Musk might net jaunt between meetings at supersonic speeds in a jet-powered suit of armour like his celluloid doppelganger, but nobody who knows him would be in the least bit surprised if one day he did. Not when account the amount he has achieved since he made his fortune from the $300m sale of his first company (an early online platform for newspapers called Zip2 that he created from scratch with his brother) to Compaq in 1999. His share of which he promptly ploughed into the purchase of a company that went on to become Pay Pal, which in turn he sold to eBay for $1.5bn in 2002. Many people would understandably have called it a day right there and headed for the beach, But Musk, who recently promised to colonise Mars (the planet not the confectionary manufacturer) within his lifetime, isn’t just simply anyone.

Born in 1973 in Pretoria, South Africa, he and his three younger siblings were brought up through the last years of apartheid.

His father managed his own construction engineering company, looking after both government and commercial projects, while his mother was a model and a dietician. Unfortunately they divorced just before Musk’’s tenth birthday, and as a consequence he and his younger brother Kimbal were left to their own devices more than most other kids their age. It was during this period of relative freedom that Musk first showed signs of an obsession with explosives and rocket technology that would eventually culminate, in 2002, in the formation of SpaceX.

“It is remarkable how many things you can explode,” he once famously said. “I’m lucky I have all my fingers.”

As a youngster he was also an avid reader and would think nothing of polishing off two books a day and, fittingly perhaps, has cited his favourite book of the time as Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. “It taught me that the tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but that once you do that, the rest is really easy,” he said, in reference to the novel’s revelation that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is simply 42.

Bordering on geek (it has to be said), Musk was an easy target for school bullies and took comfort in his books, and more and more in the relatively new phenomenon of computers. He quickly mastered the basics of simple language programming and sold his first piece of software, a space-based video game called Blastar, to a computer magazine for the princely sum of $500.

It was only a matter of time before Musk outgrew his homeland and at age 15, he procured himself a Canadian passport (his mother was born there) bought a plane ticket, and arrived in Montreal with little more than a fist of saved pocket money and a rucksack full of enthusiasm.

He spent the year pitching up on the doorsteps of unsuspecting distant relatives and paying his way by labouring on farms, turning his hand to gardening and cleaning out the boilers at lumber mills.

His ultimate plan however was to make his way to America, which he achieved when he was accepted to study at the University of Pennsylvania, a stint which culminated in a double degree in economics and physics. Unsurprisingly he paid his way through his student days by hosting enormous parties at a house he shared with another student called Adeo Ressi.

After graduating, he was persuaded to embark on a PhD at Stanford, but dropped out within days of his arrival when he realised that what he really wanted to do was get into business. Hence the formation of Zip2 with his brother.

With his coffers full from the sale of that company and PayPal a few years later, Musk was able to set his sights on the businesses he really wanted to focus on. To him the holy trinity in the context of human betterment: clean electric cars, solar powered homes and space exploration.

“Ultimately,” he once said, “the thing that is super important in the grand scale of history is, are we on a path to becoming a multi-planet species or not? If we’re not, well, that’s not a very bright future.”

Like all good Hollywood plots however, it was far from an easy ride. It is well known that in its early years the first of his trinity, Tesla Motors, tiptoed perilously closely to the precipice of financial disaster more than a few times. “Personal bankruptcy was a daily conversation,” his brother told an interviewer. “He threw everything he had into keeping Tesla alive.”

But if Musk has anything going for him — aside from the large brain, the natural business acumen and the work ethic of a hyperactive super ant — it’s vision: his ability to completely focus on his goal and then treat everything in his way as a temporary inconvenience.

As he once put it himself, “The first step is to establish that something is possible — then probability will occur.”

His vision was strong enough to convince the US government to extend the teetering company a $46 5m loan and introduce hefty tax rebates for green car drivers, a pair of measures which allowed Tesla to come out of the bend of uncertainty at speed and accelerate relatively smoothly to its current position as a $25bn company producing some of the best cars ever designed and a waiting list to die for.

Musk’s vision to convert all US homes from fossil fuel to solar power resulted in the 2006 formation of SolarCity by two of his cousins, Peter and Lyndon Rive, who, with initial financial assistance from their relative, have gone on to make it the single largest provider of domestic solar power in America, with more than 13,000 employees.

Musk is chairman of the board at SolarCity and plays an active role in steering it forwards.

His final frontier — space exploration — is currently being served by SpaceX, a company he formed in 2002 with the principle aim of helping the human race to colonise other planets. And thereby have a chance of species survival in the event of earth-bound human extinction at the hands of a wayward asteroid, a vast nuclear explosion, a pandemic virus, or something else similarly irksome. Like Tesla Motors, Spacex had more than its fair share of teething problems but has since become the first private company to successfully launch a spacecraft into orbit and then bring it back in one piece, It has also won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of US government contracts to build rockets and run supply missions to the International Space Station. All amid a dramatic decline in spending on Nasa.

“He’s a throwback to when people were doing less incrementalist things,” says Peter Thiel, the tech investor who co-founded PayPal with Musk. “The companies he’s started are executing against a vision measured not in years but in decades.” This is a sentiment shared by WebTV co-founder Bruce Leak, who once collaborated with Musk at a video game company. “He has that Bill Gates energy where his foot bounces and he’s wiggling just because he’s so smart.”

These days Musk plays the role of influential billionaire tycoon with ease, and has many millions of followers.

But he’s not one to rest on his laurels and much of his energy these days is spent on his grandest ambition: to pave the way for human colonisation of other planets. In 2012 he announced that he would start making this a reality by transporting people to Mars “in roughly 12 to 15 years”. He has since elongated this prediction slightly but still sees this as a likely reality within his own lifetime. “Hopefully it will happen within my lifetime,” he was this year reported as saying. “I would like to think I will end my days on Mars. Preferably though, not on impact.”