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Elon and Kimbal Musk started the online city-guide company Zip2 in 1995 with about $28,000, and Compaq bought it in February 1999.

Elon Musk founded the online bank X.com in March 1999. It merged with Confinity in 2000, and the combined company was later renamed PayPal.

By that month Elon Musk had nearly run through his personal savings, and he split what was left between the two companies to keep both alive.

Falcon 1's first three launches, from 2006 to 2008, did not reach orbit. The fourth launch reached orbit on September 28, 2008.

Falcon 1 reached orbit on September 28, 2008. On December 23, 2008, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion Commercial Resupply Services contract for 12 cargo flights to the International Space Station.

Most launch companies buy engines and other major parts from suppliers. SpaceX designs and builds its own engines, avionics, and structures.

On February 6, 2018, the first Falcon Heavy carried his midnight-cherry Tesla Roadster, with a mannequin named Starman in a SpaceX spacesuit at the wheel.

Falcon Heavy's two side boosters touched down at the same moment at Landing Zones 1 and 2 at Cape Canaveral, the first time two boosters had landed side by side.

The rocket straps three Falcon 9 cores together, so 27 Merlin engines fire at once and produce more than 5 million pounds of thrust.

The engine sends all of its fuel and all of its oxidizer through two preburners, so almost no propellant is wasted. Raptor first flew on SpaceX's Starhopper test vehicle in 2019.

During the 2018 Model 3 “production hell,” he slept at the factory during critical periods, and in an August 2018 interview with The New York Times he called the past year excruciating.

At Autonomy Day in April 2019, Tesla said its own Full Self-Driving (FSD) computer processed 2,300 camera frames per second, against 110 on the bought hardware it replaced.

Tesla casts a rear underbody section as one aluminum part instead of stamping and welding about 70 pieces together.

Instead of painted panels on a frame, the Cybertruck wears a load-bearing exoskeleton of ultra-hard 30X cold-rolled stainless steel.

On Tesla's third-quarter 2013 earnings call, on November 5, 2013, he said “some kind of giga factory” would need to be built to make batteries.

Tesla opened its first six Supercharger stations, in Hawthorne, Barstow, Lebec, Coalinga, Gilroy, and Folsom, on September 24, 2012.

Elon Musk put roughly $100 million from the PayPal sale into SpaceX, led Tesla's 2004 Series A with $6.5 million, and put $10 million into SolarCity in 2006.

Tesla pays him no salary. His pay comes from stock awards, including performance awards granted in 2018 and 2025, that vest only when Tesla hits market-value and operating targets.

It divides a finished part's cost by the cost of the raw materials inside it.

When a supplier quoted a valve at $250,000, Elon Musk judged the price absurd next to the materials and told the team to make it, and SpaceX built it in-house for a fraction of the price.