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VH1 needs to make a "Best Year Ever" episode just about Elon Musk. Tesla Motors, even with a few bumps in the battery road, has grown to enormous levels already, SpaceX is finally being taken seriously, and, because he had too much free time on his hands, Musk also released his plans for the Hyperloop. So, it should come as no surprise that the man whose hands are in technology both in and out of this world was named AskMen's "Most Influential Man of the Year."
It's likely that this will be just the first of many year-end awards he receives, so let us humbly suggest one more for the list: Most Interesting Man Alive. Every detail of his story reveals how fascinating his mind is, from his favorite book as a child to the blockbuster movie character inspired by him. While he's out here learning to change the world, you can teach yourself a few things about him with 25 Things You Didn't Know About Elon Musk.
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Elon's great-grandma was the first female chiropractor in Canada.
That's not the only odd first in his family. His grandparents were the first to fly from South Africa to Australia in a single-engine plane. And his grandpa won a race from Cape Town to Algiers.
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Elon read four to five hours a day as a kid.
By the time he was 10, Musk read twice as much. The information that came in one ear stayed there. Musk could blurt out that the moon is 384,400 miles from Earth, on average.
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy enlightened him.
The book taught him that figuring out the right questions is difficult and everything else is easy. To discover what questions to ask, Elon believes society should increase the "scope and scale of human consciousness."
Elon was bullied in school.
He was the smallest and youngest guy in his school, and the other children picked on him. His mother said he was also in conflict with South Africa as a whole. According to a GQ article, "it turned out he had two recourses. The first was his family — and his ability to think of himself as a Musk, and therefore as a kind of transcendent citizen rather than as a South African."
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Despite not having a map, he once tried to bike 50 miles.
Musk grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, which is about 50 miles south of Johannesburg. When he was still young, Elon and his even-younger brother tried to ride their bikes to Johannesburg. The two got lost and somehow made it through "some super-dangerous areas" without harm. Too bad he didn't have a hyperloop yet.
Elon also created homemade explosives and fireworks.
Yet still no harm. "It is remarkable how many things you can explode," Elon said. "I'm lucky I have all my fingers." And you thought your illegal M80s were cool.
Elon copped his first computer at age 10.
Then he taught himself how to program it. Musk would sell his first piece of software, a game called Blastar, two years later for $500.
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He tried opening an arcade when he was 16.
Elon and his younger brother Kimbal had a lease and suppliers, but the city wouldn't approve their business. Their parents had no idea until afterwards.
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Elon moved to Canada to make immigrating to the U.S. easier.
After high school, Musk figured out that it would be easier to become an American citizen as a Canadian than a South African. Elon studied at Queens University in Ontario, and in 1992 switched to Penn, where he'd graduate with degrees in economics and physics. However, he didn't take the oath of American citizenship until 2002.
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Elon worked at a lumber mill and cleaned boilers so filthy he needed a hazmat suit.
He didn't jump off the plane and immediately into college. After moving to Canada, Elon was broke and homeless, so he popped up on distant relative's doorsteps and did odd jobs until he could go to school.
At Penn he paid his way through school by throwing house parties.
His roommate made art installations to make their place feel like a club, while Elon handled the business end. The two once got into an intense argument when Musk converted one of his roommate's pieces to a desk. To this day, they still disagree on whether the piece was art or a piece of furniture.
He's been interested in the Internet, sustainable energy, and space exploration since college.
Musk says he's always wanted to create a significant, positive effect for the future of humanity. Right now you can thank him for making it possible to pay for those Js on eBay or to drive an electric car that doesn't make you look soft. And soon, you can thank him from space.
Musk bored his dates with rants about electric cars.
Electric cars don't seem so boring now, do they? Your loss, ladies.
He dropped out of Stanford 48 hours after beginning the physics doctoral program.
But he didn't retreat to his parents' basement. Musk launched his first company Zip2, which made an Internet city guide for newspapers including the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. The money he made from selling the company led him to his involvement with PayPal.
Elon made $180 million as a co-founder of PayPal.
He sold the company back in '02. Six million (and 300,000) of that fortune became Musk's initial investment in Tesla in 2004. Today, PayPal has continued to grow stronger than ever. In an eBay earnings report released early this year, John Donahoe, eBay Inc. President and CEO, said "eBay mobile finished the year with $13 billion in volume - more than double the prior year - and PayPal mobile handled almost $14 billion in payment volume, more than triple the prior year. In 2013, we expect each to exceed $20 billion." As of Q2 of this year, PayPal has more than 132 million active accounts and is in more than 200 markets.
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He was held at gunpoint by police in Russia.
Musk went to Russia to buy three $7-million-dollar rockets for the company that would later become SpaceX, and while he was there, he was pulled over several times and had to bribe the police to move on. The sellers turned out to be equally shady, so Musk decided to build his own rockets.
It just so happens that when he was building those rockets that he decided to use an incredible 3D technology with CAD, with which he could manipulate the Merlin engines by motioning his hands in front of a computer screen. Sound like some Tony Stark ish? Well, that's because ...
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Tony Stark's character in the Iron Man movies was inspired by him.
Director Jon Favreau says that when he began working on the first movie, he had no idea how to make Stark seem real. That's when Robert Downey Jr. told Favreau the two needed to sit down with Musk. "Downey was right," Favreau wrote. "Elon is a paragon of enthusiasm, good humor and curiosity - a Renaissance man in an era that needs them." In Iron Man 2, Musk played himself in a brief scene.
He was an executive producer on Thank You For Smoking.
Based off a book of the same name, the 2005 movie follows a tobacco lobbyist in the 90s. It made four times its budget, so shouts out to Elon for another profitable venture. And that's not his only project either. He has producer credits on five movies total, according to IMDb, and he plays himself in Machete Kills. You know, just in case anybody was thinking about messing with him like back in his school days. He also tweeted in May that he was thinking about a Thank You For Smoking sequel, which would likely target worldwide pollution concerns.
Elon insisted upon selling battery packs to other manufacturers.
Tesla was still struggling back in 2007 and needed new sources of income. Costs for the Roadster, priced at $109,000, soared to $140,000. Musk asked Tesla CTO JB Straubel to build a Smart Car powered by a Tesla battery to show to Daimler executives. Straubel warned that he'd have to pull engineers from working on the Roadster, but Musk insisted. It paid off when the Smart Car was unveiled, and Tesla won a contract to supply Daimler with battery packs and also secured a $50 million investment.
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Elon reimagined the sedan.
When Musk brought in Mazda designer Franz von Holzhausen to work on the Model S, he told von Holzhausen he wanted to make a four-door car with seven seats. von Holzhausen replied, "That's an SUV, not a sedan." Once again, Musk insisted, and von Holzhausen finished a prototype of the game-changing sedan in 2009. It turns out that ditching the combustible engine creates a lot more space. Those extra two seats, by the way, are in the trunk, so it's not completely different, but still.
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Musk ate froyo with Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda.
The two CEOs had a fun-filled day driving the Tesla Roadster through California. Toyoda wanted to take not one, but two test drives of the electric sportscar. After they were done, the two enjoyed a frozen treat at Musk's SpaceX rocket factory. A month later, Toyota invested $50 million in Tesla. When asked why, Toyoda said of Musk, "I love him."
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Elon paid $42 million for a plant valued at $1 billion.
Before the Model S, Tesla was producing the Roadster in a garage in Menlo Park, Cali, individually putting the cars together one by one. In 2009, Tesla only made 800 of the electric sports cars. With the company looking to expand exponentially, Elon came across a factory run by GM and Toyota that was 5.5 million square feet and had a plastics molding factory, two paint facilities, 1.5 miles of assembly lines, and a 50-megawatt power plant. About 450,000 cars were being produced at that plant per year at the time. But a plant that size was far more costly than anything his budget allowed for.
Initially Musk wasn't even allowed to visit the factory in Fremont, but in 2010, GM pulled out of the plant after having to declare bankruptcy, and Toyota planned to shut down production. Interest in the massive building was low, so Musk was able to get away with way lower than what the facility was actually worth.
He's since also purchased 35 acres adjacent to the factory for a test track and is currently looking into building a lithium ion battery megafactory with production "comparable to all lithium ion production in the world.”
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He works 80-100 hours per week and once almost had a nervous breakdown.
Would you expect anything else from a CEO of two companies and chairman of another? His advice for entrepreneurs: "Work like hell." It hasn't all been good vibes, though.
Before all of Musk's recent success, there was a moment in 2008 when he had a humongous decision about the future of SpaceX and Tesla. To him, they were basically his children, and it came to a point where he had to choose how to distribute his funds. He could put all of it into one and kill the other or spread the funds to both and risk losing it all. Obviously, he chose the latter.
"I never thought of myself as someone who could have a nervous breakdown, like, 'what kind of pussy has a nervous breakdown?' ... but I came damn close," Musk said in an interview with Business Insider this week.
He sonned Mitt Romney.
In one of his many nonsensical statements during his presidential campaign, Mitt Romney called Tesla a "loser." Musk responded after the election by saying Romney "was right about the object of that statement, but not the subject."
He was annoyed with the traffic on California's I-405, so he donated $50K to a group advocating highway improvements.
He also said he'd be willing to pay for additional workers to help widen the highway. Much more productive than road rage, right?