The Blog of Funny Names

This blog was started by three young gentlemen, whom you could call enterprising if you really wanted to. I mean, who would stop you? You can say whatever you want around here. One of our founders is particularly enterprising, but even Dr. Dave would have to admit that a young man named Elon Musk fits that description better than any of us. And even better, his name is Elon Musk.

Not that kind of musk.

Elon grew up in South Africa during a time when travel out of the country was restricted for most citizens. In spite of this, he managed to tour most of Africa, 18 of the American States, the Middle East, much of Europe, and possibly Narnia and Oz before he turned 18, although I have no confirmation of the latter two. He left the country to pursue an enterprising life in North America, moving to his mother’s native land of Canada at the age of 18. He attended college there for two years before moving south of the border to the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated with a dual major in Business and Physics, as you do.

Elon planned to go to graduate school in Stanford after this, but at this point he just couldn’t wait to get started on all that enterprising business. He and his equally well named brother Kimbal Musk started an internet startup called Zip2 which they promptly sold to Altavista for more than $300 million. Ah, the all American success story.

How did he decide to spend his fortune? Well, if I was him I would definitely have started a cologne company. I mean, what better name for a manly scent product than MUSK could there be?

Elon went another way. He decided to continue pursuing his passions, which include the three “most important problems that would most affect the future of humanity”. These three fields of interest did not include beer pong, making cologne or writing a blog about people with funny names. Instead, they were the internet, clean energy, and space exploration. Hey, those things are cool too.

After his first internet company, Musk and his colleagues got involved with another online entity, which later became known as PayPal. You could say he was somewhat successful with that one.

Elon Musk, looking cool in front of the friggin’ car he made.

With the conquering of the internet now out of the way, Elon decided to go for the whole energy thing since no one else seemed to be bothering with genius innovations in that area. He co-founded Tesla Motors, the electric car company. In fact, Musk himself directly oversaw the development of the company’s Tesla Roadster car and acts as their head product designer. About a year ago, Tesla was valued at about $1 billion. Meanwhile, according to an ad website, funnynamesblog.com is valued at $48. Hey, I think that’s pretty good!

At this point Musk was feeling kinda bored and didn’t have enough on his plate, so he initiated SolarCity, and still sits on that company’s board. More of that clean energy thing, SolarCity is the largest provider of solar systems in the United States. So I guess you could say that went pretty well also. Even better, his amusingly named cousin Lyndon Rive is the company’s cofounder.

An artist’s representation of Musk’s space exploration plan.

So what’s the deal with the space exploration, I’m sure you’re asking. I’m getting there. Musk also founded a company called SpaceX (he must have an army of assistants filing all this paperwork). SpaceX, to put it in plain English, makes space rockets. That, of course, is awesome. Musk hopes to send humans to Mars in the next 10-20 years, although he did not specify which ones and what he wants them to do there. All the same, we’ll be waiting for whatever his next venture is, and probably buying a share or two in it just to be safe. Or maybe we’ll just keep writing blogs about funny named people. Yeah, that seems good too.