Behind the Musk Myth: 10 Rarely Known Facts About Elon Musk

Elong Musk Illustration Image

Elon Musk is one of the most well-known personalities in the world. There are rockets, cars, and social media statuses that we all know about him. Yet, the real story about this man is much more complicated and interesting than it may seem.

He did not create Tesla. He was fired from PayPal. He even tried to negotiate buying Russian missiles for sending a greenhouse to Mars. In 2008, all his companies were a week away from bankruptcy.

In this post, we are going to uncover the other side of this popular story and find out 10 surprising facts about Elon Musk that are rarely mentioned by anyone.

1. He didn’t found Tesla. Tesla was incorporated in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk joined in 2004 as lead investor in the Series A round and became chairman. After a legal dispute, a 2009 settlement let Musk, JB Straubel, and Ian Wright also be called “co-founders” alongside the original two.

2. He was pushed out of PayPal. In 2000, while he was on a flight to Australia to raise money and start his honeymoon, the board replaced him as CEO. When eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for about $1.5 billion, his stake paid him roughly $175 million, which he put into SpaceX and Tesla.

3. His first Mars plan involved Russian missiles. In 2001-2002, he traveled to Russia to try to buy refurbished intercontinental ballistic missiles to send a greenhouse to Mars. The Russians reportedly dismissed him. That frustration led him to start SpaceX instead, and it is a big part of why SpaceX exists.

4. 2008 nearly ended everything. SpaceX’s first three Falcon 1 launches failed. Tesla was close to running out of cash. The fourth launch succeeded in September 2008, and NASA then awarded SpaceX a roughly $1.6 billion contract. Tesla’s emergency financing closed on Christmas Eve.

5. He left South Africa partly to avoid military service. He emigrated to Canada at 17 in 1989 through his Canadian-born mother, and has said he did not want to serve in the apartheid-era South African military.

6. His grandfather was an adventurer. Joshua Haldeman, his maternal grandfather, was a Canadian chiropractor and pilot who moved the family to South Africa in the 1950s and flew a small plane from Canada to South Africa and Australia.

7. He nearly died of malaria. After a trip to South Africa in 2000, he contracted a severe case of cerebral malaria and was reportedly close to death before being correctly diagnosed.

8. His academic path was unusual. He earned degrees in physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania, then enrolled in a Stanford PhD program and left after about two days to start Zip2. At 12 he sold a video game he coded called Blastar for about $500.

9. He was an OpenAI co-founder. He helped found OpenAI in 2015, donated tens of millions of dollars, and left the board in 2018. He later sued the company, and that dispute continues to shape the AI industry. He then started xAI in 2023.

10. He has publicly revealed that he has Asperger’s Syndrome. He revealed this during an episode of Saturday Night Live in 2021. This is one way of looking at his passion, but it doesn’t give the complete picture.

Conclusion: The “lone genius founder” story is great marketing. Reality, however, is more intriguing. The man who kept on betting on himself, barely making it through a couple of close shaves through luck and timing, and always been great at claiming his dues.

Elon Musk With Space X Model