Elon Musk, The Real Life Iron Man

Elon Musk, The Real Life Iron Man

Elon Musk, born in South Africa, is the renowned entrepreneur and innovator of PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity. Musk wants to save our planet; he wants to send citizens into space, to form a colony on Mars; he wants to make money while doing these things; and he wants all of us to know about it. He's the real-life inspiration for the Iron Man movie series starring Robert Downey Junior.

The personal story of Musk's life comes with all the adornments that one associates with a great drama-filled story. He was a strangely brilliant boy who was brutally bullied at school, and abused by his father. Amid these harsh conditions and the violence of South African apartheid, Musk continued to thrive academically and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he paid for his studies by turning his house into a club and throwing massive parties.

He started a couple of great dot-com hits, including PayPal, which eBay acquired for $1.5 billion in 2002. Musk was forced to step down as executive director, so he began his lost years in which he decided to go it alone and bewildered his friends by investing his fortune in rockets and electric cars. Meanwhile, Musk's marriage disintegrated when his technological obsessions took over his life.