Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971 in Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa. He has Canadian, African, and American citizenship. He is mostly known for being the founder of SpaceX. In December of 2016, Musk was ranked 21st on the list of the most powerful people in the world. At the age of twelve, he taught himself how to code, and he even wrote code for his own video game called Blastar and sold it to a gaming company for $500. One of his main ideas is that he colonize Mars. He said “I won’t be happy until I do so”. He wants to do so to decrease the chance of human extinction. Musk is sometimes considered the real-life Tony Stark because of everything he can do.

Musk was raised in South Africa, but he moved to Canada at the age of 17 so he could attend Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. After two years at Queens University, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania where he got a degree in economics and physics. In 1995, he then went to Stanford University where he started a degree in applied physics and material sciences, but he dropped out after two days to purse an entrepreneurial career.

Elon Musk helped with the Tham Luang cave rescue in Thailand in July of 2018. He helped them by building a small rescue pod that had the ability of going in the cave and rescuing children. The rescue pod was five feet long and twelve inches wide. It was propelled manually by divers. By the time the rescue pod was finished, eight of the twelve children had already been rescued, and it was not used in rescuing the last few. It was still described as “technologically impressive” by many. Even though it was not used in rescuing the children, it was still kept in case of a similar problem.

In 2008, SpaceX nearly went bankrupt. Musk used most of the company’s money on rocket launches. Although he failed the first 3 launches, he overcame the odds and made the fourth launch successful. After the fourth launch was successful, NASA offered a $1.6 million dollar contract to SpaceX. Musk said if it wasn’t for NASA, SpaceX wouldn’t have been able to function any longer.