Who is Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter

Elon Musk, the famous South African-born billionaire and new owner of Twitter, is one of the most popular names among entrepreneurs in the new technology economy.

He bought the social networking company for US$ 44 billion (about R$ 214 billion) this Monday (25). Musk is known for advocating “free speech” on the platform and has criticized some of Twitter’s measures in the past.

His main venture, however, is Tesla, a company that specializes in electric cars, energy storage and solar panel manufacturing. But Musk also created Paypal (an online payment company) and other successful companies.

Some of them are the Boring Company, by which it plans to conquer the underground, and SpaceX, focused on aerospace exploration and responsible for the recent launch of a Tesla car into space.

Since selling PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion 12 years ago, Musk has become for many a genius, for others a madman, and for many a visionary, an enlightened, a playboy or a superhero.

The 47-year-old mogul has dated famous American actresses such as Talulah Riley (“Pride and Prejudice, Inception”) and Amber Heard (“Justice League”).

With Canadian singer Grimes, he fathered a child whose name inspired many tweets at the time of birth: the boy X Æ A-12 (his mother says he pronounces it in English “X AI Archangel” or eksi ei ai archangel). The two are also parents to the girl Exa Dark Sideræl.

He has six more children from previous relationships.

Actor Robert Downey Jr is said to have been inspired by him to play Tony Stark in “Iron Man”.

The renowned entrepreneur has changed the way we understand the private spaceflight and electric car, solar energy and artificial intelligence industries.

Musk has promised that we will soon travel on high-speed magnetic trains inside an underground tube and also that we will make tourist trips into space eventually colonizing Mars.

Launching the Falcon Heavy car into space was the first step in this endeavor. “It’s silly and funny,” he admitted at the time. “But the silly and funny things are important,” he added.

But who really is Elon Musk? How did you become a billionaire? And how did you get into the futuristic career?

Start

It all started in Pretoria, South Africa.

As a child, Musk was obsessed with science fiction novels.

His mother, Maye, a model, and father, Errol, an engineer, divorced when he was eight years old.

His younger brother and sister decided to stay with their mother, while Musk moved in with his father.

But he doesn’t have good childhood memories. He says he was bullied by his classmates. “It was all horrible,” he commented of that period.

At age 17, he moved to Canada to study physics and economics at the Queen’s University of Ontario.

From there, he immigrated to the United States in 1992, went on to study at the University of Pennsylvania, and then began with a Ph.D. in physics at the renowned Stanford University in California.

He ended up dropping out of school to become an entrepreneur.

It was then that he founded, together with his smaller brother, Zip2, an online newspaper platform.

In 1999, the duo sold the company to Compaq for US$300 million. With that money, Musk risked creating an online bank, X.com, which would later become PayPal.

It was three years later, in 2002, that he sold the famous online payment site to eBay.

At 31 years old, Musk already had a net worth of US$ 165 million (R$ 805.4 million) and cultivated a reputation as a relentless worker.

When he founded Zip2, he worked every day, slept in the office and showered at the Young Men’s Christian Association that was on the way to work.

When asked in 2010 what advice he would give entrepreneurs, he suggested they should “work 80 to 100 hours a week.”

“If other people work 40 hours a week, and you work 100 hours, you will achieve in four months what others take a year to do,” he said.

‘THE ALPHA MALE’

At that time, Musk had been married for two years to Justine Wilson, an aspiring writer he had met in Ontario.

In an interview with Marie Claire magazine, Wilson recalled that, on one occasion, Musk asked her if she wanted ice cream.

Initially, she said yes, but then changed her mind. Even so, Musk showed up with two ice creams.

“He’s not a man who takes no for an answer,” she said.

Wilson also highlighted another part of their relationship. On the day of her wedding feast, as they danced, he told her, “I’m the alpha male of the relationship.”

According to her, Musk was a “controlling husband”, who forced her to dye her hair blonder and blonder.

“I’m your wife, not your maid,” she would have said. To which he would have replied: “If you were my maid, I would fire you”.

Their first child, Nevada, died at ten weeks from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Musk has always refused to talk about what happened.

The couple then had five more children, twins and triplets, through in vitro fertilization.

Eight years after their marriage, they divorced, in a contentious multi-million dollar separation.

Six weeks later, Musk texted his ex-wife to let him know he was engaged to Talulah Riley, a British actress 14 years his junior.

“I will never be happy without having someone,” he told the American magazine Rolling Stone. “Waking up alone kills me.”

the new companies

After the sale of PayPal in 2002, Musk used his fortune to found three new companies: Tesla, SpaceX and a solar energy company called Solar City.

Tesla seemed doomed to failure: an electric car company in a country heavily dependent on gasoline.

With Musk at the helm, the company laid out a plan:

First, sell a high-performance sports car, equip it with an engine that sets it apart from the stereotype of small, underpowered electric vehicles, design a luxury sedan, and finally, a low-cost, long-range electric car.

A US$456 million loan from the US government saved Tesla from bankruptcy in 2008. Two years later, the company became the first US automaker to be publicly traded since Ford, in 1956.

And, in 2017, it achieved what few imagined: it surpassed Ford and General Motors in market value, for a short period.

But serious delays in the production of its low-cost Model 3 resulted in repeated losses.

conquest of space

Over the past five years, Musk has outlined different plans and timelines for his ultimate goal of sending humans to colonize the planet Mars.

Late last year, he said he expected SpaceX to send a cargo mission as early as 2022 to lay the groundwork, followed by another mission, this time manned, in 2024.

But the practical difficulties and dangers of sending humans over a distance of 160 million kilometers are still a major challenge.

NASA, the American space agency, has been more cautious and predicts a manned mission for only the mid-2030s.

But in the meantime, SpaceX is starting to reap its achievements.

Resupply missions to the International Space Station, commercial satellite launches, contracts with NASA and the US Air Force have led SpaceX to move closer to the club of the world’s most valuable companies.

Currently, its market value totals US$ 21.2 billion (R$ 70 billion).

The company also pioneered new technology for launching reusable rockets and outperformed NASA and other rivals such as Canada’s Boeing by offering (relatively) cheap spaceflight.

Journey to the center of the Earth

And while SpaceX seeks to conquer space, another Musk company is dedicated to exploring underground.

In October, his Boring Company obtained permission from the US government to excavate a test tunnel of about 12 kilometers under the US state of Maryland.

Musk hopes that one day the “Hyperloop”, an electromagnetic bullet train that he says will transport passengers at up to 1,233 km/h, will pass through there.

In July last year, the businessman tweeted that he had obtained “verbal approval from the government” to build a similar tunnel between New York and Washington, which would cut travel time between the two cities from 3 hours to 29 minutes today.

However, the government denied the conversation.