Elon Musk's first company was a web software company, Zip2, that he founded with his brother Kimbal James Musk and Greg Kouri. They founded the company in 1995 with the help of angel investors. The company developed and marketed an online city guide for newspapers. It helped people find places by creating maps, directions, and local business listings, and the yellow pages.At the time when Musk was building the company, he shared how much effort he put into Zip2. The tech billionaire said:"The website was up during the day, and I was coding it at night, seven days a week, all the time."Four years later, the company was sold to Compaq for $307 million in cash, which amounts to $580,000,000 in 2024. Out of this, Elon Musk obtained $22 million (approximately $42,000,000 in 2024) for his 7% share.Keep reading to learn more about Elon Musk's achievements before he became one of the richest men in the world with a net worth of $600 billion.Elon Musk's career highlights as billionaire crosses $600 billionElon Musk began his tech career with Zip2, coding in a small office that he rented in Palo Alto with his brother and Greg Kouri. After selling his first company for $307 million in cash, he went on to pursue other ventures.In the same year, after Musk sold Zip2, he founded X.com, which was an online financial services and e-mail payment company. In just one month, more than 200,000 customers joined the service. Later, X.com collaborated with Confinity and was renamed PayPal.During this time, he was removed as the CEO of X.com, but because of his 11.72% share, he received $175.8 million (equivalent to $310,000,000 in 2024) when eBay acquired PayPal in 2002.In the early 2000s, Elon Musk became involved with the nonprofit Mars Society. In order to build affordable rockets, Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. He became the company's CEO and Chief Engineer. The company's first rocket launch was in 2006 with the Falcon 1. However, it was unsuccessful.SpaceX almost went bankrupt after two more failed attempts, but received funding from NASA. The contract was worth $1.6 billion at the time ($2,300,000,000 in 2024). SpaceX made big progress by landing reusable rockets for the first time in 2015. It later launched powerful rockets like Falcon Heavy and began building Starship for future missions. In 2020, SpaceX became the first private company to send astronauts to space and the ISS.By 2015, Elon Musk's SpaceX developed Starlink, which is a constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites. So far, there are 7,600 active Starlink satellites.While Musk is widely known for his relation to Tesla, the company was actually founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Elon Musk was involved with the Series A funding round and made an investment of $6.5 million. Since then, he has been actively involved in the company and became the CEO in 2008.Another highlight of his illustrious career is SolarCity. It was initially founded by his cousins almost two decades ago. Musk helped by funding the company. It became a top solar power company in the country by installing solar panels for homes. In 2016, Tesla bought SolarCity and made it part of Tesla Energy.Elon Musk also co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit organization. The main goal was to create safe and helpful artificial intelligence for people. However, he left OpenAI in 2018 because its work conflicted with Tesla's AI projects.Another AI-related venture he co-founded was Neuralink. The company aims to connect the human brain with AI using tiny implanted devices. This technology could help improve memory and treat serious neurological problems. In 2023, it received approval to begin long-term human trials from the FDA.The Boring Company is considered to be one of Musk's side projects. The goal of the company is to build tunnels, and its first experiment was to tunnel under the SpaceX factory in California. It completed its first project in 2021 by building tunnels that could help transport visitors beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center.One of Elon Musk's more recent and big purchases was Twitter, which he renamed to X. In 2022, he bought Twitter for $44 billion and planned to make it "better than ever."Elon Musk started his journey with Zip2 and achieved early success by selling it for millions. He then built major companies like PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, and Starlink through hard work and innovation. Today, Musk is known for leading many important technology projects that have changed the world. Today, Musk broke the world record for being the first person to have a net worth of $600 billion.Also read: Elon Musk speaks candidly about alien conspiracy theories