9 Things You Didn’t Know About Elon Musk

Elon Musk is like a real-life Tony Stark from Marvel: a brilliant engineer, renowned inventor, and billionaire-philanthropist! Everyone knows who he is, but what do we really know about him? Is he an alien or an Illuminati? Probably not, but there are quite a few quirky lesser-known facts about his youth and some of his projects that you may find interesting, so let’s roll!

Here are 9 things about Elon Musk you didn’t know about.

1. Living on one dollar a day
When Musk immigrated to Canada, leaving his divorced parents in South Africa, he was taken in by a lovely family. Sadly they weren’t rich, so he had to live on 1 dollar a day for some time. If it weren’t for oranges and hot dogs sold cheaply in bulk, who knows how his life would’ve gone from there.

2. Musk’s most dangerous job
There came a time when Musk realized he needed money so of course, he got a job. Actually, several odd jobs, but it wasn’t enough. One day some dude told him about this boiler place that pays $18/hour but naturally, there was a catch – the job sucked! Musk later said in an interview that he had to put on a hazmat suit, go inside a small tunnel, shovel away the flaming hot gunk from the boiler, bring it back through the same hole he came in from, rinse and repeat. Wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the unbearable heat. If you were not back in 30 minutes – you were probably dead in that tiny tunnel.

3. Zip2 made Musk a rich!
Sometime in the mid-90’s Musk dropped out of Stanford (after only 2 days) to start Zip2 – his very first software company. Due to some corporate BS, he had to hand over the control over the company to a group of venture capitalists, while keeping only 7% of the shares. A few years later, Compaq Computers bought them out for $307 million, giving Musk $22 million, and officially making him a multi-millionaire at the age of 28.