- [Narrator] This is the story
of Elon Musk in three minutes.
Elon Musk was born in
Pretoria, South Africa in 1971
to Maye Musk, a Canadian
model and dietician,
and Errol Musk, an engineer and pilot.
He developed a love for
reading at a young age
and by 12 years old he used
self-taught programming
skills to develop code for a video game
he called Blastar, which
he then sold for $500.
Musk was a victim of severe bullying,
including an incident
that landed him in the
hospital after being thrown
down a flight of stairs.
Despite this, Elon has
said he believes his
purpose in life to try to take a set of
actions that are likely
to prolong civilization,
minimize the probability of a dark age,
and reduce the length of the
dark age, if there is one.
Musk attended Queens
University in Canada for
two years before moving on to Penn.
While at Penn, Musk ran
an unofficial nightclub
out of a rented 10 bedroom frat house.
In 1995 Musk entered the
PhD program at Stanford.
And then dropped out
after two days to focus
on entrepreneurial ventures
based on this internet
thing everyone is suddenly talking about.
He created Zip 2 along with his brother.
Four years later he received $22 million
for his share when they
sold Zip 2 to Compac.
Musk used some of this
money to cofound X.com,
a user-friendly online financial service.
You might know it better today as PayPal,
and when eBay purchased PayPal in 2002,
Musk's shares netted
him a cool $165 million.
Committed to fighting
global climate change,
Musk founded Solar City and Tesla.
The Solar City plant, to
be constructed in Buffalo,
will be the biggest solar plant in
the United States three times over,
and he plans to build even
bigger plants in the future.
Tesla has grown into
the leading electric car
manufacturer and the fourth most valuable
automotive company in the world.
Musk conceptualized the Mars Oasis,
a plan to commercialize
space travel and colonize
Mars in order to avoid the inevitable
extinction of human kind on earth.
And let's be honest, even if you survive,
nobody wants to be the
only human left on a planet
with crocodiles,
cockroaches, and Twinkies.
Musk founded SpaceX with
$100 million of his own cash.
In February 2018, SpaceX successfully test
launched the most powerful operational
rocket in the world, the Falcon Heavy.
And yes, the Falcon does
take its name from a certain
stuck up, half witted,
scruffy looking Nerf herder.
Oh, and as part of the launch,
they sent a Tesla Roadster into space.
It's orbiting the earth right now.
You can see the reflection
of the earth on the hood.
Check mate, flat earthers.
When he's not launching
sports cars into space,
Musk is working on the Hyperloop,
a high speed transit
system that shoots pods
holding riders through
a reduced pressure tube.
It is expected to get
people from Los Angeles
to San Francisco in less than an hour,
which is less time than it takes to drive
from one side of L.A. to the other.
While tweeting in traffic in 2016,
Musk mused, I'm going
to build a tele-boring
machine and just start digging.
And thus, the Boring Company was born.
The Boring Company
recently released plans for
a flamethrower, which has
received 20,000 preorders.
U.S. Customs have warned a flamethrower
will not clear international security.
Musk responded by renaming the product
a temperature enhancement device.
As of 2018, Elon Musk is worth
an estimated $20.4 billion.
He states that he hops to die
on Mars, just not on impact.
And that's the story of
Elon Musk in three minutes.
