Elon Musk is a South African-born American entrepreneur and business magnate. He is co-founder and CEO of Tesla, Inc., a pioneer in the manufacture of electric cars. He is the founder, CEO, and Chief Engineer of SpaceX, the first company to sell a commercial flight to the Moon.
Musk is also the founder of The Boring Company, an American infrastructure, and tunnel construction services company, and co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. On May 9, 2018, he was awarded membership of the Royal Society of London, for his outstanding services to science.
Facts About Elon Musk
| Born | 28 June 1971, Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa |
| Real Name | Elon Reeve Musk |
| Nickname | Technoking of Tesla |
| Age | 50 Years Old |
| Height | 5 Feet 9 Inches 179 Centimeters 1.79 Meters |
| Weight | 65 Kilogram 143 Pounds |
| Hair Color | Light Brown |
| Eye Color | Dark Green |
| Zodiac Sign | Cancer |
| Education | Waterkloof House Preparatory School Anglican Sunday School Bryanston High School Pretoria Boys High School University of Pretoria Queen's University Stanford University Wharton School of Business University of Pennsylvania |
| Ethnicity | British-Pennsylvania Dutch Ancestry |
| Nationality | South Africa Canada United States |
| Religion | Anglicanism |
| Wife | Justine Musk (m. 2000–2008) Talulah Riley (m. 2010–2012) Talulah Riley (m. 2013–2016) |
| Children | Nevada Alexander Musk Xavier Musk Griffin Musk Saxon Musk Damian Musk Kai Musk X Æ A-Xii |
| Parents | Father: Errol Musk Mother: Maye Musk |
| Siblings | Tosca Musk (Sister) Kimbal Musk (Brother) Lyndon Rive (Cousin) |
| Net Worth | $200 Billion (As of 2022) |
Elon Musk Biography
Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa as Elon Reeve Musk. He was born into a wealthy Anglican Christian family. Elon Musk’s father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, and property developer who was once a half-owner of a Zambian emerald mine near Lake Tanganyika.
His mother, Maye Musk, is a nutritionist and model, who is native to Saskatchewan, Canada, but was raised in South Africa. Elon Musk has two siblings, a younger brother, Kimbal Musk (born 1972), and a younger sister, Tosca Musk (born 1974).
Elon Musk Ethnicity? According to him, Musk has British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk lived most of the time with his father in South Africa.
He completed his early education at Waterkloof House Preparatory School and Bryanston High School before graduating from Pretoria Boys High School. He developed an interest in computers at the age of ten and began studying programming languages and programming his Commodore VIC 20.
At the age of 12, he developed the video game Blastar, which he sold to the PC and Office Technology magazine for $500. Musk was bullied throughout his childhood. After a group of youths threw him down a flight of stairs and then beat him until he lost consciousness, he was hospitalized for a few days.
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Higher Education
Shortly before his 16th birthday, Musk applied for passports with his younger brother at the Canadian embassy and emigrated to North America a year later to avoid military service in the South African army under the apartheid regime.
His first destination was Canada, where he enrolled at Queen’s University in Kingston. After moving to the USA, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia with a bachelor’s degree in economics and physics in 1995.
In 1995, he started his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) program in materials science at Stanford University in California. However, after only two days on campus, Musk decided to drop out of college to join the Internet boom and start an Internet startup.
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Personal Life
Elon Musk married in 2000 to Justine Wilson, a writer he met in Ontario. The couple’s first child (named Nevada) died at 10 weeks of life with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. After Nevada’s death, Elon and Justine underwent IVF treatments and had five more children (twins and triplets).
Musk has five children with Justine, twins Xavier, and Griffin were born in April 2004, followed by triplets Kai, Saxon, and Damian in 2006. After eight years of marriage, the couple divorced in 2008 and share custody of their five sons.
Musk’s next relationship was with Talulah Riley, a British actress twenty years junior to him. The two got married for the first time in 2010, having divorced two years later. In July of the following year, they remarried and divorced definitively in December 2014. The couple had no children.
In 2017, Musk dated American film and television actress, Amber Heard for several months. Since 2018, the businessman has been in a relationship with singer Grimes, who is the mother of Elon’s sixth child (and Grimes’s first child).
The baby was born on May 5, 2020, and given the controversial name X Æ A-Xii. The name is the result of the math variable X, it refers to the artificial intelligence (Æ) and the couple’s favorite aircraft (A-Xii).
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Business Career
Zip2
In 1995, Musk co-founded his first company, Zip2, with his brother Kimbal, providing content for media companies. Musk secured contracts with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and convinced the board of directors not to plan a merger with CitySearch.
When computer manufacturer Compaq bought the Zip2 company for $307 million in 1999, it was the highest price paid for an Internet company at that time; Musk himself received $22 million for his 7% stake.
X.com and PayPal
Immediately afterward, in 1999, Musk founded the company X.com, which developed an online payment system via e-mail. In 2000, X.com merged with competitor Confinity, which specialized in a similar product called PayPal.
In the years that followed, PayPal became the most important online payment system in the world – and achieved sales proceeds of 1.5 billion US dollars when it was sold to eBay in 2002. Musk held 11.7% of the company’s shares at the time, making it the largest shareholder. In July 2017, Musk reacquired the x.com domain from PayPal.
While Musk’s Internet company opened up new markets with products that did not previously exist in this form, the business idea that was to underlie the entrepreneurial activities of the following years was different: Musk wanted expensive and technically complex products that were cheaper and suitable for mass production to offer.
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SpaceX
In the year 2000, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), to make rockets at lower costs and carry out space travel. The first two rockets were the Falcon 1 (first launched in 2006) and the Falcon 9 (first launched in 2010).
In January 2011, SpaceX became the first company in the world to sell a commercial flight to the Moon. Musk developed a reusable rocket that could take off and return to the platform that launched it.
Starting in 2012, the Grasshopper rocket made several short flights to test the new technology. SpaceX also developed the Dragon Ship, which carries supplies to the International Space Station and is also designed to carry up to seven astronauts.
On January 7, 2018, the Falcon 9 spacecraft was launched for a secret mission called Zuma, which belongs to the US government and carried a satellite that will be in low Earth orbit. In addition to being CEO of SpaceX, Musk was also the lead designer on the construction of the Falcon, Dragon, and Grasshopper rockets.
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SpaceX Launched Car and Two Astronauts Into Space
On February 6, 2018, SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy “super rocket”, which took into space, as a test charge, the Tesla Roadster, a red electric sports car equipped with an “astronaut dummy” dubbed the Starman.
The Tesla Roadster has traveled towards the orbit of Mars and will be in space for many years. The Falcon Heavy is the first step in Elon Musk’s ambitious plan to take a man to Mars. In May 2020, SpaceX launched a manned rocket with two NASA astronauts (Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken) towards the International Space Station.
The launch of the rocket was a milestone because it was the first time in nearly a decade that a manned voyage had been sent into space by the Americans. The last mission, in 2011, was through the Space Shuttle program.
Upon returning to Earth, the Capsule moored off the coast of Florida bringing the astronauts safely back to Earth. The fact that it landed is also important, 45 years ago no American capsule landed on our planet.
The mission was an industry milestone also as it was the first private company to send a spaceflight with its rocket.
Tesla Motors
A pioneer in the manufacture of battery-powered cars, the American company Tesla Motors is a company located in Palo Alto, California, United States. Founded by entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2004, Musk has become one of its main funders.
The name, Tesla, is a reference to the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), who filed over 700 patents, invented the bladeless turbine and the AC induction motor.
The initial challenge for Musk’s company was big: Tesla wanted to consolidate itself with electric cars in a country that traditionally consumes a lot of gasoline. In 2006, Tesla introduced its first car, the Roadster, which had a range of 394 km on a single charge, which cost $92,000. Tesla Motors also launched the Model S and X.
In 2008 Tesla nearly went bankrupt, having been saved by a $456 million loan provided by the US government. In 2010, the company was able to list its shares on the stock market, becoming the first American automaker to trade after Ford (in 1956).
Gradually, the cost of production fell, and in 2017 Tesla launched the Model 3, which costs, in the cheapest version, $35,000. The Model 3 had a range of 350 km, that is, this is the distance the car can travel on a battery charge.
In 2017 Tesla had already surpassed the market value of Ford and General Motors. In November of the same year, Tesla already accumulated a list of almost 500 thousand interested in the new electric car. To meet all this demand, Elon Musk built a huge battery factory in the Nevada State desert to power his cars.
Solar City
In 2006, Musk founded the company SolarCity with his cousins Peter Rive and Lyndon Rive. SolarCity does sell and install solar energy generation systems as well as other related products and services to residential, commercial, and industrial customers.
In 2016, Tesla acquired SolarCity, for $2.6 billion and merged it with its battery energy storage products division to create Tesla Energy.
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OpenAI
In December 2015, Elon Musk announced the creation of OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research company. OpenAI aims is to develop and market open-source artificial intelligence in a way that benefits society, not harms it.
Neuralink
Neuralink is an American neurotechnology company founded in July 2016 by Elon Musk and eight other people. The company aims to develop a device for communication between the human brain and computers, a so-called brain-computer interface (BCI).
The Boring Company
In 2016, Musk founded The Boring Company to construct tunnels and infrastructure. The company aims to reduce traffic jams in large cities by installing a network of underground tunnels. Tunnels are currently planned in Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Chicago.
In 2021, a tunnel beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center was completed.
Elon Musk Net Worth
According to an American business magazine Forbes, Elon Musk Net Worth is estimated at around $200 Billion as of 2022. He has earned his most wealth through his Tesla and SpaceX shares.
Musk owns 23% of Tesla but has pledged more than half of his holdings as loan security. After its most recent investment round in February 2021, Musk’s rocket firm, SpaceX, is valued at $74 billion.
In April 2021, SpaceX signed a $2.89 billion contract with NASA. In 2021, Time magazine named Musk Person of the Year.
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