Elon Musk

Media outlets are reporting today that German automaker and Mercedes parent Daimler AG has acquired a stake in Silicon Valley electric-car builder Tesla Motors. Word is, Daimler's nearly 10 percent buy is the latest component in the company's plan to expand production of cars that rely on the power grid, not dead dinosaurs, for motivation.

Since January, SpaceX's heavy-payload Falcon 9 launch vehicle has stood 180 feet above Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, undergoing ground-systems tests in the run-up to its first test flight. The reusable Falcon series, named for the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars, has nine engines that provide more than a million pounds of thrust. Last September, the smaller, 70-foot-tall Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to orbit the Earth.

If there's a gene for entrepreneurship, Elon Musk has it. From his first project at age 12 creating and selling a videogame called Blastar for $500, to his $1-billion-plus sale of PayPal to eBay in 2002, the 37-year-old South African is every bit the born mogul. These days he's chairman of Solar City, the largest residential solar-power provider in California. He's also the founder and CEO of Space X, a space-exploration company that made headlines last September when it launched the first privately developed rocket into orbit. But lately it's Musk's newly minted role as CEO of the San Carlos, California-based start-up Tesla Motors that is drawing the most attention.

Dot-com thrillionaire Elon Musk and his company SpaceX of California suffered a painful setback today when their low-cost rocket Falcon I was lost somewhere over the Pacific Ocean just seconds after its maiden launch from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Musk, the founder and former owner of PayPal, aspires to build a new generation of affordable transportation to space. "We want to be the Southwest Airlines of space launches," he told PopSci in 2004.

The $6.7 million launch vehicle, which was carrying a U.S. Air Force FalconSat-2 satellite, cost roughly two-thirds less than satellite-launching rockets made by big-name competitors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

SpaceX has not yet reported the cause of the failure; check out their website for the latest updates. —Nicole Dyer

Late this month, if everything goes according to plan, Space Exploration Corporation, or SpaceX for short, will launch its privately funded two-stage rocket, Falcon I, into low-Earth orbit, carrying with it the U.S. Department of Defense’s TacSat-1 satellite. The ride costs just under $6 million, a price that undercuts the competition by up to two thirds. â€We want to be the Southwest Airlines of space launches,†says SpaceX CEO and PayPal founder Elon Musk.