Elon Musk is worth $13.1 billion as of September 2015, but allegedly doesn't believe in the word "business."
The tech entrepreneur, born in South Africa in 1971, reportedly told Wait But Why earlier this year that "there's no such thing as a business, just pursuit of a goal."
Whatever Musk labels his efforts, he sure has involved himself in a bunch of them — major online payment services, building and launching spacecraft, and trying to cover the world with solar panels, to name a few.
The breadth of his reach is astounding, and it's enough to make anyone feel exhausted.
To cut through that complexity, we've highlighted 18 entities that Musk has reportedly founded, cofounded, invested in, or supported in some way.
1. Musk's first company was Zip2 Corporation — the web's first Yellow Pages — in 1995.
Musk was 24 when he dropped out of graduate school for physics at Stanford University to launch his first company, Zip2 Corporation— a dot-com media company that supplied maps and business directories to online newspapers.
He linked digital online maps from Navteq to a business directory and created the internet's first online Yellow Pages.
Four years later, in 1999, Musk sold the company to computer-manufacturer Compaq for $307 million. At that time, it was the largest amount ever paid for an internet company.
2. He founded online payment company X.com in 1999, which eventually merged with PayPal.
The same year Musk sold Zip2, he used $10 million from the sale to found the online financial-services company X.com.
Musk wanted to focus on the new technology of making payments via email, so he merged his company with a competitor called Confinity— which started the online money transfer process PayPal.
In a heated clash of personalities and egos, however, the cofounders of Confinity fired Musk from the board, then renamed the company PayPal.
The online auction company eBay purchased PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
3. In 1998, Musk invested in IT company Everdream Corporation, which was eventually sold to Dell.
Cofounded in 1998 by Musk's cousin, Lyndon Rive, Everdream sold desktop management services to small businesses. It also managed and fixed antivirus software, performed data backups, and administered data encryption.
Musk, who was still involved with PayPal at the time, invested in Everdream on the fourth round, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal.
Rive and his twin brother, Russ, sold the company, headquartered in Fremont, California, to Dell in 2007.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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