xAI (company)
Search results
Zip2 was a company founded by Elon and Kimbal Musk in 1995 that provided and licensed online city guide software to newspapers. It was acquired by Compaq in 1999 and became part of its AltaVista web search engine.
- Zip2
- X.Com
- PayPal
- SpaceX
- The Musk Foundation
- Tesla
- Solarcity
- OpenAI
- Neuralink
- The Boring Company
Along with his brother, Musk founded Zip2, an online business directory, as an online alternative to the standard paper yellow pages. (Google would not launch until 1998.) He sold it for over $300 million in 1999 to Compaq Computer Corporation. Musk was ousted as CEO in 1996, however, when the board of directors decided to install a more experience...
Musk invested some of his windfall from the Zip2 sale into his next venture: X.com, an online bank, launched with three other co-founders. X.com’s business model was innovative for its time, in that it incentivized sign-ups and eased the process of transferring funds digitally, with no need for mail or traditional banking infrastructure. In an inte...
X.com merged with software company Confinity just one year later, forming PayPal, a secure online payments platform with a foundation in payments conducted for PalmPilots. PayPal would go on to be one of his most successful companies; Musk and his partners, including Confinity co-founder Peter Thiel, sold it to eBay in 2002 for a $1.5 billion stock...
Musk next set his sights on a lofty goal: space exploration, and the future colonization Mars. In the past 20 years, SpaceX has dealt with a series of rocket launch failuresand Starship explosions. But it has also become a heavy-hitter in the space industry with a number of records to its name, including being the first private company to send a cr...
Founded as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the Musk Foundation is one of Musk’s least-talked-about endeavors. Its stated goals including supporting renewable energy and pediatric research and education, and the developing of “safe artificial intelligence to benefit humanity.” Between 2002 and 2018 it handed out around $25 million, about half of ...
These days, Musk is perhaps best known for his leadership at Tesla, the electric car company named after famed inventor Nikola Tesla. Valued at over $1 trillion at one point in 2021, Tesla was founded in 2003 by two other men; Musk entered a Series A funding round with an investment of $6.5 million, and eventually took an increasingly active role i...
Founded by his cousins in 2006, SolarCityreceived Musk’s patronage from the offset; he was their primary financial backer. A solar energy company that became the leading residential solar installer in the U.S. by the mid-2010s, SolarCity installed solar energy systems that were leased to residential users. Musk, via Tesla, acquired SolarCity in 201...
Musk co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015, with a for-profit artificial intelligence research lab component; it was started with a $1 billion collective pledge from its founders. Musk has been open about his interest in developing “friendly” AI that supports humanity, but he ended up resigning from the board in 2018 due to conflicts with Tesla...
Another research endeavor, Musk co-founded Neuralink in 2016 with the goal of working on “brain-machine interfaces,” or BMIs, that can be implanted directly into the body. Neuroscientists have been skepticalof Neuralink’s research and claims. While they currently conduct experiments on animals, they moved plans to begin working on human subjects to...
Founded with the intention of helping dispel city traffic via underground tunnels as a subsidiary of SpaceX, the Boring Company is one of Musk’s side projects. Its aim: build tunnels. They first experimented by tunneling under the SpaceX factory in California. The Boring Company became an independent entity in 2018, and in 2021 completed a tunnel p...
Aug 10, 2024 · Zip2 was a technology company founded by Elon Musk in 1995 that offered a searchable business directory with maps. It was acquired by Compaq in 1999 and became part of AltaVista, a search engine.
Jun 19, 2018 · Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal founded Zip2, a web software startup that created online city guides for newspapers, in 1995. They lived in their small office, showered at the YMCA and worked hard to sell the company to Compaq in 1999.
Mar 23, 2020 · Zip2 was a directory for local businesses and a platform for newspapers to develop city guides, founded by Elon Musk in 1995. It was acquired by Compaq in 1999 and became part of MyWay.com and InfoSpace, before fading into obscurity in 2004.
Learn about the origins and challenges of Zip2, the online city guide that launched the careers of Elon and Kimbal Musk. Watch Joe Rogan's interview with Kimbal Musk, who shares his insights on Tesla, SpaceX, and The Kitch.
- 5 min
- 5.9K
- American Optimist
People also ask
When did Zip2 become a company?
How does Zip2 work?
Is Zip2 dead?
What happened to Zip2?
Apr 3, 2020 · Zip2 was a business directory search engine that Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal Musk created in 1995. They faced skepticism and rejection from the Yellow Pages industry, but eventually partnered with major media companies and sold the company for $300 million.
