Who is Elon Musk, the person everyone has been wondering lately ? What makes him so famous ? One wonders about Elon Musk's life, the projects he has in mind, the companies he founded in the business world and how he became so successful.

We share with you what you need to know about his forward vision and the wealth that comes with it.

Childhood and Youth Years

Elon Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa. He is one of three children of an engineer father (Errol Musk) and a nutritionist mother (Maye Musk). He has a sister (Tosca Musk) and a brother (Kimbal Musk).

Musk, who was interested in science-fiction and computers in his childhood, was already showing what he could do in the future by selling the video game he wrote at the age of 12 to a company.

At the age of 17, he went to this country with the advantage of his mother's being a Canadian citizen, entered "Queen's University" and studied physics. This school, which was one of the best universities in the country, would have an important place in his development.

While studying here, he did a summer internship at one of Canada's famous banks, "Bank of Nova Scotia", and his experiences there formed an idea for the company he would establish in the future.

Halfway through his undergraduate studies, he attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor's degree in economics and then a second bachelor's degree in physics.

After being accepted to a PhD program in "Energy Physics" at Stanford University (Silicon Valley - California), Musk moved here in 1995. Realizing that the impact of the internet on human life was progressing very rapidly, he started to make plans to establish his first company.

Entering the Business Life and Zip2

At the age of 24, Elon Musk left Stanford University's doctoral program to establish his first company called "Zip2 Corporation". The company he founded produced yellow pages-like internet city guide content for the newspaper publishing industry. He persuaded some angel investors to finance his company.

Eventually, a group of venture capitalists providing start-up money financed Zip2 with $3.6 million, but in return, the majority of the company was out of their control.

Elon Musk, who grew the company with funding from investors, eventually attracted the attention of other companies, and "Compaq Computer Corporation" (the company that created the AltaVista search engine) purchased Zip2 for approximately $305 million in cash in February 1999. This was one of the largest acquisitions in the internet business at the time. Of this amount, Musk was paid $22 million for his 7 percent stake, making him a millionaire at the age of 28.

X.Com and PayPal

Although Elon Musk did not have the necessary capital to realize the projects in his mind, he was relieved to a certain extent. In 1999, he used $10 million from his own fortune to start another company, which he called X.com.

X.com was an online bank that was a full-service financial service provider to consumers. The company's greatest service was figuring out how to securely transfer money using a recipient's email address.

Musk's proven success and reputation at Zip2 helped his company gain serious attention and immediately attract investors. The company has received a $25 million start-up capital from California's leading venture capital (VC) "Sequoia Capital".

In March 2020, Elon Musk acquired a company called "Confinity", which started an online money transfer business called PayPal. PayPal had been in business for several months when the company was acquired, and Musk believed the online transmission technology known as "peer-to-peer" (p2p) had a promising future.

Five months after the acquisition, Musk announced that X.com would abandon its original online banking operations and instead focus on establishing itself as the leading global payment transfer provider. The X.com name was abandoned and it was decided to continue as PayPal.

Over time, with the widespread use of the concept of shopping over the internet, secure payment has also gained importance. PayPal offered its users easy and secure payment. It grew tremendously throughout 2001, thanks to its widespread use on eBay, the online shopping site with hundreds of thousands of person-to-person sales.

PayPal got off to an impressive start on its first day on Wall Street when it went public in February 2002. That same year, eBay bought the company for $1.5 billion. Elon Musk was PayPal's largest shareholder with an 11.5 percent stake and received $165 million in eBay shares from the deal.

Establishment of SpaceX

Elon Musk was very interested in science fiction and space subjects from his childhood years. He was therefore a member of the "Mars Society", an organization promoting the discovery of the red planet, and was interested in the possibility of life on Mars. He founded SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies) in June 2002.

Musk wanted to create an experimental greenhouse (Mars Oasis) on the planet. It was a nutrient structure in which plant life that would be environmentally friendly with Mars could thrive. The cost of his plan was $20 million in the first place. However, he later learned that sending something into space on the Delta rocket made by Boeing would add another $50 million to the cost. Turning his direction to Russia, Musk later gave up on it due to various risks.

Musk decided to build his own rocket, mainly because of the cost and other problems he faced. He convinced some experienced engineers from companies like Boeing and TRW to work at SpaceX's headquarters in California. He had the idea of making a repurposed rocket, and if he could do that, it would cut costs considerably. However, this idea has caused problems in attracting future investment with venture capital. Instead, he had to put in his own money to build the first reusable rocket in the private sector.

So Musk and his SpaceX team began making the "Falcon" rocket, named after the "Millenium Falcon" (used by Han Solo) spacecraft from the Star Wars movie. This rocket will not be a rocket that will be used again in the first place, this feature will be added in the future.

The success of the rocket in trials and its low cost attracted the attention of NASA. He later signed a $1.6 billion contract with NASA. The contract included the supply of crew and cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). In 2012, it made history as the first commercial company to launch and dock a vehicle to the International Space Station with its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule.

Now the goal was to send a crew to the ISS. SpaceX working on a reusable rocket in 2015 Successfully landed near the launch pad of the first version of the Falcon 9 rocket. This was the beginning of a new milestone.

SpaceX launched the "Falcon Heavy", the company's most powerful rocket at the time, as a test fire in February 2018. The opening mission carried a Tesla Roadster belonging to Musk into space as a payload, and 2 of the rockets landed safely on Earth. This was a terrific advertisement for Elon Musk and SpaceX.

In May 2020, SpaceX performed its first manned flight, Demo-2, and made history as the first commercial company to send 2 crews to the International Space Station (ISS).

Elon Musk and Tesla Motors

Tesla Motors (Tesla Inc) was founded in California in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. The company got its name from "Nikola Tesla", a pioneer in electricity (Alternating Current). Elon Musk invested $30 million in the company in 2004 and became Chairman of the Board.

Initially, Eberhard and Tarpenning dreamed of making an all-electric sports car. They achieved this with the Tesla Roadster model, which went into production in 2008.

The Tesla Roadster has accomplished something in this area that no other company has accomplished before. They produced a car that could fully meet consumer needs. Previous experiments in this area had failed. Because companies couldn't produce a battery powerful enough to keep cars on the road, a cost-effective engine that could fit in a car and get it up to highway speed.

The Roadster met all these needs. The first model, produced in 2008, was as fast as many sports cars. It could also travel 400 km on a single full battery. The vehicle used a standard lithium-ion battery structure common to many electronic devices, and customers could charge the car at a standard outlet.

Tesla Motors then launched the "Model S" sedan introduced in 2012 and the "Model X" SUV introduced in 2015. The Model S won "Best Overall Car" and "Best Car of the Year" awards.

Tesla's other models are Model 3, Tesla Semi, Cybertruck, Model Y compact SUV.

Tesla also manufactures three energy storage products. Powerwall (home battery), Powerpack (commercial scale battery) and Megapack (product developed for grid scale installations). In 2016, Tesla acquired SolarCity, the leading provider of solar energy systems in the United States, making it the world's first vertically integrated sustainable energy company. In 2017, it launched Solar Roof, its energy generation product.

Other Projects and Companies

Elon Musk is also running the "Neuralink" project, which develops ultra-high-bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computers, apart from the projects we mentioned above.

In addition, Musk founded The Boring Company (TBC) and launched the Hyperloop project to transport people from one point to another without waiting and super fast.

Finally, it started to implement the StarLink project, which the whole world expects to become popular and which will move the stones in internet usage. With thousands of satellites to be placed in Low Earth orbit (LEO), it aims to provide internet access to individuals or institutions wirelessly from the satellite. Two prototype test satellites were first launched in February 2018. Additional test satellites and 60 operational satellites were deployed in May 2019. According to estimates, it is believed that 42,000 satellites should be placed in orbit in order for the project to be used effectively all over the world.