In 1999, Ed Ho, Harris Fricker, Christopher Paine, and Elon Musk created X.com, a payment site associated with First Western National Bank where people can send each other money through E-mail. Five months later, due to disagreements on running the company, Elon fired Fricker. Paine and Ho left soon after because of it. When X.com officially launched at the end of that year, Bill Harris was the official CEO, not Musk. In 2000, X.com and Confinity's PayPal merged, using the name of the latter [what's wrong with calling a website "x.com"?].
In 2001, Elon Musk became involved in a non-profit: the Mars Society. They were trying to send a green house onto Mars, and Elon tried to participate by flying to Mosscow to purchase inter-continental ballistic missiles, however his mission was unsuccessful. So instead, Elon Musk just decided to fund his own foundation with the $100,000,000 he had lying around (around $175 million today).
He decidied to name it SpaceX (he likes that letter a lot) and launched his first rocket in 2006. It failed to reach orbit, and the next two launches were failures as well, causing the company to near bankruptcy, but NASA gave him a $1.6 billion grant later that year. In 2015, the company had its first successful attempt at catching a used rocket.
Various images of SpaceX's Starship.
In July 2003, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning officially incorporated Tesla Motors. In the next year, Musk invested $6.35 million (around $10 million today) for the company's series A launch, and therefore joined the company's board of directors as chairman. During the crisis of 2008, Eberhard was ousted from the firm and Elon took his place as CEO. The company is now worth around $1.5 trillion.
Listed from top left: Tesla's Model S, Model X, Model 3, Model Y, and the Cybertruck.
