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).
