Most entrepreneurs are lucky to have one billion-dollar company to their name. Elon Musk, Americas real-life Tony Stark, has four. Perhaps best known as the C.E.O. and founder of the private aerospace company SpaceX and C.E.O. and co-founder of electric carmaker Tesla Motors, Musk isnt shy about his ultimate ambitions: helping to save the planet by shifting the world economy to sustainable energy. But, like any savvy billionaire, Musk is hedging his bets, too, by working actively to establish a human colony on Mars.

If anyone can bring humanity into the interplanetary age, its Musk. Born in South Africa to an electrical engineer father and model Maye Musk, he developed an interest in computer programming at an early age, selling the code to a video game he had developed to a magazine when he was just 12 years old. In 1992, Musk moved to the United States, where he received a dual degree from the University of Pennsylvania in physics and economics, before flying west to Stanford to begin a Ph.D. in applied physics. Two days into his program, he dropped out to become an entrepreneur. His first start-up, a software company called Zip2, sold to Compaq four years later, in 1999, for more than $300 million in cash, with more than $30 million in stock options.

A millionaire many times over at the age of 28, Musk didnt hesitate before starting over again with X.com, a financial services business that quickly merged with the company that would become PayPal. Two years later, the payments processing start-up was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, netting Musk another $165 million. But by then, Musk was already dreaming bigger. In 2002, he poured $100 million of his fortune into founding SpaceX, a private aerospace company with the goal of making spaceflight affordable by building the first reusable rocket. And in 2004, he got involved with Tesla Motors, leading a series A funding round and joining its board as chairman. That limitless ambition nearly cost him everything. During the financial crisis in 2008, after he had become C.E.O. of Tesla, both companies were on the verge of failure and Musk was deep in personal debt trying to keep them afloat. But Musk is the most risk-immune person Ive ever met, recalled venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, a friend and managing partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the renowned venture capital firm, who has backed both efforts, in an interview with Esther Dyson for Business Insider. Hes really an American hero, more than anyone Ive ever met.

SpaceX and Tesla both pulled through, thanks to Musk and an assist from the U.S. government, which gave him a $1.6 billion NASA contract and offered generous green energy subsidies on Teslas first production car, the blistering fast, all-electric Roadster. Today, SpaceX is the largest private producer of rocket motors in the world, and Tesla is onto its third-generation vehicle, the Model 3, which has already secured about $15 billion in pre-order sales, according to the company. SolarCity, another company Musk co-founded and for which he is the largest shareholder, is now one of the top two residential solar contractors in the U.S. Musk, obviously, is not taking a break from success. His next mission? Landing a rocket ship on Mars, as early as 2018.

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