Was SpaceX founded before Tesla?

Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 to reduce space transportation costs and ultimately develop a sustainable colony on Mars while Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning incorporated Tesla in July 2003 as Tesla Motors. Tesla name is a tribute to inventor Nikola Tesla.

In 2004, Elon Musk became an early investor in the electric vehicle manufacturer, which later came to be known as Tesla, Inc.

Musk became a multimillionaire in his late 20s when his start-up, Zip2, was sold to a division of Compaq for $307 million in 1999.

That very year Elon Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank, which later merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal.

In October 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion.

After getting $175 million from the buyout, he put $100 million into his new space exploration and spaceflight services company in 2022, SpaceX.

While Twitter, Tesla, and PayPal were founded before Musk got involved in the projects, SpaceX was Musk’s brainchild.

SpaceX had 160 employees by 2006 and earned $278 million in funding from NASA, as it was trying to launch the Falcon 1 rocket.

However, the young company was set to collapse after its first three launches failed.

Come late 2008, NASA saved SpaceX by awarding it a $1.6 billion contract, despite the failures.

Musk made headlines when SpaceX launched a rocket in In May 2012 that would send the first commercial spaceship to the International Space Station.

Fast forward 15 years, the company right now has about 12,000 staff in its wing and has launched 240 Falcon rockets — a success that came under Musk’s highly demanding and intense leadership.

On Thursday, SpaceX’s Starship rocket launched off into the sky and after completing a full test mission around the earth, on its fourth try, survived a fiery, hypersonic return from space and made a breakthrough landing in the Indian Ocean.