Elon Musk was born in South Africa in 1971. He got his first computer at the age of 8 and learned to program. At 17 he went to University in Canada and subsequently settled in the USA where he founded a company, Zip2, which provided online travel guides. Zip2 was an early internet success and in 1999 he sold it to Compaq Computer Corporation for $330m. Straight away Musk started another internet company X.com to provide online payments. It became PayPal and he held 11% of the stock when it was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5B.
