THE MAN ON THE MOON - ELON MUSK

Elon Reeve Musk is an industrial designer, engineer and the founder, CEO, CTO, and chief designer of SpaceX.

Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28,1971 in South Africa to Maye Musk and Errol Musk. Elon has a younger brother who was an early business partner of his.

When Elon turned 10 years old, he got his first computer and taught himself how to program and by the time he was 12 years old he sold his first program for the price of 500 dollars. Throughout his childhood, he was bullied and was even hospitalized once after a group of kids threw him down the stairs.

Elon graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. Although Musk's father insisted that Elon go to college in Pretoria, Musk was determined to move to the United States, saying "I remember thinking and seeing that America is where great things are possible, more than any other country in the world."

Musk knew it would be easier to get to the United States from Canada and moved there against his father's wishes in June 1989, just before his 18th birthday, after obtaining a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother.

In 1995, Musk was accepted to a Ph.D. program in Energy Physics/Materials Science at Stanford University in California. In California, he attempted to get a job at Netscape, but never received a response to his job inquiries. He ended up dropping out of Stanford after two days, deciding instead to join the Internet boom and launch an internet startup instead, Zip2.

In 2001, Elon had an idea to land a miniature experimental greenhouse on Mars, containing food crops growing on Martian land(regolith), in order to reawaken public interest in space exploration.

Musk believed the key to making space travel affordable was to make rockets reusable, though space industry experts believed reusable rockets were impossible or infeasible. Musk however, realized that he could start a company that could build the affordable rockets he needed.

Ultimately, Musk founded SpaceX with the long-term goal of creating a true spacefaring civilization. With 100 million US dollars of his early fortune, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., traded as SpaceX, in May 2002. Musk is CEO and CTO of the California-based company. By 2016, Musk's private trust held 54% of SpaceX stock, equivalent to 78% of voting shares.

In conclusion Elon Musk is an interesting and unique man who is shaping the future and will soon start a colony on Mars.