Hello everyone and welcome to ZD Tech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. My name is Marine Louste and today, I’m going to tell you a few nuggets about who wants to, and I quote, “die on Mars, and not on landing”. I named Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla and SpaceX, among others.
The cryptoinfluencer
His statements on Dogecoin and bitcoin cause the price of these virtual currencies to explode and implode. To the point that some accuse him of having made them lose fortunes. The self-proclaimed Dogefather continues to influence the cryptocurrency world: he even recently claimed to have guessed the real name of the creator of bitcoin.
But long before becoming a cryptoinfluencer, Elon Musk was first a young African.
The most African of American billionaires
And yes, the most African of American billionaires was born in Pretoria, South Africa, during Apartheid. Before joining his “promised land”, the United States, he settled in Canada. To be quite naturally a lumberjack.
But his vocation for digital entrepreneurship had begun long before.
Entrepreneur at 12
At 10, he convinced his father to buy him his first computer, a Commodore, and taught himself to code. He codes his first computer program at 12, a video game inspired by Space Invaders, for which he collects 500 dollars. Not bad for a first paycheck!
And that was long before joining Stanford.
Weekend at Stanford
Because yes, Elon Musk went through Stanford. A quick passage since he will stay there… two days. Attracted by entrepreneurial ambitions, he prefers to create his first company, an online directory that he sells for more than 300 million dollars.
He then creates with part of these funds X.Com, which will later become PayPal. But while he is at his head, he is fired during his leave.
Aversion to holidays
Since then, he hardly takes any vacations. “Holidays will kill you”, he will say even after a severe attack of malaria, which occurred a few months later during his honeymoon. And he applies the same regime to his employees, to whom he lavishes this threatening advice: “take two weeks of vacation, and I will see if I really need you”.
Iron Man IRL
Passionate about SF and comics from a very young age, Elon Musk feels like the stuff of a superhero. Maybe that’s why he inspired Jon Favreau for the movie version of Iron-Man.
Like the Marvel hero, the entrepreneur dreams of taking off. This is how he founded SpaceX in 2002. According to his own words, to compensate for the “lack of ambition of NASA”. His goal: to colonize the red planet. And die there in peace… as late as possible of course.
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