Read who the Silicon Valley mogul really is and how he rose to global fame
Elon Musk he has amassed enormous wealth that made him the richest man on the planet. He is, perhaps, the most talked about global businessman of recent years.
He once stated on a podcast: “I don’t think you would necessarily want to be in my shoes. I think people wouldn’t like it that much.”
Who is Elon Musk really and how has he achieved worldwide fame?
- Ilon’s early years…
Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971 in South Africa, to a Canadian mother, Maye, a model, and a South African father, Errol, an engineer. When his parents divorced in 1979, Musk went to live with his father.
In 1983, aged 12, Musk created a video game called ‘Blastar’ and sold it to a computer magazine for $500 (£411).
- Elon is moving to North America
After graduating from high school, he moved to Canada in 1989 with his mother, sister and brother and spent two years studying at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
In 1992 he went to university in Philadelphia, USA, where he got degrees in physics and economics.
While studying there, Musk and his college roommate, Adeo Ressi, rented a 10-bedroom house and turned it into a nightclub. It was one of Musk’s first business experiments.
After graduating, he traveled to Stanford University in California to begin a PhD in applied physics, but dropped out after two days as he felt the internet had much more potential to change people’s lives.
In 1995, he and his brother started Zip2, a company that provided maps and business directories to online newspapers such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.
The fledgling business proved successful, as four years later it was sold to computer maker Compaq for $307 million, which netted Elon $22 million.
Also in 1999, Elon co-founded the online financial services company X.com, which a year later merged with the software company Confinity, co-founded by Peter Thiel. The company appealed to Elon Musk because of its easy payment system.
The merged company later became PayPal, which grew into one of the largest payment systems in the world. It made another windfall when online shopping giant eBay bought PayPal in 2002.
As PayPal’s largest shareholder, he pocketed $165 million of the $1.5 billion price paid by eBay. Also, in 2002, he became a US citizen.
Using $100 million from PayPal’s windfall, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) with the goal of making rockets more affordable.
On March 24, 2006, SpaceX launched the Falcon 1 rocket, which had a successful liftoff, but a few minutes later began to spin out of control and was destroyed.
Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s vice president of business development at the time, said: “Obviously this is a setback, but we’re here for the long haul.”
The company kept its word, and after two more setbacks in March 2007 and August 2008, its persistence finally paid off.
On September 28, 2008, a Falcon 1 rocket successfully launched into space, becoming the first private rocket to reach orbit on liquid fuel.
On July 14, 2009, Falcon 1 made its second and final flight, successfully carrying the Malaysian RazakSAT satellite into orbit in SpaceX’s first commercial launch. After this flight, Falcon 1 was retired and succeeded by Falcon 9 (first launched in 2010).
A third rocket, the Falcon Heavy, was launched for the first time in 2018, and two years later saw the first test flights of the Super Heavy-Starship system, the successor to the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.
SpaceX also developed the Dragon spacecraft, which carries supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). Dragon can carry up to seven astronauts and had a manned flight carrying astronauts Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken to the ISS in 2020.
Musk has made no secret of his ambitions for a human presence on Mars by 2029 and has even talked about plans to build a self-sustaining city on the Red Planet by the 2060s.
SpaceX is worth $127 billion, according to Forbes magazine.
In 2004, Elon Musk invested about $6 million in Tesla, an electric car company co-founded by Martin Eberhard.
Elon took an active role on the product side and helped develop its first car, the Roadster, which debuted in 2006, three years after the company launched. But 2008 was a very difficult 12 months, which he described as “the worst year of my life”.
Tesla was losing money and nearly went bankrupt, while the Falcon 1 rocket had failed to launch for the third time while the US was in the middle of a financial crisis.
A decade later, in 2018, he described the launch of SpaceX and Tesla as possibly “the dumbest things anyone has ever done” in terms of startups.
As Tesla’s chairman, Elon Musk could be incredibly demanding, pushing employees to achieve goals that many thought were impossible, according to Gene Berdichevsky, the battery engineer on the company’s first production vehicle.
Some ideas failed despite exhaustive efforts. But the ones that turned out to be right ended up “changing the world,” he said.
- Personal life
2008 was also a year of personal turmoil for Musk, as he split from his wife of eight years, Justine Musk, a Canadian author. He later married actress Talulah Riley in 2010, before divorcing in 2012. The couple remarried a year later, but then split a second time in 2016. In August of this year, he revealed that he has nine children, with three wives.
In 2021, Musk guest hosted the American sitcom Saturday Night Live. He referred to himself as “the first person with Asperger syndrome to host SNL.” It was the first time he appeared to associate himself with the condition.
According to the Brain Charity in the UK, Asperger’s syndrome is a form of autism, a condition that people are born with that causes them to act and communicate differently.
“The term is sometimes used to describe people with autism who have above average intelligence. It is now more common for them to be diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).”
Musk has been described by some as a real-life Tony Stark, thanks to his presence and influence in the tech world. Stark is a fictional character, commonly known by the nickname Iron Man, and is portrayed in Hollywood films by Robert Downey Jr. Iron Man (2008) screenwriter Mark Fergus stated that for the version of Stark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe he was partially inspired by Musk, as well as Donald Trump and “maybe a little bit of Steve Jobs”.
If there’s perhaps one company where Musk has made more headlines than any other, it’s Twitter. The Silicon Valley mogul had originally made an offer in April 2022 to buy the social networking platform and take it private for $44 billion.
Twitter accepted the offer, but then Musk later decided he no longer wanted to own it, claiming he had been misled about spam accounts on the platform. He was sued by Twitter in July, before reversing course in October and saying he wanted to complete the $44 billion deal, which was finally done later that month.
In the days and weeks that followed, he fired top executives and laid off thousands of company employees. In the past he has spoken of his belief in absolute freedom of speech.
Experts have warned that the tycoon’s lax stance on moderation could provide an avenue for the service’s “worst” trolls to thrive, turning Twitter into a “Wild West” where anything goes.
“This is a guy who is more transparent than 99.99 percent of other CEOs and yet harder to predict because he has the confidence to change his mind publicly,” said Eric Gordon, a professor of business and law at the University of Michigan.
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I am Terrance Carlson, author at News Bulletin 247. I mostly cover technology news and I have been working in this field for a long time. I have a lot of experience and I am highly knowledgeable in this area. I am a very reliable source of information and I always make sure to provide accurate news to my readers.
