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.

Writing Your Success Story: When Things Don't Work Out, Do You Break?

Every great success story is usually preceded by a breakdown. Things don’t always seem to work out at some point. And the lengths of these points vary: it takes a year for some, months for others and years for most.

The only reason we usually end up talking about them though is because of the simple fact that the writers of these success stories never stopped writing when things seemed hardest.

The reason we like to see them, to hear them, to watch them and to want to be like them is simply because despite the periods of hardship that these people faced, they were always able to come back and complete their stories on their terms. That is why they are inspiring.

You have probably heard the story of Edison so many times that you don’t really appreciate what it means to try and fail 10,000 times. It is failure after failure and trial after trial. Talking about it is easy. Writing about it is also easy. But failing those many times and still having the courage to try again, that isn’t.

Failure is nasty. It’s bitter. It’s disgusting. But success isn’t. And the only way to get success is to get up and try again and again until you finally have a taste of the success that you want from life.

The Steve Jobs' success story has been termed one that can only happen in America. But we wouldn’t really be celebrating the guy as one of the greatest personalities of this century if he had stopped at building the first Apple machine. People wouldn’t be repeating his story so many times if it weren’t for the fact that he kept on investing in Pixar over and over again despite the fact that the company wasn’t making any money.

If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have had the financial muscle to make a total comeback to Apple and create the bounce-back of the century. And none of that would really have happened if he had decided to simply enjoy his wealth after being kicked out of Apple.

Michael Jordan is arguably one of the greatest sportsmen ever. Years after his retirement, he still makes over $80 million a year. But what really makes his story so wonderful to read and what makes him command so much respect is the fact that he had it in him to bounce back in style.

After being kicked out from high school team, he did the work and was able to be picked the next year. After his father died, he retired; but he found himself strong enough to go back to the game he loved. That first year back he didn’t really win the title, and many people were jeering saying that he was done and that his retirement had undone him. But he bounced back. He didn’t break. He bounced back and finished up his story. Time and time again when he felt it was incomplete, he went back and completed it. That is why many people consider him a legend.

Colonel Sanders had really done much in his life. He had tried a lot and failed. His wife left him because she thought he was a loser who could hold no job. He tried many ventures which succeeded for a time and then went under. He did this until he reached his retirement age. He received his retirement check from the US government as something to keep him comfortable as he waited to die.

To all, there was really nothing more to be done. He was old, he had lived well and had enjoyed some relative successes. Only he knew that there was still something more in him. There was more to his life story other than the “normal” life he had lived. Things had seemed to come to a standstill, but that is when he picked himself up and completed his success story by establishing one of the most successful franchising enterprises in American history. A billion dollar corporation resulted just out of an old man’s determination to write the last lines of his story on his own terms.

Things won’t always work out. Good things will not always happen. Things will not always happen perfectly according to the little plans in your head. This is a fact. It is just the way life is. However, the question is: will you break? Will you let the little extended dry patches deny you the opportunity to write your life’s story on your terms? When things don’t work out, will you crumble?

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A Story Of Success: Rethinking What You Love

Seth Godin in The Bootstrapper’s Bible tells that story of a friend of his. She loved making things and she was good at it. She could use leftover clumps to create beautiful fabric. She could use almost any piece of fabric to create great pieces of art. She was good at it and she loved it.

Like everyone else, she had heard about how the secret to success lies in doing what you love. She loved this and so decided to start making toys and pieces for the toy industry. As Seth explains, she did all the right things right and avoided all the bad things. But she almost always seemed to get close but never really get a contract with the big manufacturers.

It was only years later that she discovered her mistake. She had chosen the wrong industry! Nobody really wanted her because the toy industry is cutthroat and the “big” fish don’t really like to encourage inventions and inventors. As Seth Godin observes: “… Toy companies work hard to keep inventors away, because they’re scared of lawsuits and the hassles of dealing with outsiders. They’re not overflowing with happy, Tom Hanks–like luminaries, looking for the next Big Idea. The toy industry is a business, and a cutthroat one.”

She had worked hard and none of it was yielding any fruit. She simply wasn’t becoming successful. Her story of success seemed elusive.

That is when she decided to go into publishing. She studied the market and the industry in general and decided that it was more open to new ideas. She developed new concepts based on what she loved and had learnt over the years. A few months down the line, her calendar concept was picked up by a publisher and what followed was over 2 million of copies of their work in print. She is experiencing success because she went back to the drawing board and rethought what she loved.

Are you doing what you love and yet still not experiencing success? Maybe it is time for a little bit of a rethinking exercise. Maybe the key to success in your life lies in thinking differently, in applying a little bit more of creativity.

It’s Time To Toast

It is time for you to declare war on anything that lets you rot. It is time for you to start moving away from the quicksand that is boredom. Normal doesn't suit you. And neither does being the average pedestrian in life who simply drifts by.

It is time to start living. Stop the nonsense that amounts to simply existing. Stop the mediocre lifestyle whose aim is to try to make you fit in. Of course you were born original, but without the guts to actually let the song of your song be heard, you are nothing but a boring sketch of routines.

What is it you want? What is it that your soul longs for? What is it that elevates you into the living lane? What is it that makes your spirit stir? How high are the castles that you have built in the air?

There is more to life than simply trying to fit in. And there is definitely more to living than to simply allow yourself to be a slave to fear. There is more to life. And deep down you know it. There is more in you to give and deep down your soul knows this.

Don’t wait for some inspiration because all you need is within. Don’t wait for the moment to be perfect because there is no fun in that. And don’t wait for tomorrow because it never comes. There is only now, and now is all you have. Now is the perfect time to start building foundations for the castles you have built in the air.

So, let us make a toast to the future you. Let us make a toast to the braver you. Let us make a toast to those castles in the air. Let us make a toast to all the dreams that you are going to make into reality. Let us make a toast to your success story.

Self Made Millionaire By 18: The High School Teen Who Sold An App For $30 Million

At 17 years and with a year of High School to go, the teenage entrepreneur joins a list of tech billionaires who made a fortune early on. What is interesting about his success story is the fact that he taught himself how to code using tutorials and by the age of 15, he had already started to build his $30 million dollar application: Summly.

As Dan Simon pointed out, he wasn’t even born when Yahoo! was formed and yet he is making the application that is bound to play a crucial role in defining its place in the mobile application industry. The mobile application, Summly, does nothing complicated. All it does is to summarize news into 400 characters which as he points out: is more than a tweet but less than a full article.

His app has made him a celebrity of sorts. He has been featured in CNN, CBS and many other major news outlets and of course, the multimillion dollar tag price on his app helps along. He has also been recognized as one of the youngest entrepreneurs to receive a hefty amount of venture capitalist investment.

What is even more impressive is that at his age, he already boasts of business partners such as Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian Chesky, Hosain Rahman, Jessica Powell, Joanna Shields, Josh Kushner, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Shakil Khan, Spencer Hyman, Stephen Fry, Troy Carter, Vivi Nevo, Yoko Ono and many more.

With $30 million to his name, he didn’t even know what to do with the money. He decided to place it in a trust fund that is co-managed by his parents while he focuses on helping the internet giant to integrate the technology into its system. Talk about “accidental empires”!

Summly Founder Nick D'Aloisio in Pics