Featured Image Credit: Steve Granitz / Contributor / Paul Harris / Contributor / Getty
One of Elon Musk's earliest business risks paid off massively for the tech mogul, transforming him into a millionaire at age 27 and serving as the foundations for the massively successful businessman he is today.
Finding success in business is very much a case of taking the right risks and hoping that you find a bit of luck along the way.
One clever investment or key decision could be make or break for many, and that success can very much continue down the line if you make the right moves.
That's very much the case for Elon Musk, as the richest man in the world didn't exactly have the most glamorous beginnings to his business career, yet one smart risk that involved betting on the success of the internet allowed him to soar quickly up the financial ladder.
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The risk in question was starting a company called Zip2 with his brother Kimbal, which provided city guides for online use to newspapers.
While this might not sound particularly interesting or innovative to modern ears, it proved to be an incredibly savvy move at a time when the internet was in its infancy.
Serving as a digital yellow pages of sorts, Musk convinced electronic map company Navteq to license their mapping software to him for free, which he then combined with business listing databases to create Zip2.
It was such a financial risk for the pair that they had to live in the company's offices as they couldn't afford their own place to stay, but that perhaps showed their dedication to making Zip2 a success.
The company was eventually bought four years after Musk and his brother started out for a staggering $307,000,000, and Elon pocketed around $22,000,000 of that figure.
He used that as a launching point into what he is today, having merged his X.com online bank with PayPal and eventually sold that to eBay for $1,500,000,000 in 2002.
After that sale he finally created what many call his finest work in SpaceX - an aeronautics company that has been able to rival NASA in recent years and maintains its aim to send humans to Mars.
Of course, Elon's success has now led him to become the richest individual in the world, holding a net worth of $439,000,000,000 according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index - which is nearly double that of Jeff Bezos in second place.
While he does have notable failures such as his acquisition of Twitter - which has dropped 72% in value since Musk's takeover - his businesses remain ultra-successful and have allowed him to power himself into US politics with Donald Trump's recent election victory.
