Elon Musk's Life Story: Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's Highs and Lows

Elon Musk's offer to buy Twitter for $43 billion (€39.8 billion) puts him in control of the social media platform that helped propel him to fame.

Musk is the world's richest person, with a fortune of $262 billion (€240 billion), but the South African entrepreneur's path has not been easy. There were numerous potholes along the way.

Despite being at the helm of companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, he was fired multiple times from his own companies, had numerous rocket crashes, and it took a while for his electric vehicles (EVs) to take off.

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on June 28, 1971. His first business venture occurred when he was 12 years old when he sold the code for the PC space-fighting game Blastar to the magazine PC and Office Technology for $500 (€460). "It was a simple game... but it was better than Flappy Bird," Musk said.

After finishing high school in South Africa, he moved to Canada, where he studied for two years at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. He did, however, complete his studies in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a degree in physics and economics.

Musk and a classmate converted a 10-bedroom frat house into a nightclub to pay for rent while Musk was a student in Pennsylvania. Musk then pursued his Ph.D. at Stanford University but dropped out just two days into the program to work in the dot-com bubble.

In 1995, Musk co-founded Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. It was Musk's first business, and it provided newspapers with online city guide software. Musk lived in the office because he didn't have any money.

Compaq purchased Zip2 for more than $300 million (€278 million). Musk then founded X.com, an online banking company, in 1999. A year later, X.com merged with Confinity, a financial start-up founded by Peter Thiel, to form PayPal.

Musk was then named CEO of PayPal, but his tenure was brief. Musk was shot from PayPal in 2000 while on vacation in Australia due to numerous disagreements over branding and micromanagement. Musk told Fortune, "That's the problem with vacations."

But he retained a stake in PayPal, and when eBay purchased the company in 2002, Musk received $165 million (€150 million).