1 / 9Elon Musk turns 51 years old on June 28, and his achievements make him the most successful tech entrepreneur and investor in the world. His companies have disrupted several major industries and their work is continuing to achieve higher goals. From an online business directory Zip 2 to space exploration company SpaceX, Elon Musk has created many successful business ventures in his career and he inspires an entire generation of budding entrepreneurs. On his 51st birthday, CNBCTV18.com has handpicked some of the key milestones of the world's richest person read on to know more. (Image: Reuters)
2 / 9No 1 | Acquisition of Zip 2 by Compaq (1999) | Musk with his brother founded Zip2, an online business directory, as an online alternative to the standard paper yellow pages. They sold it for over $300 million to Compaq Computer Corporation. (Image: Reuters)
3 / 9No 2 | Made his first billion | Using $10 million of his earnings from the sale of Zip2, Musk co-founded e-payment company X.com, an online financial services company. After a merger with Confinity, X.com's board ousted Musk and renamed the company PayPal. In 2002, eBay purchased PayPal for $1.5 billion, and Musk earned $180 million from the sale. (Image: Reuters)
4 / 9No 3 | SpaceX (2002) | In early 2002, Musk founded the Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, with $100 million of the money received from the PayPal sale. His goal was to make spaceflight cheaper by a factor of 10 and colonise the planet Mars. The space exploration company in the next few years received many contracts from NASA and today it has grown into a $125 billion giant, according to reports. By 2015, SpaceX had made 24 launches on various assignments of NASA setting lots of records along the way. Later in 2016, the SpaceX Falcon 9 made the first successful ocean landing of a reusable orbital rocket. (Image: Reuters)
5 / 9No 4 | Takeover of Tesla (2004) | Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla, an electric vehicle company, in 2003. Musk led the series A round funding for Tesla and joined the board as its chairman in 2004. In 2007, Eberhard was ousted from Tesla and Musk took over as the CEO. (Image: Reuters)
6 / 9No 5 | OpenAI (2015) | In late 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI, a non-profit organisation dedicated to research on artificial intelligence. (Image: Shutterstock)
7 / 9No 6 | SolarCity Acquisition (2016) | Musk came up with the idea for a solar energy company and gave his cousins Peter and Lyndon Rive the working capital to get the company, SolarCity, off the ground in 2006. Tesla’s $2.6-billion acquisition of SolarCity was completed in November 2016. (Image: Reuters)
8 / 9No 7 | Neuralink (2016) | Musk co-founded another research venture, Neuralink, with the goal of working on “brain-machine interfaces,” or BMIs, that can be implanted directly into the skull or the body. (Image: Shutterstock)
9 / 9No 8 | Twitter takeover bid (2022) | In 2022, Musk ended up buying enough stocks to make him a majority shareholder in micro blogging platform Twitter. He then made an offer of $44 billion to acquire Twitter. In April, the Twitter board approved the acquisition deal, but the process has not been completed yet. If the deal goes through, he plans to make Twitter an arena for free speech, make the algorithms open source to increase trust, and defeat the spam. (Image: Shutterstock)
