In 1995, 23-year-old Elon Musk resolutely dropped out of his Stanford physics PhD program and co-founded Zip2 with his brother.

In the early days of the internet, the first nationwide maps, route navigation, and yellow pages services were all coded by him in C, with a small amount of C++ line-by-line coding.
At that time, Silicon Valley office rents were more affordable than apartments, and to cut costs, they rented a leaky old office for $200 a month.