Say the name Elon Musk and most people will know you're talking about the entrepreneur, Tesla co-founder and soon to be owner of Twitter, but he hasn't always been the mogul he is today.
Footage from a 1999 interview with Musk shows the now-50-year-old businessman in earlier days of his success, after he sold his first company, Zip 2, which allowed newspapers to publish online.
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Musk received a staggering $400 million cash for the sale, according to CNN – admittedly nothing compared to his current net worth of $264.6 billion, but enough at the time to give him some bragging rights.
"Back in '95, there weren't very many people on the internet," Musk told CNN at the time. "Certainly nobody was making any money at all – most people thought the internet was going to be a fad," he said.
Having proved those people wrong, Musk splashed out on a $1 million McLaren F1, the delivery of which was caught on camera during the interview. Justine Wilson, Musk's fiancée at the time, described the purchase as 'decadent'.
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The businessman recalled how just a few years ago he had been showering at his local YMCA and sleeping on the office floor – a far cry from the life he came to be living in 1999, and even further from the luxuries he no doubt enjoys on a daily basis nowadays.
Musk pointed out he was rich enough at the time to 'go and buy one of the islands in the Bahamas', but said he was more interested in building and creating a new company – an internet bank named X.com, which went on to become PayPal.
"I think X.com could absolutely be a multi-billion dollar bonanza, because if you look at the industry that X is pursuing, it's the biggest sector of the world economy," Musk said.
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X.com merged with a company called Confinity before rebranding in 2001 as PayPal – a year after Musk left the company. In 2017, the Tesla CEO reclaimed part of his history by purchasing the X.com domain name.
In the years since the interview took place, Musk continued to dream big and hopes to almost literally reach for the stars in the future by transporting humans to Mars through SpaceX. With a little more than $1 million to spare these days, this week he reached an agreement with Twitter to buy the company for a staggering $44 billion, though many people probably wish he'd just bought another fancy car instead.
Topics: Elon Musk, Technology, Viral, Money
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Emily Brown