Queens Gazette

Queen's Gazette
A conversation with Elon Musk, Com’94, is filled with pauses. He gathers his thoughts to answer questions about what and who has inspired him, about the ­differences between madness and genius, and about the high-flying ventures that have won him fame and fortune.

You wonder if his stops-and-starts are the respites he needs to check on whether there’s a flash of inspiration trying to get his attention somewhere else in his brain on “line two.”

Former student Elon Musk is an entrepreneur-philanthropist with out-of-this world ambitions. (Dan Tuffs/Getty Images)Brainstorms, it would seem, occur with stunning frequency in the mind of this former Queen’s student who’s fast emerging as one of the 21st century’s foremost innovators. Musk is a billionaire who has been written about – and lauded – by such influential publications as Forbes, The New Yorker, Time, and the Los Angeles Times, and was profiled recently on the popular CBS television news magazine 60 Minutes.

It was at Queen’s that this world-class visionary and entrepreneur extraordinaire began the post-secondary studies that helped to further unlock his mind and served as a kind of preamble to his stratospherically imaginative and successful career. It’s a career that promises to soar even higher, to the heavens and beyond.

More than two decades ago, from 1989 to 1991, Musk spent his freshman and sophomore years in Kingston. That’s a period in his life he now recalls with fondness and a light-hearted sense of cheer. These days he’s renowned as the creative and guiding force behind PayPal, Tesla electric motor cars, and SolarCity (which leases solar-power systems to private homeowners). And his private rocket ship company, SpaceX, made headlines when it launched a cargo rocket and spacecraft that on May 25, 2012, became the first commercial vehicle to deliver a load of supplies to the International Space Station.

Musk is also a dedicated philanthropist. He established and serves as is chair of the Musk Foundation, which promotes science education, pediatric health, and clean energy; he’s keenly interested and actively involved in efforts to promote solar power and green technologies. In April 2012, when he joined The Giving Pledge – the philanthropic campaign kick-started by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates – Musk made the moral commitment to donate one day the bulk of his wealth to worthy causes.

> Foreshadowing his future entrepreneurial career, Musk wrote the code for and sold a video game when he was 12.

Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, the eldest of three siblings – he has a brother, Kimbal, and a sister, Tosca. Their father was an engineer, his mother, a nutritionist and fashion model (who once posed in the nude, make-believe pregnant at 63 years of age, for a New York Magazine cover). The genes for both logic and a conventions-be-damned attitude would seem to be inherited, and to an exponential degree.

As the kind of kid who had all the answers, young Elon didn’t win many schoolboy friends. His mother has been quoted as recalling, “He read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica when he was only eight or nine, and he remembered it.”

Foreshadowing his future entrepreneurial career, Musk wrote the code for and sold a video game when he was 12. By the time he was a teenager, he had a much bigger appetite for education than could be satisfied by answering his draft call from the apartheid-era South African army.

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“I left South Africa by myself, against my parents’ wishes,” he told the Review during a recent interview at SpaceX’s Los Angeles headquarters.

Musk’s mother is Canadian-born, and he has a grandmother and an aunt living in Alberta. So it was to Canada and to Queen’s that he came in 1990, hoping to broaden – and eventually to go beyond – both his personal and literal horizons. “I came to North America because I felt this was where there was opportunity to do great things in technology.”

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Oddly enough, it wasn’t just academic excellence that drew Musk to Queen’s, but rather another very down-to-earth reason – his keen eye for members of the opposite sex. “It was a close call for me between the University of Waterloo and Queen’s.

“I was going to do physics and engineering at Waterloo, but then I visited the campus … and, you may not want to print this,” he says with a laugh, “but there didn’t seem to be any girls there! So, I visited Queen’s, and there were girls there. I didn’t want to spend my undergraduate time with a bunch of dudes.”

Turning more serious, he recalls that he met his first wife – ­Justine (Wilson) Musk, Artsci’96, at Queen’s. The couple was together for eight years, , and they had five sons together. As befits a man about whom so little is ordinary, Musk is the ­father of twins and of triplets.

“I had a great time at Queen’s,” Musk reflects. “It was fun and interesting. I’d call them formative years,” he says.

Musk lived at Victoria Hall, on the International Floor. “That was where I met Navaid Farooq [Artsci’94] who remains one of my best friends to this day,” says Musk.

Recalling his two student years in Canada, Musk notes, “In the first two years at university, you learn a lot about a great many things. One particular thing that I learned at Queen’s – both from faculty and students – was how to work collaboratively with smart people and make use of the Socratic method to achieve commonality of purpose.”

What he learned about the Socratic method at Queen’s would prove to be huge, perhaps one of the most significant factors in his future success when it came time for him to start SpaceX.

Elon Musk (right) and his brother Kimbal wore their Queen's year jackets on a 1992 outing in Toronto with their grandmother. (Photo courtesy of Kimbal Musk.)However, after just two years in Kingston, Musk decided that finishing his degree at an American Ivy League university might help win him a job in American industry and propel him upwards in his career faster. So he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. His course work there didn’t prevent him from making trips back to Kingston to visit his younger brother, Kimbal Musk, Com’95, who had followed his path to Queen’s and would go on to a highly successful business career of his own.

Elon earned two degrees at Penn – a BS in physics and then one in economics from its Wharton School. From there, it was on to Stanford University, where he’d been accepted for doctoral studies, originally intending to concentrate in the field of energy physics. However, by now Musk was envisioning his career possibilities in three arenas: the Internet, clean energy, and space.

This was 1995, the start of the Internet boom, and its lure was too much for Musk to resist. At age 24 he dropped out of Stanford after just two days, and then partnered with brother Kimbal to start a business they called Zip2 Corporation, which produced online city guides for various big-city newspapers. Zip2 Corporation signed contracts with both The Chicago Tribune and The New York Times.

When venture capitalists jumped in with an offer of $3.6 million in start-up capital, Musk relinquished majority control of the fledgling venture. This proved to be an early example of his business savvy and crucial to his career success. In 1999, Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash, rewarding Musk with $22 million for his seven per cent stake. He became a multi-millionaire at age 28.

Musk used part of his windfall to launch another company. X.com was an online bank that developed the PayPal online payment system that’s widely used today. Musk sold PayPal to eBay in 2002 for a staggering $1.5 billion, netting $165 million in eBay stock in the process.

Then, as now, Elon Musk moved at warp speed in his business dealings. Later that same year, he launched his next venture – and his most high-flying one to date, the space transport provider Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, as it has become commonly known. Not content to stop there, in 2003, he started Tesla Motors, a maker of high-end electric sports cars.

Nikola Tesla ( ) was a Serbian-American inventor whose accomplishments had tantalized and inspired Musk for years. Tesla, who invented the alternating current induction motor and the bladeless turbine, was right when his rival Thomas Edison was wrong about whether direct or alternating current would power America. Tesla registered more than 700 patents, foresaw harnessing both solar and tidal power, and envisioned satellites and interplanetary communi