When Robert Downey Jr. found out that he was going to play Iron Man in the movies, he said, "We need to sit down with Elon Musk."

That's because Musk — colonizer of Mars, transformer of cars, shepherd of solar panels — is the closest thing we've got to a superhero.

Born in South Africa, he sold his first software — a game called Blastar — when he was only 11. He went on to found and sell a startup to Compaq for $300 million in 1999, and parlayed that into a major stake in PayPal, which eBay bought for $1.5 billion in 2002.

With that dough, he got into three world-changing companies: Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City. And though Tesla and SpaceX nearly went bankrupt, each of the companies is now shifting their industries.

Yet Musk — with his 100-hour workweeks, estimated $11.7 billion net worth, and habit of never taking a note in meetings — remains enigmatic. So we went looking for clues to his vision, goals, and thinking process.

Here's what we found.