Who is Elon Musk?
Elon Reeve Musk FRS ( born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; president of the Musk Foundation; and owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc. With an estimated net worth of around $181 billion as of November 18, 2022, Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes‘s real-time billionaires list.
Elon Musk’s life
Musk was born and grew up in Pretoria, South Africa. He attended the University of Pretoria before moving to Canada at age 17, acquiring citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. Two years later, he matriculated at Queen’s University and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received bachelor’s degrees in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University, but dropped out after two days to instead pursue a business career, co-founding the web software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal; the startup was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. The same year, Musk co-founded the online bank X.com, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
Elon Musk Industries
1. Zip2
2. Z.com
3. SpaceX (Starlink)
4. Tesla
5. Inc. (Criticism /Energy/ Litigation)
6. OpenAI
7. Neuralink
8. The Boring Company
9. Twitter, Inc (Acquisition)
1. SpaceX (Starlink)
In early 2001, Musk became involved with the nonprofit Mars Society and discussed funding plans to place a growth-chamber for plants on Mars. In October of the same year, he traveled to Moscow with Jim Cantrell and Adeo Ressi to buy refurbished intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could send the greenhouse payloads into space. He met with the companies NPO Lavochkin and Kosmotras; however, Musk was seen as a novice and the group returned to the United States empty-handed. In February 2002, the group returned to Russia with Mike Griffin (president of In-Q-Tel) to look for three ICBMs. They had another meeting with Kosmotras and were offered one rocket for $8 million, which Musk rejected. He instead decided to start a company that could build affordable rockets. With $100 million of his own money, Musk founded SpaceX in May 2002 and became the company’s CEO and Chief Engineer.
2. Tesla
Tesla, Inc.—originally Tesla Motors—was incorporated in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who financed the company until the Series A round of funding. Both men played active roles in the company’s early development prior to Musk’s involvement. Musk led the Series A round of investment in February 2004; he invested $6.5 million, became the majority shareholder, and joined Tesla’s board of directors as chairman. Musk took an active role within the company and oversaw Roadster product design but was not deeply involved in day-to-day business operations.
Published: Dec 4, 2022
Latest Revision: Dec 11, 2022
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