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Vance, Ashlee. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. Ecco, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2015.

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His upbringing was difficult, in South Africa. Musk’s parents separated and he chose to live with his dad, to give him company, even though it was still very tough to do this, as there was turmoil between them. He was bullied in school regularly, and once even had to miss a whole week of school due to the severe beating he received.

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Musk withdrew into books, to avoid the hardships of everyday life. He read two encyclopedias and remembered “everything”. His favorite book was: “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. This book taught him that it’s easy to answer a question, but knowing what the right question in the first place, was hard. "Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy," (Page 24).

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Musk was learning Entrepreneurship when he was young. We was already selling his video game Blastar, for $500, when he was just 12 years old. In high school, he already formed very strong opinions about solar power, colonizing other planets, paperless banking, and space rockets.

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Elon escaped military service in South Africa, by immigrating to Canada, although he originally wanted to go to the US. He attended Queens University, where his confidence began to soar, and his character took shape. "There's no question, though, that Musk had been pining to get to the United States on a visceral level for a long time," (Page 44).

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Through college he met Justine Wilson, who ended up becoming the mother of his 6 sons. At first Justine had no interest in Elon. She stood him up for their first date, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

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Musk spent 2 years at Queens University in Canada, but transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he continued to do well. He became very comfortable with his fellow physics students, some of which proved to be valuable both personally and financially. "Musk blossomed even more at Penn, and really started to feel comfortable with his felloe physics students," (Page 51).

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After Musk graduated, he was eager to jump on the dotcom bandwagon. He founded the Global Link Information Network in 1995, which was renamed to Zip2, which helped businesses clueless about the internet, to get online.

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In February of 1999, Compaq Computer offered to pay $307 million for Zip2 in cash. Musk, however, was not interested in working for Compaq, and was already planning to become a successful CEO. "As soon as it was clear the company would be sold, Elon was on to his next project," (Page 72).

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With the money from the Compaq acquisition, Musk bought a McLaren sports car, a condo and a prop plane. The rest of the money went into a new internet company: X.com Elon partnered with Barclays and FDIC insurance, and was able to establish the first online bank, which also offered three mutual funds which investors could choose from.

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Musk’s competition came in the form of Peter Thiel and Max Levchin at Confinity and their new product Paypal. There was a brief battle between Confinity and X.com, but shortly after they decided to join forces because of complementary positions: Confinity’s bette product, Paypal, and X.com’s money and superior banking products. "Shortly after the deal closed, X.com raised $100 million from backers," (Page 86).

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Two months after the merge, Thiel resigned, and Levchin also threatened to do so. Musk still kept pushing the X.com brand, although most employees preferred PayPal. The company was renamed from X.com to PayPal. In 2002, it was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. Musk’s share was $250 million.

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In 2001, on his 30th birthday, Musk moved to L.A., right around the corner from the hub of the space industry. Musk always wanted to get involved in space. "Musk's first interactions with the aeronautics community were with an eclectic collection of space enthusiasts, members of a nonprofit group called the Mars Society. Dedicated to exploring and settling the Red Planet," (Page 99).

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In June, of 2002, Elon started SpaceX. (Space Exploration Technologies). At this time, sending 500lbs into orbit had cost $30 million and up. Elon was able to improve this, and sent 1,400lbs into space at a cost of $6.9 million with the Falcon 1 rocket.

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Musk knew that most launches failed to date, for example: Atlas’ 9 out of 20 had failed. He was prepared for failure. It actually took him 4 years to achieve the first successful launch. This dedication paid off, as SpaceX became the first commercial company to carry the Dragon capsule to space and retrieve it back to earth, with an ocean landing. "The failures seemed to do little to curtail Musk's vision for the future or raise doubts about his capabilities," (Page 143).

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Musk helped the world recognize electric car technology as exciting and ever-progressing. J.B. Straubel, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning were already working on lithium-ion powered electric cars. Eberhard and Tarpenning founded Tesla Motors on July 1st, 2003. Straubel then joined them.

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By 2012, Tesla’s Model S has been named Motor Trend’s “car of the year”. Consumer Reports gave it the highest rating ever in history, of 99/100. Tesla has been considered the most successful emerging car company since Chrysler in 1925. "Elon Musk had built the automotive equivalent of the iPhone," (Page 269).

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Elon Musk joined the Rive brothers to become the chairman and largest shareholder. Six years later, SolarCity became the largest installer of solar panels in America. SolarCity was valued close to $7 billion in 2014, and has expanded to the business sector, servicing customers like Walmart and Intel.

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SolarCity, SpaceX and Tesla all complement each other strategically. This common and ambitious goal is: sustainable living for all of human kind. "SolarCity, like the rest of Musk's ventures, did not represent a business opportunity so much as it represented a worldview," (Page 321).

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SpaceX is testing it’s ability to take people into space in 2016, and to the international space station. Elon’s dream is to be the first man to set foot on Mars.

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Musk gas a grueling weekly schedule. He spends Monday morning to Tuesday night at SpaceX, then flies to Silicon Valley to work at Tesla during Wednesday and Thursday. He then flies back to L.A. He truly believes in what he’s doing, to be able to continue such a lifestyle. "Musk tabulates the amount of flight time he endures per week to help him get a sense of just how out of hand things are getting," (Page 17).

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Cybertruck is designed to have the utility of a truck with sports car performance. Built to be durable, versatile, capable and high-performance both on-road and off-road.

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SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.

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Powerwall detects grid outages and automatically becomes your home's main energy source. Protect your home from the next power outage and keep your lights on, phone charged and no puddles under the fridge.

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Elon Musk might be the only person in the world whose biggest failure in life made him a millionaire. Zip2, the serial entrepreneur's first venture, sold for $307 million in 1999, earning Musk $22 million for his 7% share of the company when he was only 27-years-old.

For most people, that would be the high point of a lifetime, but Musk looks back on the experience with frustration and disappointment: He wanted to realize the full potential of the Internet, but all he did was make himself rich.

Whatever else went wrong with Zip2, Musk definitely chose the right time and place to launch the company: Silicon Valley in 1995, the year the consumer Internet was born. Musk moved to San Francisco after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in physics and economics. He planned to do his PhD in materials science at Stanford, but a few weeks before classes started, Netscape went public with a valuation of nearly $3 billion. Musk was already aware of the business potential of Internet, but now he saw that Internet companies were about to have their moment, and he wanted to be part of the action. He lasted two days at Stanford before dropping out to launch his first online venture.

The way the story is usually told, Musk didn't know what kind of company he wanted to create, just that it should be an Internet company. In fact, he'd done an internship in Silicon Valley the previous summer, where he happened to hear a bungled pitch from a YellowPages sales rep for an online listing to go with the printed book. While the rep clearly didn't know what he was talking about, Musk recognized that searchable web directories were a quick and easy way to offer value online. He began scheming with his brother Kimbal-who would join him in California as his co-founder and business partner-about ways to capture the opportunity.

The first thing Musk did was purchase a local business directory for a few hundred dollars. Next, he negotiate free access to digital mapping software from a GPS company called Navteq. From there, the concept was straightforward: He'd simply write the necessary code and put the two databases together. Everyone should be able to find the closest pizza place and figure out how to get there, Musk liked to say.

Today, the utility and appeal of such a service is more than obvious, but at the time, the brothers had trouble convincing anyone else to believe in their idea. The small businesses they approached didn't see the point, and even venture capitalists were slow to grasp the potential. "Back in '95, there weren't very many people on the Internet, and certainly nobody was making any money at all," Musk said in an interview in 1999. "Most people thought the Internet was going to be a fad."

Since Musk and Kimbal weren't going to get any funding with a mere proof-of-concept, they had to build out the company using their own capital, and there wasn't much of it. When Zip2 launched, Musk only had $2,000 in the bank. Kimbal had a bit more, having recently sold his share in a College Pro Painters franchise, but most of their startup costs were covered by their father, Errol Musk, who gave them $28,000 to get going.

Since Musk and Kimbal barely had any money, they came up with an elegant solution: they hardly spent any. "When you are first starting out you really need to make your burn-rate ridiculously tiny," Musk said at a talk at Wharton Business School. "Don't spend more than you are sure you have." For the two entrepreneurs, applying this principle meant sleeping on futons at the office rather than renting an apartment, and showering at the YMCA a few blocks away. "It was the best shape I've ever been in," Musk told a crowd at Stanford in 2003.

Even after sacrificing their own living quarters, they still had to keep operations extremely lean. They shared one computer between them; Musk programmed at night and turned the server on during the day. At first, the best Internet connection they could afford was through a cheap dial-up modem, but eventually they were able to convince an ISP startup in the office below theirs to let them plug in. Musk drilled a hole in the wall and ran a cable down the stairwell.

Once the website was up and running, Musk hired three salespeople on commission. They went door to door in malls and shopping districts to sell sponsored listings. Slowly, the money started to trickle in. One of the benefits of keeping expenses so low is that even with a small amount of revenue, the brothers were able to achieve positive cash flow early on, which looked good to investors.

The brother's hard work and early sales eventually earned some attention from the venture capital community in Silicon Valley, which had finally clued in to the potential of the Internet. Musk wasn't above using smoke and mirrors to impress them, reports Ashlee Vance in his authoritative biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. The young entrepreneur built an elaborate casement around the PC that housed the Zip2 server and stacked the whole thing on a large, wheeled base, to make it look like "a mini-supercomputer." The trick worked, and investors were suitably amazed, not only by the futuristic machine, but by Musk's do-or-die approach. "My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail," he told one (though Musk later denied having said this).

At last, Musk's big gambit paid off, and in early 1996 the firm Mohr Davidow Ventures invested $3 million into the company, on the condition that Musk hand over most of his shares and cede operational control to a seasoned tech executive named Rich Sorkin. Musk was demoted to Chief Technology Officer, and not surprisingly, he hated to see someone else run his own business. But he needed the money to take Zip2 to the next level, so he took the deal.

Under Sorkin, Zip2 shifted its focus from local to national. Instead of helping flower shops and auto dealerships stake their claim on World Wide Web, Zip2 began offering a platform service to newspapers across the country, so they could create their own local directory services. The New York Times Company signed up for its first website with Zip2, along with the Chicago Tribune and big media properties like Knight Ridder and Hearst Corporation. Craigslist hadn't yet robbed the newspapers of their classifieds cash-flow, but the writing was on the wall. Media companies still had money to spend, and they knew they needed to do something to avoid getting rolled under. For a time, Zip2 played the white knight to print publishing, and the company grew quickly as a result.

With all the new money, Zip2 was finally able to hire software engineers and even poach some of the best talent in the Valley. Musk had done most of the initial coding himself, and though he was a gifted programmer, his work clearly showed that he was self-taught. The new programmers found that they needed to rewrite most of the software, to make it more efficient. Musk's DIY approach to coding didn't include chunking, so he inadvertently created a "hairball": a tangled mess of code that's nearly impossible to unravel if anything goes wrong.

But Musk didn't always agree with the changes, and he had a bad habit of returning the favor. Often he would re-write his programmers' code after they left work at the end of the day, without telling them of the changes. He was also prone to micro-managing and rudely criticizing his team. Needless to say, they found him difficult to work with. Musk never stopped himself from bluntly correcting others when he thought they were wrong. As a child, this alienating habit earned him the unwanted attention of school bullies. In his first company, he won the begrudging respect of his employees, but not much affection.

His lack of social delicacy definitely impacted his working relationships at Zip2, but mostly importantly with Sorkin, whom Musk accused of mismanaging the company. Although the money coming from media partners had made Zip2 very profitable, Musk felt that Sorkin's strategy had compromised the company's potential to reach consumers directly. To Musk, they were helping the old-guard defend against Internet encroachment, rather than making the Internet more exciting and impactful for users.

In 1998, three years after Musk arrived in Silicon Valley, Sorkin tried to merge Zip2 with CitySearch, a comparable service with more national reach. Musk assented to the deal initially, but later rebelled. He organized a coup to have Sorkin ousted and himself reinstated as CEO. The plan worked at first, and Sorkin was dropped, but it quickly backfired when Zip2's board turned around and sold the company to Compaq, which was trying to beef up its AltaVista web portal. Musk never even considered sticking around; he was ready for the next thing.

Musk often says that he never expected any of his ventures to be successful, including Zip2. But, like many other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, his willingness to take risks is a major point of pride. To repeat one of his most often quoted sayings, "Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

Still, failure isn't sweet. At an awards ceremony in 2011, Musk spoke briefly about his time at Zip2, in a tone of self-reproach. "I was very naive and much stupider than I am now. I wish I could go back and give myself a slap on my face." He added, "I was trying to make up for my mistakes by working really, really hard." Musk didn't clarify which mistakes he was referring to, but in Vance's book, he shared some of his regrets about his poor leadership and communication style.

"Even if they would like to behave like you, they don't necessarily have all the assumptions or information that you have in your mind," Musk said, speaking of his employees and colleagues. "You have to put yourself in a position where you say, 'Well, how would this sound, knowing what they know?'"

Whatever the lessons, Zip2 gave Musk everything he needed to start his next company: the financial capital, but more importantly, the frustrated sense of disappointment at how things had worked out, and an urgent desire to do it better next time. Musk took his share of the sale and bought himself a new home and a Maclaren F1-the fastest car in the world at the time, and a decent symbol for Musk's approach to life. The rest he invested in his next venture, X.com, which ultimately became PayPal.

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Elon Musk might be the only person in the world whose biggest failure in life made him a millionaire. Zip2, the serial entrepreneur's first venture, sold for $307 million in 1999, earning Musk $22 million for his 7% share of the company when he was only 27-years-old.

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Errol Musk, according to Elon, has a genius-level IQ and was reportedly the youngest person to earn a professional engineer's qualification in South Africa, according to a 2017 Rolling Stone profile.

When Elon was a child, he moved in with his dad after this parents divorced. At the time, Errol Musk was working in construction and emerald mining, according to Rolling Stone.

Errol Musk made headlines in 2018 when it was revealed that he had a child with his then-30-year-old former stepdaughter Jana Bezuidenhout, whom he's known since she was 4 years old.

Today, Musk and Errol are estranged. The Tesla CEO told Rolling Stone that his father is "a terrible human being." "You have no idea about how bad," Musk said. "Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done."

Tosca Musk has been producing movies since 2001, and has made more than 30 to date, according to her IMDb page.

She is currently the cofounder and CEO of Passionflix, a streaming service for movies that have been adapted from romance novels. Musk founded the company in 2016 and has raised over $4 million from investors that include Kimbal Musk.

Musk is unmarried and has two children, twins named Isabeau and Grayson.

Lyndon Rive, along with his brother Peter, cofounded SolarCity in 2006. He served as the company's CEO until after the company was acquired by Tesla for $2.6 billion in 2016. Rive stayed on as the head of sales for Tesla's energy division until 2017.

Prior to launching SolarCity, Rive founded a software company called Everdream with his brothers, Russ and Peter, in 1999. They sold it to Dell eight years later for $120 million.

Peter Rive, SolarCity's cofounder and CTO, left Tesla eight months after it acquired SolarCity.

In February 2019, both Lyndon and Peter Rive joined Zola Electric, a startup focused on bringing clean, affordable energy to Africa.

Russ Rive cofounded software company called Everdream with his brothers, Lyndon and Peter. He's since cofounded production company SuperUber, which counts Tesla and SpaceX among its clients.

Almeda Rive is a competitive dirt-bike rider, according to Vanity Fair, and also worked in sales at SolarCity, according to LinkedIn.

Justine Wilson met Elon Musk while they were attending Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. While Musk eventually transferred to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, they reconnected as Musk started working on his first startup and Justine started working on her first novel after graduation.

They got married in 2000, according to Justine Musk's essay in Marie Claire.

The couple eventually moved to Los Angeles and had a son named Nevada, whom they lost to SIDS when he was 10 weeks old. They ultimately had twins and triplets - five sons in total - named Griffin, Xavier, Damian, Saxon, and Kai.

Justine Musk wrote in Marie Claire that she was a "stater wife," and described her and Musk's relationship as unhealthy. The couple divorced in 2008.

More: Features Tech Elon Musk Tesla

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Elon Musk's family includes a model, several millionaire entrepreneurs, and multiple sets of twins. Here are the members of the Musk family tree.

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Errol Musk, according to Elon, has a genius-level IQ and was reportedly the youngest person to earn a professional engineer's qualification in South Africa, according to a 2017 Rolling Stone profile. When Elon was a child, he moved in with his dad after this parents divorced.