Elon Musk was born on June 28th, 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa. He founded X.com in 1999, which later became PayPal, SpaceX in 2002, and Tesla Motors in 2003. Musk became a multimillionaire in his late 20s when he sold his start-up company, Zip2, to a division of Compaq Computers. His father Errol Musk was an electromechanical engineer, a pilot, and a sailor. But life as a child wasn’t all gorgeous mothers and comic books for Elon. His parents separated in 1980 and his father became his primary caregiver. These were traumatic years for the young boy, the bullying... Musk founded his third company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, in 2002 with the intention of building spacecraft for commercial space travel. By 2008, SpaceX was well established, and NASA awarded the company the contract to handle cargo transport for the International Space Station—with plans for astronaut transport in the future—in a move to replace NASA’s own space shuttle missions. find out more about his formative years. The creation of PayPal, Zip2, Tesla, SpaceX & more in the video.