SpaceX and Tesla mogul Elon Musk is speculated to perhaps become a trillionaire one day, but how did he make his first billion dollars?

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Number 7. Ambitious Youth
From a young age, Elon Musk was a dreamer. Always deep in thought, his father Errol once described to a Johannesburg radio station just how abstract of a thinker his son could be: "The Kind of things he would come up with as a youngster was always surprising," Errol said. "When he was very small, he would ask me 'where is the whole world?' when he was three or four. It was these sorts of questions that made me realize that he was a little different." Elon would get so lost in his imagination that his parents went so far as to seek medical attention for possible hearing issues. He found an outlet for this creativity at the age of 10 when he discovered computers. Teaching himself to program, he crafted his first piece of software at the age of 12, a game called Blastar. The space themed game was published in South Africa's PC and Office Technology magazine, earning Elon $500 for the source code! He would maintain this same hunger for knowledge throughout his schooling, even going outside his comfort zone in high school to pick up karate and wrestling as a means of defending himself against bullies. Once in college, he followed his passions at Queen's University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University, earning degrees in economics and physics before quickly dropping out of his PhD program to pursue business success during the internet boom.


Number 6. Resourceful Determination
Not always graced with riches, there were times early in his career where Musk would have to rely on his curious intuition and self-drive to get by. Once he arrived in Canada after moving from South Africa in the late 1980s, Musk hopped from one oddjob to the next. First he worked on his cousin's farm shoveling grain and tending to vegetables before going to Vancouver and learning to use a chainsaw and cut logs. During tough times, he even worked for a lumber mill as a boiler room cleaner after finding it to be the highest paying job offered from an unemployment agency at 18 dollars an hour. This job required Musk to work in a hazmat suit as he shoveled residue and squeezed through cramped spaces in extremely high temperatures. While in college, the future billionaire resorted to selling PC parts and customized computers to classmates, and once he got to the University of Pennsylvania, he rented a frat house and converted it into a nightclub where he would earn an entire month's rent in one night!


Number 5. Early Ventures
When Musk was accepted to Stanford's PhD program, he had hoped to obtain a degree in energy physics. However, the prospect of the burgeoning internet industry drew his attention and just two days after his Stanford acceptance, Musk quit school to start the Zip2 Corporation with his brother Kimbal [kimble]. Together they built up the startup venture using an initial funding of 28 thousand dollars from their father's bank account. The company created maps and directories for online media outlets, and became such a useful commodity, it drew the attention of PC company Compaq. This leading supplier of personal computers at the time paid the Musk brothers a handsome 307 million dollars for Zip2, 22 million of which went directly to Elon. They used the proceeds of this deal to fund their next endeavor, X.com, which operated as an online payment and financial service company. Within a year, it became known as PayPal after merging with rival company Confinity . Elon was removed as the company's CEO and it would sell to eBay within the next two years for 1.5 billion dollars in stock...against the advice of Musk! Still, Elon would walk away with 180 million dollars after taxes as his share of the sale.


Number 4. Shoot For The Stars
Using the money he gained from the sale of eBay, Musk would immediately start his third company in 2002 with the development of the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX for short. Within 6 years, the space age start-up had earned the respect of NASA, being awarded a contract to transport cargo to the International Space Station as the government entity began to move away from their own space shuttle missions.

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