While Musk has been anything but shy about what he was up to, few people
outside of his companies got to see the factories, the R&D centers, the machine shops,
and to witness the scope of what he was doing firsthand.
Here was a guy who had taken much of the Silicon Valley ethic behind moving
quickly and running organizations free of bureaucratic hierarchies and applied it to improving big, fantastic machines
and chasing things that had the potential to be the real breakthroughs we've been missing.
By rights, Musk should have been part of the malaise.
He jumped into the dot-com mania in 1995 when, fresh out of college, he founded a company called Zip2.
A primitive Google Maps meets Yelp.
The first venture ended up a big, quick hit.
Compaq bought Zip2 in 1999 for $307 million.
This is something very few people know about Elon.
They know about PayPal, they know about SpaceX, they know about Tesla.
Now they know about SolarCity.
They didn't know that when he was in his early 20s, he sold a company for $307 million.
Musk made $22 million from the deal and poured almost all of it into his next venture,
a startup that would morph into PayPal.
As the largest shareholder in PayPal, Musk became fantastically well-to-do
when eBay acquired the company for $1.5 billion in 2002. So let's just stop there.
1999, young Elon, first startup, sells it for $307 million.