The entrepreneur with astronomical ambition When cruising the information highways of the internet lost its thrill, Elon Musk turned his attention to outer space. What is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur antsy for his next project to think about other than putting humans on Mars? But these things happen in steps, and Mr Musk must first settle for the International Space Station. In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Mr Musk, aged 40, watched his Falcon 9 rocket blast off into space from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. While a bevy of cameras recorded the streak of fire in the sky, he stood post, sweating, at the California-based mission control of SpaceX, the private company he founded in 2002 to pick up the slack left by the US government's divestment in Nasa. "There is so much hope riding on that rocket," he said. Three previous launch attempts of the Falcon 1 rocket in recent years failed, ending in a fizzle or an explosion. After one failure, Mr Musk retreated to a video game console for six hours, according to one of his friends, where he played the latest game "where you shoot things and kill people" to calm himself. This week's launch of the Falcon 9 was Mr Musk's last chance to get it right before the $100m he had personally fronted for the project, out of a fortune estimated at $2bn by Forbes, was sucked dry. He got it right this time. At least, so far. The Falcon rocket took off, propelling Dragon, a spacecraft full of food, clothing and other supplies, into Earth's orbit. If the mission goes smoothly and Dragon passes a series of mid-flight tests, it will dock on the International Space Station this weekend, when astronauts will begin unloading the supplies, reload Dragon with space cargo and trash, and send it back to earth. If it succeeds, it will be the first privately made space vehicle to dock at the space station. And if the full trial run is completed, SpaceX will start to draw on its $1.6bn contract with Nasa to make 12 more trips delivering supplies to space-borne astronauts. Nasa retired its fleet of space shuttles last year. After the lift-off, Mr Musk said the elation within the company was like "winning the Super Bowl," adding that the mission "heralds the dawn of a new era of space exploration," where private commercial companies will play a key role alongside, or in place of, government entities. "It is like the advent of the internet in the mid-1990s when commercial companies entered what was originally a government endeavour," he said. That move dramatically accelerated the pace of advancement and made the internet accessible to the mass market. I think we're at a similar inflection point for space. Mr Musk made his first blast-off as an internet entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He came to the US from South Africa via Canada when he was a teenager, leaving his home country, in part, to avoid military service under the apartheid regime. After completing degrees in physics and economics, he moved to California, where he founded and sold two internet companies: Zip2, a publishing software company for news outlets, and X.com, which merged with Confinity to become PayPal, the online payments service later bought by eBay. After these internet ventures, Mr Musk moved on to his two other competing passions, clean energy and space exploration. He cofounded both Tesla Motors, where he oversaw the design of the mass-market electric car, and SpaceX at around the same time. He serves as chief executive of both companies. Mr Musk gets mixed marks on his management style, however. At PayPal, some of his co-workers found his ability to stabilise and streamline the company's operations after its chaotic merger remarkable. "Elon had a grand vision of what PayPal could become," says David Sacks, who served as PayPal's first chief operating officer. I really think he thought it could be a huge company and take over the world. Yet others bristled at Mr Musk's hands-on approach. It depended on what Elon thought about you. He either thought you were good or not, for him it was pretty binary," Mr Sacks says. If he didn't think you were good, it probably wasn't a pleasant situation. Mr Musk was forced out of the chief executive role at PayPal after seven months, and years later defended his title of co-founder and the contributions he had made to the company. In a controversy over the founding credit for Tesla, Mr Musk was sued by Tesla's former chief executive, Martin Eberhard, for slander and libel. The case was settled out of court, with five people named as co-founders, including Mr Eberhard and Mr Musk. Mr Musk's private life suggests similar strains. He married twice and this year agreed to his second divorce. His first wife, Justine Musk, with whom he has five children, claimed Mr Musk once said to her: "If you were my employee, I would fire you." Though he runs two companies with ambitious goals and spends time with his five children, he does find time to relax and "decompress," as he likes to say. He has gone to Burning Man, the annual week-long summer festival in the Nevada desert where revellers dance through the night. Last year, for his 40th birthday, he invited a couple of dozen friends to meet him in Paris. They rode the Orient Express overnight to Venice, where Mr Musk hosted "a post-apocalyptic masquerade ball" at a palazzo he had rented on the Grand Canal. Guests were asked to dress the part, with some arriving in torn, scuffed Charlie Chaplin-style tuxedos. Dinner was followed by a performance from an American circus troupe, flown over especially. Back home at the office celebration, Mr Musk marked the occasion with a three-foot high cake in the shape of a rocket ship.