Here is your Forbes Daily Briefing from Monday, January 12th.

Today on Forbes, from the School of Elon Musk to Billion Dollar Startups, Meet Space X's

alumni founders. In January 2002, Elon Musk strolled into a warehouse in Los Angeles, where he spotted Thomas Muller, hoisting

an 80-pound engine over his shoulder as he bolted it into the lower thrust structure of a rocket.

This wasn't a day job.

Mueller, then an engineer at aerospace manufacturer TRW, would often spend his weekends with

amateur rocket club reaction research

society to build new kinds of rockets outside his scope at work. Musk had shown up at the

club's headquarters to sell its members, including Mueller, on his vision of building a space

company that would enable humanity to one day colonize Mars. Before Mueller had the chance to

set the engine down, Musk began firing question after question. Mueller recalls, quote,

in very typical Elon fashion. What is that? Is that a big engine? What's the biggest engine you've

worked on? A 650,000 pound engine for TRW, he responded hesitantly.

After all, the only thing Mueller knew about Musk was that he was an internet millionaire,

recently ousted from his CEO position at PayPal.

But it didn't take long for the two to click.

When asked if he could build an engine of similar

scale from scratch for Musk, Mueller said yes, even though he knew the real answer was no.

Mueller said, quote, that was the optimism and the naivity that Elon wanted to see because

that's the way he was, too. The very next week on Super Bowl Sunday, Mueller invited Musk over to his house, where they

and a few other members from the Rocket Club conceived what came to be known as the Merlin

engine.

...