that he had been recording the mark in these areas.

(Photo: Mataxvision.bloguje.cz)

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