21 Super-Awesome Elon Musk Photos Showing His Entrepreneurial Journey to Building Billion-Dollar Empires

Elon Musk's fortune continues along a sky-high trajectory thanks to the soaring stock of Tesla Motors, the luxury electric car maker he founded right after successful entrepreneurial endeavors with PayPal and Zip2. The South African-born Musk wants to take over a million people to Mars and dabs in renewable energy through his venture with Solar City which seeks to provide solar energy to American homes. There is no stopping him just yet, he has a proposal to create a high-speed transportation system which will re markedly reduce transportation time and cement his stature as the living real life depiction of Marvel's superhero Tony Stark and has been immortalized in the screenplay Iron Man 2 in which he also made a cameo. 

 The Early Years

Elon Musk as a child

Elon and  his mother  who is a model and a nutritionist

Elon and his brothers growing up

Elon Musk hanging out with friends, he is described as being too studious and staying away from everyone's way in school spending most of his time in libraries

Middle Life and School

Musk was also interested in computers and by the age of 12, he had written the code for his own video game, a space game called Blastar, which was the first product he ever sold

Elon Musk pictured with his brother

Right after he and his brother sought out to lease a building for their video game business which failed because they lacked parental consent.

                

Moving to Canada The USA

He emigrated to Canada in June 1989 at age 17 to attend. He left Canada in 1992 after getting a scholarship to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania."It is where great things are possible" he says on moving to USA

Him during his  undergraduate years in economics and stayed on another year to finish a second bachelor's degree in physics

 Elon and his campus girlfriend who would become his first wife

In 1995, Elon Musk headed to Stanford University in California to pursue a PhD in energy physics. However, he only attended the school for two days before dropping out to start his first company, Zip2 Corporation, which provided online content-publishing software for news organizations.He is seen here preparing a meal in school

Creation of PayPal

A young Elon during PayPal's formative years

In 2000, X.com bought a company called Confinity, which had started an Internet money-transfer process called PayPal. Elon Musk renamed X.com/Confinity Paypal and dropped the company's online banking focus to concentrate on becoming a global payment transfer provider.

In February 2001, X.com changed its legal name to PayPal. In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for US$1.5 billion in stock. Before its sale, Musk, the company's largest shareholder, got a good chunk of that money.

Celebrating the success of Paypal's acquisition with close friends

Success and Family

In 2002, Musk founded his third company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, with the goal of building spacecraft for commercial space travel. SpaceX develops and manufactures space launch vehicles with a focus on advancing the state of rocket technology.

In addition to trying to compete in the Space Race, with the NSA and countries like Russia and China, Elon Musk has conquered the electric car market by giving the world the first fully-function and viable electric car.

Elon Musk during his wedding in 2010

Elon and his family

He is the only man worth being an inspiration for a superhero. Ironman's Tony Stark is modelled after elon Musk.

Elon's Next Conquest - The Red Planet

And who says that earth should be enough for an ambitious billionaire? Elon Musk's next project involves interplanetary conquests, starting with Mars. And although it might seem like the stuff of  comic books and science fiction, by now, people have learnt never to bet against Elon. And neither should you.

The Success Story Of The Farm Boy Who Formed A Cosmetics Empire

Success stories such as these remind us that it is possible to achieve our dreams no matter the obstacles on the way. This is the success story of a farm boy who grew up to become a teacher and a hairdresser. But that was way before he formed four successful cosmetic companies that are still an operational success over 60 years later.

While working as  a chemistry teacher, Jheri Redding worked as  a hair stylist – just to be able to pay the bills. He however grew frustrated with each passing day in his career as a hair stylist simply because the products he was using were not effective.

Rather than rant and rave, Jheri simply started experimenting with various ingredients in his kitchen. He tried mixing the hair products with vinegar, mayonnaise and many other food stuffs. The positive results and the positive feedback he got encouraged him further, and where he didn’t get it right, he tried something else.

His willingness to experiment with different products soon saw him develop a number of treatments, gels and styling creams. Since they were so successfully received, he decided to build his brand – he eventually settled on Jheri Redding Products.

Due to the success of his products, he decided to form a company. He formed his first in 1956, then another in 1960, the next in 1968 and the fourth in 1979. Through sheer will and determination, this man who spent his time styling people’s hair ended up forming an extremely successful cosmetics empire… and all these companies are still in operation to date.

His secret to success? Seth Godin, in The Bootstrappers Bible writes:

“Redding created lasting businesses through the combination of a gift for spotting long-term opportunity and his relentless drive to create significant competitive advantages in product features and distribution clout. The Illinois farm boy became a cosmetologist during the Great Depression because he saw hairdressers prospering and farmers failing. … was the first to add vitamins and minerals to shampoos, the first to balance the acidity of the formulas, and the first to urge hairdressers to supplement their haircutting income by selling his products on the slow days …There arenʼt many like Jheri Redding, who also founded Redken (1960), Jhirmack (1976), and Nexxus Products (1979).”