How did Elon Musk grow into the business maverick he is today? It didn’t come easy. Even though the 48-year old tech titan Elon Musk is currently worth more than $40 billion, CNBC reports that the “Tesla and SpaceX boss hasn’t always been so wealthy.”
On my cousin's farm in Canada at 17, wearing a hat on a hat pic.twitter.com/U96ClGz5gZ— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2017
Musk acknowledged (via Twitter), “I arrived in North America at 17 with $2,000, a backpack and a suitcase full of books. Paid my own way through college. Dropped out of Stanford Engineering/Physics grad school with $110,000 in college debt.”
Let’s rewind. Looking back, where did this immigrant’s journey begin? Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa. In his home country, he’d moved to Johannesburg and Durban but always wanted to go to America. In a revealing 2012 interview with Kevin Rose, Musk explains, “It always seemed like when there was cool technology or things happening, it was kinda in the United States. So, my goal as a kid was to get to go to America basically.”
A fascinating interview with Tesla CEO Elon Musk back in 2012 where he discusses some of his early challenges (Youtube: Kevin Rose)
It turns out he’d make a go of it in Silicon Valley. He reached out to one of the hot dot-com companies of the time, Netscape. After making an effort, he recalls, “I didn’t get a reply from Netscape and I actually tried hanging out in the lobby, but I was too shy to talk to anyone. So I’m just like standing in the lobby. It was pretty embarrassing. I was just sort of standing there trying to see if there’s someone I could talk to and then I just couldn’t, I couldn’t … I was too scared to talk to anyone. So then I left.”After South Africa, Musk found his way to Canada where his mother recalls having very little money, “in a rent-controlled apartment in Toronto with Elon on the couch.”
He eventually received a scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania in the US. Musk didn’t know what to do after graduating. He admits, “I actually wasn’t sure what I wanted to do growing up. I think at one point I thought inventing stuff or creating things would be a cool thing to do. But I wasn’t really sure if that meant starting a company or whether that meant working for a company that made cool stuff.”
Source: Matt Pressman | CleanTechnica
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