When Robert Downey Jr. found out that he was going to play Iron Man in the movies, he said, "We need to sit down with Elon Musk."
That's because Musk — colonizer of Mars, transformer of cars, shepherd of solar panels — is the closest thing we've got to a superhero.
Born in South Africa, he sold his first software — a game called Blastar— when he was only 11. He went on to found and sell a startup to Compaq for $300 million in 1999, and parlayed that into a major stake in PayPal, which eBay bought for $1.5 billion in 2002.
With that dough, he got into three world-changing companies: Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City. And though Tesla and SpaceX nearly went bankrupt, each of the companies is now shifting their industries.
Yet Musk — with his 100-hour workweeks, estimated $11.7 billion net worth, and habit of never taking a note in meetings — remains enigmatic. So we went looking for clues to his vision, goals, and thinking process.
Here's what we found.
On finding your own education
"My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment — my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.
"When I asked for an explanation, I got the true explanation of how things work. I also did things like make model rockets, and in South Africa there were no premade rockets: I had to go to the chemist and get the ingredients for rocket fuel, mix it, put it in a pipe."
On his childhood experiments
"It is remarkable how many things you can explode. I’m lucky I have all my fingers."
[Businessweek, September 13, 2012]
On his favorite book when he was a teen, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
"It taught me that the tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but that once you do that, the rest is really easy."
[Businessweek, September 13, 2012]
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