'So much drama & good times:' Elon Musk reflects on arriving in the US with $2,000 in his pocket, and hints he might consider writing a book

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Elon Musk.

• Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently reflected on his early career in a tweet that said: "So much drama & good times too!"
• The tweet was in response to a post about the early years of his career that described how he got his start in Silicon Valley.
• In the tweet, Musk suggested that the story of his early career "may be worth a book one day."
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. 

With a net worth of $22.5 billion, Tesla CEO Elon Musk ranks at number 39 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. But when he arrived in North America at the age of 17, he had just $2,000, a backpack, and a suitcase full of books, he tweeted last June when reflecting on his early career.

On August 5, Musk looked back on this time period yet again in a tweet responding to a story about how he got his start in Silicon Valley."So much drama & good times too!" he tweeted in response to the story, which was published by Clean Technica. He added that it "may be worth a book one day" in the tweet, but suggested that publishing a book would likely come at the expense of the work he's doing at SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink.

Musk, who is from South Africa, moved to Canada in 1989, where his family lived in a small rent-controlled apartment in Toronto. Musk's mother, model and nutritionist Maye Musk, worked five jobs to make ends meet at the time, as she told Business Insider back in 2015. 

Musk eventually went on to found his first company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal in 1996, as Clean Technica points out, which they sold to Compaq for roughly $300 million in 1999. That money was used to create the company that eventually became PayPal, as CNBC notes. 

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Musk didn't always know that he wanted to lead a company, but he knew he wanted to create things, as he told Kevin Rose in an interview from 2012.

"At one point, I thought inventing stuff or creating things would be a cool thing to do," he said. "But I wasn't really sure if that meant starting a company, or whether that meant working for a company that made cool stuff."

If Musk does one day publish a book about his life, it wouldn't be the first. Journalist Ashlee Vance published a biography about the Tesla and SpaceX CEO in 2015 called "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future."