Elon Musk (born June 28, 1971, Pretoria, South Africa), South African-born American entrepreneur who co-founded the electronic-payment firm PayPal and formed SpaceX, maker of launch vehicles and spacecraft. He was also one of the first significant investors in, as well as chief executive officer of, the electric car manufacturer Tesla. In addition, Musk acquired Twitter in 2022.
Early Life
Elon Musk was born on the 28th of June in 1971. He was born in one of the three capital cities of South Africa called Pretoria. He is the oldest of three siblings. Elon Musk’s father, Errol Musk, is a successful engineer while Maye Musk, his mother, was a model and a nutritionist. His brother, Kimball Musk is an environmentalist and a venture capitalist. Elon’s sister, Tosca Musk, is an award-winning director and producer.
Elon started school about a year in advance. He attended the Waterkloof House Preparatory School. He then graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. By the time Elon Musk was 10 years old, his parents got divorced. While Elon Musk was one of the intellectually sound students at school, he had a difficult time. He has very few friends from the Afrikaner culture. As Elon faced plenty of adversity growing up, he grew up to be a strong believer that adversity is essential to shape up an individual.
Elon's Eduacation
After graduating from high school, Elon Musk pursued his interests in physics and economics. He studied at Queen’s University in Canada for two years. He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania after these two years. He went on to major in two subjects at this university. While pursuing a dual degree may necessitate a lot of work, leaving little time for other activities, he made time for activities outside of his university education. Elon and a classmate bought a 10-bedroom fraternity house and turned it into an impromptu nightclub.
Elon Musk earned a Bachelor of Science in Physics and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Elon’s career was aided by these two degrees. He believes that physics is a great framework for his thinking because it allows him to explore and understand fundamental truths. It also assisted him in reasoning several business ideas and determining the viability of his ideas.
Musk later moved to California when he was 24 years old to pursue his Ph.D. in Applied Physics at Stanford University. While he began his Ph.D. program with great enthusiasm and lofty goals, he dropped out after only two days. The internet boom in Silicon Valley was the driving force behind his decision to drop out. As a natural entrepreneur, he began to develop great ideas centered on the birth of the internet.
Elon Musk’s Wife
Elon Musk has been married twice but is not presently married. He has been in a relationship with Canadian singer-songwriter Claire Elise Boucher, professionally known as Grimes, who has had a son since 2018.
Elon Musk’s Children
Elon Musk and his wife are the parents of six children. Griffin, Xavier, Damian, Saxon, Kai, and X Æ A-Xii are among those present.
Elon Musk Success Story
Elon took many companies to new heights of success in his business career.
Zip2
During the year 1995, Elon Musk and his younger brother Kimbal Musk started a company called Zip2. Zip2 provided licensed city guide software to newspapers. In 1999, Compaq’s AltaVista acquired Zip2 for $340 million. This proved to be a great exit for Elon Musk as this buyout led to the creation of X.com.
X.com
Elon Musk along with Harris Fricker, Ed Ho, and Christopher Payne co-founded X.com. The company was an online bank that later merged with Confinity Inc. This merger led to the launch of another great company.
Paypal
The X.com-Confinity Inc merger birthed PayPal. PayPal is one of the most popular platforms to carry out online payments. During his time at PayPal, he put forward his idea to the CTO, Max Lechin, about the operating system to be used. Musk was later ousted from the company as CEO. Later on, PayPal was bought by eBay for $1.5 billion.
Tesla
Musk had long been impressed by the possibilities of electric vehicles, and in 2004, he became one of the major funders of Tesla Motors (later renamed Tesla), an electric car company founded by entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Tesla introduced its first car, the Roadster, in 2006, which could travel 245 miles (394 km) on a single charge. Unlike most previous electric vehicles, which Musk thought were stodgy and uninteresting, it was a sports car that could accelerate from 0 to 60 miles (97 km) per hour in less than four seconds. The company’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2010 raised approximately $226 million.
Tesla introduced the Model S sedan two years later, which was praised by automotive critics for its performance and design. The Model X luxury SUV, which hit the market in 2015, earned the company even more praise. The Model 3, a more affordable vehicle, was introduced in 2017 and quickly became the best-selling electric vehicle of all time.
Dissatisfied with the projected cost of a high-speed rail system in California ($68 billion), Musk proposed the Hyperloop in 2013, a pneumatic tube in which a pod carrying 28 passengers would travel the 350 miles (560 km) between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 35 minutes at a top speed of 760 miles (1,220 km) per hour, nearly the speed of sound. Musk claimed that the Hyperloop would only cost $6 billion and that, with pods departing every two minutes on average, the system would be able to accommodate the six million people who travel that route each year. However, he stated that due to his responsibilities at SpaceX and Tesla, he was unable to devote sufficient time to the Hyperloop’s development.
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Space X
Musk attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1992, where he earned bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics in 1997. He enrolled in graduate physics at Stanford University in California, but left after only two days because he believed that the Internet had far greater potential to change society than physics work. In 1995, he founded Zip2, a company that provided online newspapers with maps and business directories. Zip2 was purchased by computer manufacturer Compaq for $307 million in 1999, and Musk then founded X.com, which later became PayPal, which specialized in online money transfers. PayPal was purchased by eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.
Musk has long believed that in order for life to survive, humanity must evolve into a multiplanet species. He was, however, dissatisfied with the high cost of rocket launchers. He founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in 2002 to create more affordable rockets. Its first two rockets, the Falcon 1 (launched in 2006) and the larger Falcon 9 (launched in 2010), were designed to be much less expensive than competing rockets. The Falcon Heavy (first launched in 2018) rocket was designed to carry 117,000 pounds (53,000 kg) to orbit, nearly twice as much as its closest competitor, the Boeing Company’s Delta IV Heavy, for one-third the price. The Super Heavy-Starship is SpaceX’s successor to the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy Systems.
The first stage of the Super Heavy would be capable of lifting 100,000 kg (220,000 pounds) into low Earth orbit. The payload would be the Starship, a spacecraft designed for rapid transportation between cities on Earth as well as the establishment of bases on the Moon and Mars. SpaceX also created the Dragon spacecraft, which transports supplies to and from the International Space Station (ISS). Dragon can transport up to seven astronauts, and in 2020, it flew astronauts Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken to the International Space Station. The Super Heavy-Starship system’s first test flights will take place in 2020. Musk was not only the CEO of SpaceX, but he was also the chief designer of the Falcon rockets, Dragon, and Starship.
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Musk joined the social media service Twitter in 2009, and, as @elonmusk, he became one of the most popular accounts on the site, with more than 85 million followers as of 2022. He expressed reservations about Tesla’s being publicly traded, and in August 2018 he made a series of tweets about taking the company private at a value of $420 per share, noting that he had “secured funding.” (The value of $420 was seen as a joking reference to April 20, a day celebrated by devotees of cannabis.) The following month the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Musk for securities fraud, alleging that the tweets were “false and misleading.” Shortly thereafter Tesla’s board rejected the SEC’s proposed settlement, reportedly because Musk had threatened to resign.
However, the news sent Tesla stock plummeting, and a harsher deal was ultimately accepted. Its terms included Musk’s stepping down as chairman for three years, though he was allowed to continue as CEO; his tweets were to be preapproved by Tesla lawyers, and fines of $20 million for both Tesla and Musk were levied.
Musk was critical of Twitter’s commitment to principles of free speech, in light of the company’s content-moderation policies. Early in April 2022, Twitter’s filings with the SEC disclosed that Musk had bought more than 9 percent of the company. Shortly thereafter Twitter announced that Musk would join the company’s board, but Musk decided against that and made a bid for the entire company, at a value of $54.20 a share, for $44 billion. Twitter’s board accepted the deal, which would make him sole owner of the company. Musk stated that his plans for the company included “enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.” In July 2022 Musk announced that he was withdrawing his bid, stating that Twitter had not provided sufficient information about bot accounts and claiming that the company was in “material breach of multiple provisions” of the purchase agreement. Bret Taylor, the chair of Twitter’s board of directors, responded by saying that the company was “committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk.” Twitter sued Musk to force him to buy the company. In September 2022, Twitter’s shareholders voted to accept Musk’s offer. Facing a legal battle, Musk ultimately proceeded with the deal, and it was completed in October.
Elon musk Controversy
Elon Musk’s nature is so aggressive and he believes in free speech rights, due to which he has to face some controversy everyday.
Secured funding
The tweet sparked an investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Mr Musk exposed himself to legal risk by tweeting he had the funding for a buyout, without providing specifics to back up the claim. He was fined $40 million.
Alienating some of his fan base
Elon Musk’s all-electric vision and his reinvention of the electric car won him a devoted fan base from environmentally-minded wealthy people, particularly in the liberal coastal areas of the US.
The billionaire had long grumbled about the regulations he faced running his business in Democrat-held California, so it was no surprise when he moved Tesla to Texas last year.
But coming out in support of the Republican Party, which for years has pushed for additional oil drilling while playing down or denying humanity’s impact on climate, came as a shock to many and arguably began a slide in Tesla stock prices that continues to this day.
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Wartime diplomacy
Musk also saw Tesla’s shares slump after he waded into the thorniest issue of all, opining on Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Even though Twitter’s new owner is supplying free internet service to Ukrainian forces and civilians through his Starlink system, many saw a survey he ran as parroting Moscow’s lines on the war.
A British legislator accused Mr Musk of playing a “double game” in Ukraine and Ukrainian President responded Volodymyr Zelenskyy responded with a survey of his own, asking who people like more: one who supports Russia, or one who supports Ukraine.
Dogecoin to the Moon?
Elon Musk is a big fan of cryptocurrencies, and in 2021 Tesla invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin and started accepting it as payment.
The move sparked a rally in Bitcoin, which had previously been used primarily as a speculative investment instrument rather than a means of daily payment. Tesla, on the other hand, recently reported a $170 million loss in its digital asset program.
Mr Musk also famously boosted Dogecoin, sending what was once a joke cryptocurrency up more than 36,000% in two years before it crashed.
Mr Musk, SpaceX, and Tesla are being sued for $258 billion over allegations that they were involved in a racketeering scheme to support Dogecoin.
Elon Musk Net Worth
- Elon Musk cofounded six companies including electric car maker Tesla, rocket producer SpaceX and tunneling startup Boring Company.
- He owns about 25% of Tesla between stock and options, but has pledged more than half his stock as collateral for loans.
- SpaceX, founded in 2002, is worth $127 billion after a funding round in May 2022; it quadrupled its value in three years.
- Boring Company, which aims to defeat traffic, raised $675 million in April 2022 at a $5.7 billion valuation.
- Twitter’s board agreed to sell the company to Musk for $44 billion in April 2022, after he disclosed a 9.1% stake and threatened a hostile takeover.
- The deal closed in October 2022 after Musk tried to back out and Twitter sued. Musk now owns an estimated 82% of the company.
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