The Elon Musk you did not know: From Tony Stark connection to launching a perfume

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is well known as the owner of Tesla, the electric car maker, and SpaceX, his private space company. He also took over the social media platform Twitter, renaming it X. Until recently, Musk worked within the US government as head of the Department of Government Efficiency - known as DOGE - which was part of Donald Trump’s dispensation. 

After nearly 130 days in the role, Musk announced his departure from the department. His time there and his close ties with Trump kept him in the headlines more than ever. But there are many lesser-known facts about the billionaire entrepreneur, according to a report by Sky news. 

Here are seven things you might not know about Elon Musk.

A Young Game Developer

At just 12 years old in the early 1980s, Musk created a video game called Blastar. Using coding skills he had learned from the age of nine, Musk designed a game where players used their keyboard to shoot alien spaceships.

By 1984, the game was sold to PC and Office Technology magazine for $500 (£371) and appeared in their December issue.

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Early Business Success

Musk’s talent for business showed early. In 1995, at 24, he and his brother Kimbal started their first company, Zip2, which developed online city guides for newspapers. The business began with just $28,000 (£20,000) but was sold for nearly $300 million (£222 million) in 1999.

Before the sale, Musk and his brother were almost broke and slept on their office floor—something Musk later repeated in Tesla’s early days. He earned $22 million from the sale and bought a McLaren F1 sports car. He told CNN, “Just three years ago I was sleeping on the office floor, and now I've got a million-dollar car.”

The Musk Perfume Experiment

Not all Musk’s ventures have been long-lasting. In 2022, he launched a perfume called Burnt Hair, described on The Boring Company’s website as “the essence of repugnant desire.” The scent was priced at $100 (£74) a bottle and sold 10,000 bottles within hours, earning Musk a million dollars.

He joked, “With a name like mine, getting into the fragrance business was inevitable - why did I even fight it for so long!?” The perfume is no longer available on the company’s website.

Besides perfume, Tesla released tequila in 2020 and Musk even sold limited edition Tesla short shorts as a playful challenge to investors betting against the company.

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The Original X.com and PayPal

Before Twitter became X, Musk founded X.com, an online banking and financial service company. The platform merged in 2000 with Confinity, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, and was later renamed PayPal.

Musk served as PayPal’s CEO but was ousted after disputes over the company’s direction. eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion (£1.4 billion). In 2017, eBay sold the domain X.com back to Musk.

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Inspiration Behind Iron Man

Musk’s life inspired Hollywood. The screenwriter of Iron Man, Mark Fergus, said the character Tony Stark was partly based on Musk, alongside Donald Trump and Apple’s Steve Jobs.

“Musk took the brilliance of Jobs with the showmanship of Trump. He was the only one who had the fun factor and the celebrity vibe and actual business substance,” Fergus told New York Magazine.

Musk even made a cameo appearance in Iron Man 2 in 2010.

Not the Founder of Tesla

Despite popular belief, Musk did not start Tesla. The company was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk was an early investor and became Tesla’s fourth CEO in 2008, shortly after the first Tesla Roadster was launched.

He is credited with taking Tesla onto the global stage.

Building the ‘Everything App’

After buying Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and renaming it X, Musk has been working to create an “everything app.” He wants X to be like WeChat in China, offering messaging, payments, social media, business services and more.

X’s chief executive Linda Yaccarino said 2025 would be the year X “connect [s] you in ways never thought possible,” with features like X TV, X Money, and Grok.

In January, Musk announced a partnership with Visa to allow users to move money between traditional banks and an X digital wallet, making payments to friends easier.