When Elon Musk was 17, he lived off a dollar a day for a month to see if he had what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

He explained the experiment to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in an episode of Tyson's StarTalk Radio podcast:

In America it's pretty easy to keep yourself alive. So my threshold for existing was pretty low. I figured I could be in some dingy apartment with my computer and be okay, and not starve.

In fact, when I first came to North America — I was in Canada when I was 17 — and just to sort of see what it takes to live, I tried to live on $1 a day, which I was able to do. You sort of just buy food in bulk at the supermarket ... I was like, "Oh, okay. If I can live for a dollar a day — at least from a food-cost standpoint — it's pretty easy to earn $30 in a month, so I'll probably be okay.

I decided to replicate the challenge this past month. I adjusted for inflation — $1 in 1988, when Musk was 17, is the equivalent $2 today — and set aside $62 for the 31-day month of January.

Musk lived off mostly hot dogs and oranges, occasionally mixing in pasta and jarred tomato sauce. I bought mostly bananas, pasta, and peanut butter and would switch it up with the occasional fried egg or sweet potato.

I reached out to Musk after completing the challenge. "That's great, although I would not encourage anyone to live on $1 a day," he wrote me in an email. "That would not be super fun. Also, I did this back in 1990, so a dollar went a lot further back then. Would be much harder to do that today."

(Yes, I realize he just said 1990, but I did the entire month based on the value of a 1988 dollar, and I'm not about to re-do it ... so bear with me. The point still stands.)

Thirty-one days, 14 bags of pasta, six jars of peanut butter, and too many bananas to count later, I completed the "Elon Musk Challenge" with $1.07 to spare. Here's what it was like: