Millionaire. Philanthropist. Genius. These are some of the adjectives used to describe a man who revolutionizes the world with his inventions.On June 28, 1971, the first-born in the Musk family was born and his name was Elon Reeve.
The boy had interesting roots: his ancestors belonged to Swiss Germans and Canadians who emigrated to the Republic of South Africa. Ilona’s grandfather was an aviator, he traveled a lot with his family, and her grandmother was a teacher. In 1950, the Haldeman family moved to South Africa, where May became a successful model at the age of fifteen.
Elon Musk Net Worth
The net worth of the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is now a stratospheric $300 billion, according to Forbes ‘ real-time ranking of the world’s richest people.
The billionaire loves to collect all kinds of equipment.Among his acquisitions, the following examples stand out: the Aero L-39 Albatros plane, the Dassault Falcon 900 jet plane, the McLaren F1 car and the Wet Nellie submarine car, which starred in the famous Bond movie.
He participates in flights in which the aircraft reaches zero gravity, called Zero Gravity.The name of the girl Ilona and Grimes is declared illegal in the state of California, since the symbol «» is not a letter of the English alphabet.
The superlatives don’t stop there. Musk, the Twitter buyer , is worth more than twice the wealth of legendary investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett , who began investing in 1941 when he was 11 years old. The net worth of the so-called “Oracle of Omaha”, 91, is now “only” about $ 125,000 million.
Musk’s wealth is also worth far more than the combined fortunes of former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates ($136 billion) and Steve Ballmer ($100 billion), as well as Google co-founders Larry Page ($120 billion). million) and Sergey Brin ($115 billion).
Elon Musk Biography
In the city of Pretoria, where the family settled, also lived the man who would become the father of Elon Errol Musk, who worked as a builder at the time they met the mother of the future billionaire. After getting married, May and Errol Musk stayed to live and work in Pretoria, South Africa, where their first child would be born.
He was a closed child, he often took offense at school, but he was eager for education and quickly learned new knowledge.After their parents’ divorce, Elon and his younger brother and sister lived with their mother in the city of Durban, but later the siblings moved in with their father.
It was life with her father that instilled in the boys the skills of an engineer, helped him with his work, and absorbed his father’s ability from him. Although, by nature, he was quite a difficult and demanding person.
During his first ten years, Elon receives a computer as a gift, on which he learns programming and successfully masters this skill. At twelve years old, Elon had already become a young entrepreneur, created his own video game, sold it and received five hundred dollars for the creation of it. The young man began to buy stocks, and by selling them when their price increased, he earned a trip to university in the homeland of his ancestors in Canada.
Elon Musk Career
This is not about Marvel hero Tony Stark, but about the very real Elon Musk .
This entrepreneur founded the PayPal remote payment service , owns Tesla Motors , manufacturers of electric sports cars, head of SpaceX, the first private firm to travel to space under contract with NASA, inspiring Solar City , a company that develops state-of-the-art technology based on photovoltaic and responsible energy at Halcyon Molecular, a biotechnology laboratory that seeks cures for various diseases.
Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971. From a very young age he had a great affinity with technology: at the age of 10 he reprogrammed his Commodore VIC-20 computer by himself. In fact, it is said that at the age of 17 he had already sold his first video game totally programmed by him for $500.
At the age of 17, Elon Musk traveled to America to study business administration and physics at the University of Pennsylvania.
As is common in the history of this type of visionary, Elon Musk abandoned his doctoral studies in 1995 to found Zip2, an internet services company for communication companies. Years later he would sell the venture to AltaVista for more than 300 million dollars.
Instead of enjoying this success, Elon Musk decided to put his money to work by founding X.com, an online financial services platform, in 1999. In 2001 this firm was already known throughout the planet as the giant of internet payments, PayPal.
eBay bought the firm in 2002 for about $1.5 billion. What did Musk do with all that money? Start another company, of course. That same year he launched Space Exploration Technologies (Space X), a company known for its Dragon rockets which, after the end of NASA’s shuttle program in 2011, is responsible for transporting material to the International Space Station. In fact, he is a strong contender for a manned mission to Mars.
Just a year later, Musk would co -found Tesla Motors , the firm that has revolutionized the concept of electric cars by making them sporty and fast. In 2006, the Tesla Roadster won Time Magazine’s Invention of the Year Award, Transportation category. But it was not until 2008 when it began to be produced.
In 2006, he suggested to two of his cousins that they found SolarCity and financed them to create that company that today is already the number 1 in residential photovoltaic panel installations in the United States.
Among its philanthropic actions, the Musk Foundation seeks to promote scientific dissemination among children, promote children’s health and support the ideas of entrepreneurs on the use of renewable energy.
This story of success, hard work – Musk is said to work 100 hours a week – and certain similarities with the character have led many to think that this developer inspired the creation of Iron Man. The truth is that the Marvel superhero emerged in 1963, and Musk actually makes a cameo appearance in the movie Iron Man 2 .
The businessman is working on the development of Hyperloop , super high-speed transport that would be able to transport a person from downtown Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 35 minutes. He is also the founder of Neuralink , a company that wants to connect human brains to broadband internet.
The investment regulatory authorities in the United States, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), fined Musk in 2018 after the entrepreneur launched a tweet in which he warned that he was going to take his automotive firm Tesla off the Stock Exchange.
Sources of the Wall Street Journal affirmed that the Commission wants to know if Musk was serious or not to know if the investors of Tesla should be protected by law in case of the withdrawal of the firm from public operation.
Musk also faced a lawsuit by cave diver Vernon Unsworth, a British man who helped rescue a boys’ soccer team trapped in a cave in Thailand two years ago. According to an email he sent to BuzzFeed News , the famed entrepreneur claims the rescuer is a “child rapist.” The lawsuit was won by Musk because it showed, according to him, that the accusation was actually an idiomatic phrase typical of his country of origin that was taken out of context.
In April 2020, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX launched a tweet that many interpreted as a protest against the isolation measures imposed by the government.
“Free America Now” were the words that the billionaire placed on his account. And although you might think that this is an isolated message, the tycoon had been posting news tweets from entrepreneurs struggling to open their businesses as soon as possible and opinion pieces about the “ineffectiveness” of confinement methods.
At the beginning of March 2020, the businessman had expressed on the same social network that “the panic over the coronavirus was silly” and in subsequent events he offered his factories to develop more ventilators.
Likewise, Tesla Motors was one of the companies that resisted closing its doors at the beginning of the spread of the virus in the United States. For its part, Twitter says that Musk’s tweets do not violate its usage policies, according to TechCrunch .
These latest controversies, like naming his seventh child “X Æ A-12 Musk” , have many people wondering if Musk’s genius is beginning to border on insanity. The only thing certain is that today, he has once again positioned himself as the richest man in the world with a fortune of 223 billion dollars, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Elon Musk is the man thanks to whom NASA was able to abandon the use of Russian rockets to carry astronauts and cargo to the ISS. With extensive knowledge in the field of engineering, technology and artificial intelligence, the entrepreneur successfully develops his companies. Tesla, SpaceX and PayPal compete in the market and generate good returns. Tesla electric vehicles have become a new environmentally oriented technical novelty.
The billionaire does not intend to stop at spacecraft flying to the ISS, he plans to create vehicles that can reach the red planet. And although that is not the limit for Musk, the businessman intends to create a colony on Mars and develop active activities there to explore the planet. According to Elon himself, humanity is not completely safe on Earth, there are many threats both cosmic and earthly that can destroy humanity. He believes that the colonization of other planets is necessary and he intends to participate in this process until complete victory.
Elon Musk Personal Life
In union with his first wife, Justine Wilson, the billionaire had five children. The children’s names are: Damian, Griffin, Xavier, Saxon and Kai. Ilona’s firstborn, Nevada Alexander, unfortunately died after only living to be ten weeks old. Musk dated actress Amber Heard, whom he later met again at a trial. He was a witness on Heard’s side in a domestic violence case against Johnny Depp.
