Space Exploration Technologies Corporation

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation



SHOOTING THE MOON
Internet multimillionaire Elon Musk bets his entire fortune developing a subcompact rocket that could make outer space as accessible as cyberspace.

Discover
September 2005
By Brad Lemley

Can a rocket be cute?

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Elon Musk is 34 years old, worth hundreds of millions, owns two jets, and even has straight teeth, so it’s quite natural to hate him. Unfortunately, in person he turns out to be a chatty, self-deprecating fellow who’s virtually impossible to dislike. Born in South Africa, he has a not-quite-British accent and an arid wit: “When people ask me why I started a rocket company, I say, ‘I was trying to learn how to turn a large fortune into a small one.’ ”

If he succeeds, poverty won’t be a new experience. At age 17, he left home to enroll at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, subsisting on less than $1 a day—he calls it a forced experiment in avoiding scurvy—before landing a scholarship and earning an undergraduate physics degree at the University of Pennsylvania. Enrolled in a doctorate program at Stanford University, he dropped out after just two days to start a media-services software company called Zip2 in 1995, which he sold in 1999. He then cofounded PayPal, the world’s leading electronic payment system, and sold it to online auctioneer eBay in 2002. As a major shareholder in both ventures, his resulting net worth has been estimated at $324 million. Asked if the figure is correct, he shrugs: “That depends on how you value SpaceX.” .....