Elon Musk's first company was an online business directory called 'Zip2'

See a timeline of all of Elon Musk's business ventures

From the software company Zip2 in the 1990s to Musk's Twitter acquisition (which he later renamed X), Elon Musk has run, founded, and invested in many different businesses over the past three decades.

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk formed PayPal after merging two dot-com companies

Elon Musk cofounded "X.com," an online banking service, in 1999 with the idea that the web would become a financial repository as internet access expanded and became ingrained in daily life. Peter Thiel cofounded "Confinity" as a digital security service that morphed into a payments system. In 2000, the two merged to form PayPal, and in 2002, they sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5B.

Elon Musk joined Tesla in 2004, investing $30M and becoming chair

The company went public in 2010, raising $226 million in its IPO just two years after beginning production on its first car. Tesla's first Supercharger stations were launched in 2012 with six locations in California.

At 12 years old, Mark Zuckerberg built a messaging platform for his family called 'ZuckNet'

Mark's family used "ZuckNet" to communicate with each other in different rooms and Mark's dad's dental office, which was connected to their family home. ZuckNet ultimately didn't go anywhere, as AOL's instant messaging platform soon replaced it.

SpaceX's S-1 or 'prospectus' revealed many previously unknown details about the company, including its unprofitability despite doing $18.7B in revenue in 2025, exactly how many voting shares Elon Musk will have in the company (roughly 85%), and more.

SpaceX's S-1 or 'prospectus' revealed many previously unknown details about the company

Those revelations include the company's unprofitability despite doing $18.7B in revenue in 2025, exactly how many voting shares Elon Musk will have in the company (roughly 85%), and more.

The Boring Company was created by Elon Musk in 2017

While it started out as a subsidiary of SpaceX, the Boring Company became an independent entity in 2018. Musk started it with the aim of helping reduce city traffic via underground tunnels.

Sears once tried to become a tech company

In 1984, Sears arguably created one of the first online retail services, called “Prodigy,” in 1984 alongside IBM and CBS. But it was more of a WeChat than an Amazon, offering a variety of other services to users a few years before the dot com era.

Born to a well-off family in South Africa, Elon Musk left for Canada in 1989 before heading to the US

Musk was bullied as a child in South Africa, and even recalled being punched in the face, per a recent Walter Isaacson biography on the entrepreneur.

Elon Musk is known to sleep under his desk during intense periods of work

The tech company founder and CEO has a wide variety of leadership principles he has kept consistent while building multiple different companies, including eschewing middle management and using the "idiot index," a formula he uses to identify manufacturing inefficiencies.

The dot-com boom made Mark Cuban a billionaire

Cuban co-founded AudioNet with Todd Wagner in 1995 before it became Broadcast.com—a web app that allowed people to listen to sports commentary on their computers if they couldn't watch a game. In 1999, Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for $5.7B. By the time the market crashed, Cuban had already sold most of his stock in the company and had become a billionaire.

Yahoo acquired Paul Graham's former startup Viaweb in 1998

Viaweb was the web app tech startup that Paul Graham, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell cofounded before they started Y Combinator. The company sold for $49M and Viaweb was rebranded as the Yahoo Store.

Tesla's lack of business savvy and inability to commercialize led to his obscurity

For decades, despite pioneering technologies for large-scale electrical systems and telecommunications, Nikola Tesla had been forgotten to history. Rather than monetizing his work and becoming more well known, his inventor-first mentality saw him sell off lucrative patents to fund new experiments in the short term.

More than 650 companies went public in the US in 1996

As the dot-com bubble reached its peak, most dot-com companies went public with little proof of being profitable and were often overvalued. In 1999, the Nasdaq's price-to-earnings ratio (a tool used to determine a stock's value that divides its price by earnings) hit 90.2, signaling that many companies were operating at a net loss. Startups promised investors that more time and money would help scale their businesses and become profitable.

Grokipedia is Elon Musk's rival to Wikipedia

Developed by xAI—a company Musk founded in 2023 to compete with OpenAI and Google—the site features a search bar where users can type in queries, which reports suggest are then answered by the same xAI model powering the Grok chatbot. Grokipedia describes Wikipedia as having "systemic ideological biases" and a "left-leaning slant."

'The Million Dollar Homepage' is a snapshot of a dead internet

In 2005, 21-year-old Alex Tew set out to make $1M by selling $1 pixels on his website, effectively creating a standalone internet billboard. The gambit worked, and because the advertisements were one-time payments, the site looks the same as it did in 2005, despite many of the advertised sites going defunct since.

More than $3.5B has been invested through AngelList

AngelList was created to connect startups and angel investors. It’s evolved since its 2010 founding and has been used by companies like Uber and OpenSea.

Steve Jobs founded NeXT while on a break from Apple

While Steve Jobs was on a hiatus from working at Apple, he founded a company called NeXT and helped lead the release of its operating system NeXTSTEP. The operating system was used to create the first app store of sorts, as well as the first web browser.

The Y Combinator startup directory includes every company YC has funded

The startup accelerator has funded more than 5,000 companies over the years. This YC-specific search engine lets you look up any company to find out if it's a YC alum.

Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ aerospace company, sent its first passengers to space in 2021

Founded in 2000, Bezos spent many years working on the company as a side project before it became more well-known around 2004, when a plot of land in Texas was purchased as a launch site for the company’s rockets. He has said that the goal of Blue Origin is to build “reusable space vehicles.” This resource details what passengers experience from takeoff to landing on a Blue Origin flight.

One of Henry Ford's early failed business ventures later became Cadillac

Before founding the Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford started two businesses that ultimately failed because he didn't get a product to market quickly enough. The Henry Ford Company pushed Henry Ford out in 1902, only to later reform and be renamed after the founder of Detroit, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.

The Whole Earth Catalog provided an early blueprint for the social internet

The Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture guide to alternative living, was a repository for hippie ideas. In 1985, its founder decided to bring Whole Earth to the nascent internet with the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, or WELL, an early web forum.

Sam Altman gave his first-ever startup pitch after dropping out of Stanford

He dropped out of Stanford to start Loopt, which sold in 2012 for $43.4M. You can watch his first-ever startup pitch in a video.

Adam Neumann started another real estate company after WeWork

Former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann has attempted to purchase WeWork before, although, thus far, he hasn’t been successful. Since leaving the company, he has founded a residential real estate firm, among other projects.

Netflix started in 1997 as a mail-order DVD rental service

The first Netflix customers selected DVDs from the company’s website and received and returned them through regular mail. The approach included no late fees and quickly added the ability to rent an unlimited number of DVDs for a flat monthly fee, with the company passing 1 million subscribers in 2003.

America’s richest families

You could probably name a few of America's richest people, like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, for instance. But could you name the richest families in America, like the Waltons or the Mars family? Explore the list of 2024's richest families in America—and find out how they made their money—here.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

Sears sold DIY house kits starting at $600 in its famous catalog from 1908 through the 1940s, resulting in roughly 10,000 'Sears and Roebuck houses' being built.

Venture capital is a form of funding provided to early-stage companies with high growth potential, typically in exchange for an equity (or ownership) stake

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

The Nasdaq's 'Magnificent 7' companies are responsible for roughly 40% of the Nasdaq 100 index's gains, while the remaining 93 companies account for the other 60%.

Elk Cloner, the first computer virus to spread in public, was written as a practical joke by Richard Skrenta, a Pittsburgh high school student.

While the first exchange-traded fund (a 'basket' of different assets that can be bought and sold on a stock exchange) in the US only launched in 1993, the global ETF market has grown to more than $10T in the short time since.

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

The first robot in literature may have been a 'mechanical man' in 1907's 'Ozma of Oz,' a book in L Frank Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' series.

Explore fun facts from the USPS, including unique post office buildings, a stamp that traveled past Pluto, and more.

Fast-casual restaurant Chili's is experiencing a resurgence, with its parent company recently reporting a nearly 32% increase in sales, thanks to passionate Gen Z fans on TikTok.

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

Sony set the standard for cylinder-shaped batteries when it repurposed manufacturing equipment used to make rolls of magnetic recording tape.

The word 'jazz' evolved from 'jasm,' 19th-century American slang for 'energy'

In 2009, the nation was gripped by the story of a missing young boy who was believed to be floating over Colorado in a homemade balloon, until it was revealed that he was at home the whole time.

This site reaches millions of visitors who are tired of AI chatbots and seeking human connection. Pretend to be an AI chatbot and ask questions, provide answers, and draw for people in real time.

'Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,' a work by American painter Thomas Moran, inspired Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park.

Budweiser stores yeast derived from the original 1800s strain in a secret bunker, which only the Head of Yeast Management can access—not even the CEO

About 2,000 US babies are born annually without some portion of their limbs, potentially leading to a lifetime of pricey prosthetics.

The most expensive ad of all time was for Chanel No. 5 perfume and cost roughly $33M to produce in 2004—about $57M in today's dollars.

See how each of the more than two million known species relates to each other—and to common ancestors—in this zoomable tree of life.

Use this tool to calculate the dollar value of your parental mental load, from meal planning to coordinating after-school care, then see resources that help generate solutions.

The Beatles' US label rejected the band's first two singles, 'Please Please Me' and 'From Me to You,' with one executive calling the band 'dead in the water.'