In the mere 14 years since Elon Musk founded SpaceX, the brainiac serial
entrepreneur/Bond villain has managed to build a staggeringly successful private space program, all while juggling the Tesla empire and cooking up other crazy moonshot projects like the Hyperloop. The company, which now employs nearly 5,000 people, has earned exclusive contracts with NASA, made tentative plans to get us to Mars, schlepped cargo to the International Space Station, and achieved some truly groundbreaking launches and landings. But besides the big headlines, there's a lot you probably haven't heard about the California-based aerospace giant.As if the South African-born billionaire running several enormously successful companies didn’t already make us feel like complete slackers, here’s another little detail: he basically taught himself rocket science. According to SpaceX’s former VP of business development Jim Cantrell, Musk cooked up many of the company’s most groundbreaking ideas just by reading a couple textbooks. https://www.thrillist.com/tech/nation/things-you-didnt-know-about-spacex-elon-musk/tech
