Founder of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk turns 49 on June 28. From building rockets to reshaping the automobile industry with electric cars, Musk's chutzpa to challenge the unknown makes him one of the most influential people alive. Let's take a look at some of his biggest accomplishments:
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At the age of 25, Elon Musk - along with his younger brother Kimbal - founded Zip2, a company which provided online city guide software to newspapers. Call it the Google Maps of the late 90s. Musk sold the company to Compaq Computer in 1999, four years after it had been founded, for $307 million. Musk personally netted $22 million from the acquisition.
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After Zip2, Musk founded an online banking company X.com. A pioneer of sorts, the company received some pushback as the internet was not considered secure for banking. Nonetheless, the company was a huge hit and outclassed its biggest rival Confinity. The two companies ultimately merged in 2000 and the forming entity is today widely recognised as PayPal.
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As a young boy, Musk dreamt of going to Mars. Upon discovering that NASA had no plans to visit the Red Planet, the young Maverick decided to build a rocket and thus SpaceX was founded. Among other things, it is the first private company to successfully launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft and also the first private company to launch an object into orbit around the sun. It is currently working with NASA to take humans back to the moon. Colonization of Mars also remains one of the key agendas of the company.
Tesla acquired SolarCity, the second-largest provider of solar power systems in the US, in 2016 for $2.6 billion. Musk reportedly bought the loss-making company in his efforts to help combat global warming and transition to sustainable energy for a cleaner planet. SolarCity is working with Tesla to make solar energy competitive with traditional forms of electricity.
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Musk has argued that if artificial intelligence surpasses humanity it could result in a global catastrophe. To prevent this, he founded OpenAI in 2015 with an aim to advance artificial intelligence safely to benefit humanity and to develop AI technologies that can surpass the human brain. The company has since worked together with Tesla ion developing the nuances of the Tesla Autopilot.
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Musk founded Neuralink in 2016 to develop neuro-technology that could integrate artificial intelligence into the human brain. The company is working towards building devices to treat serious brain diseases. Another project of the company is a special gadget which will be implanted into the brain and will allow a person to control any wireless device with just the power of thought and recording brain activity.
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Apart from being known as a business magnate, the 49-year-old Musk is also charitably bent. In 2002, he founded Musk Foundation along with his brother Kimbal. In 2010, the Musk Foundation and SolarCity donated a 25 kW solar power system to the South Bay Community Alliance’s hurricane response center in Coden, Alabama. In July 2011, it donated $250,000 towards a solar power project in the tsunami-hit Sōma, Japan. Among other charitable feats, Musk donated $10 million in 2015 to the Future of Life Institute to run a global research program aimed at keeping artificial intelligence beneficial to humanity. Musk is also a top donor to American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a nonprofit organization which aims “to defend and preserve individual rights and liberties” in the United States.
