When PayPal in turn was eventually bought by eBay in 2002, Musk found himself with more than $100m at his disposal. Some Valley people do rather lack perspective. When you do a deal like that, it either pays off or you end up in a bus shelter somewhere.” In a bus shelter, that is, with the $4m Musk had reserved for his personal use. In Ashlee Vance’s fascinating and superbly researched biography, one Musk admirer describes this decision as representing “an insane amount of personal risk.
He ploughed most of it into his next venture, an internet-banking startup that would become PayPal. Soon afterwards Musk co‑founded an early internet-mapping company called Zip2, and when Compaq bought it in 1999 he made $22m (£15m). He moved to Canada at 17 and worked odd manual jobs before winding up at the University of Pennsylvania, where he took degrees in both physics and economics. At the age of 12 he published in a magazine the code for a video game he had written. His troubled father made his childhood “a kind of misery”, but he was also free to experiment with building home-made rockets in the company of his cousins. Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1971. So who exactly is he, and can he be serious? “My mind is not easily blown,” Downey Jr reported, “but this place and this guy were amazing.” Musk has also been a guest star on The Simpsons. Robert Downey Jr took inspiration from a visit to Musk’s rocket factory for his portrayal of Iron Man’s Tony Stark.
While Mark Zuckerberg wants to change the world by enabling you to see more baby photos, the man who glories in the sci-fi name of Elon Musk wants to change the world by solving transport and global warming, and establishing a colony on Mars. Yet the most intriguing figure among the Valley’s billionaire entrepreneurs right now makes incredibly elaborate machines: electric cars and space rockets. It has got to the stage where many tech startups look like parodic solutions in search of problems, as with the dozens of companies hoping to become the Uber for laundry. T he hype about the information age has been going on for so long that you’d assume all Silicon Valley innovation these days is based on apps and the internet, rather than sophisticated physical engineering: bits, not atoms.
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