Elon Musk is a man who thinks of the future and has keyed into its limitless possibilities by establishing companies with the potential to meet future needs and his success tells his story. He is the chief designer of SpaceX, the CEO and product architect of Tesla Inc, Co-founder of Paypal, and CEO of Neuralink.
His interest in computing began at a very young age. He developed computer skills at the age of 10 with the Commodore Vic – 20 and then taught himself programming which he used to create a video game called Blastar and sold it two years later for $500. You can still find a web version of the game online.
Meanwhile, Billionaire Elon Musk was born on 28th June 1971 in Transvaal Pretoria South Africa during the Apartheid era. His mother Maye Musk is a Canadian-born nutritionist and model, while his father Errol Musk is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot and Sailor. He has two younger siblings Kimbal ( born 1972) and Tosca (1974). His parents divorced when he was 10 years old and he chose to stay back in South Africa with his father instead of moving to Canada with his mother – a decision he later regretted.
Elon Musk Education
Elon Musk Education kicked off in Waterkloof House Preparatory School before joining Bryanston High School. He was an avid reader and an introvert, but was severely bullied in school, and was once hospitalized when a group of boys threw him down a flight of stairs and hit his head repeatedly against the pavement until he became unconscious. He had revealed that he later got a nose job, to fix the damage.
He was eventually transferred to Pretoria Boys High School. After his graduation in 1989, his father wanted him to further his education in South Africa, but he had already set his eyes on America because he believed that that was where great things were happening. Moreover, he wanted to avoid serving in the South African military, which was at that time imposing apartheid, a South African legal system where the black majority were denied political and economic rights.
His mother helped him in acquiring his Canadian Citizenship which made it easy for Eron Musk’s Education to be extended beyond his hometown in South Africa to Canada at the age of 17. The reason he chose Canada was that he believed that it was easy to get into America from Canada. He then enrolled at the Prestigious Queens University in Kingston Ontario for his undergraduate program. After two years, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from its College of Arts and Sciences. He equally earned his Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the Wharton School of Business.
Thereafter, he moved to California to pursue a PhD in applied physics and material science at Stanford University in 1995. However, he dropped the program just after two years to pursue his entrepreneurial dream because it was the era of the internet boom and he wanted to be involved in it.
He launched his first business Zip2, with the help of his brother. It was a city guide software company for newspapers and he was lucky enough to get contracts with the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, to provide content for their online site.
However, starting up was tough for Elon Musk. He lived in the rented office which served as his company’s headquarters, sleeping on a couch and showering at the local YMCA, yet he found it difficult to fulfil the contracts and meet up with other bills. He had to go for external finance from a group of investors, who gave him $3.6 million in exchange for the majority control of the business. His hard work, however, paid off in the end and the company was later acquired by Compaq for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options. He got $22 million for his 7 per cent share of the sale thus making him a millionaire.
Armed with the needed capital, Elon Musk went into the establishment of another company known as X.com which provided online financial services and payments. A year later, it merged with another company, Confinity which was running the money transfer service PayPal. X.Com was then renamed PayPal in 2001, and in 2002, it was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, with Musk getting the highest shareholder share of 11 percent. After the sale of PayPal, the billionaire founded another company Space X, an aerospace manufacturing and space transport travel company.
Space X got a contract with NASA to transport Cargos to the International Space station and had been able to launch a number of rockets into space with an unmanned capsule to deliver supplies to astronauts. Musk is also a member of a Mars club that plans to send people to live on Mars and he plans to build a spacecraft for commercial space travel.
Among his other Companies is Tesla Inc. which has developed high-speed electric cars and intends to bring fully electric cars to the automobile market, as well as OpenAL, a research company that promotes friendly artificial intelligence. He is also the CEO of The Boring Company, a tunnel and infrastructure construction company founded in 2006.
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Spouse
Canadian fantasy author Justine Wilson became Elon Musk’s spouse in the year 2000. The couple met while Musk was a young student at Queens University, Ontario. They dated for a while and eventually tied the knot but later divorced in 2008.
Thereafter, Musk had an on-and-off relationship with an English actress Tiley Riley. He married her in 2010 and they announced their divorce in 2012, then got married again in 2013.
The couple, however, filed for divorce in 2014 but didn’t go through with it, then in 2016, they filed for another divorce and went through with it this time, leading to their second divorce.
Subsequently, Musk began to date Amber Heard in 2017 but their relationship was short-lived because they separated in the same year due to conflicting schedules. Musk is currently in a relationship with Canadian musician, Grime, whom he began dating in 2018.
Children
Elon Musk’s children were born of the same mother; with former wife, Justine Wilson. Their first child, a son named Nevada Alexander Musk, died from Sudden Infant Syndrome at 10 weeks old.
Thereafter, the couple had 5 sons, a set of twins, and a set of triplets through in vitro fertilization. The twins, Xavier Musk and Griffin Musk were born in 2004 and the triplets, Damian, Saxon, and Kai were born in 2006. Both parents share custody of the children.
On May 4th, 2020, the South African-born billionaire welcomed a son named X Æ A-Xii with Canadian singer Claire Elise Boucher, aka, Grimes. The two reportedly met via a comment section on Twitter and confirmed their relationship when they walked the red carpet during the 2018 Met Gala.
Elon Musk Net Worth
Elon Musk has amassed a humongous amount of wealth from his innovative, technology-driven companies with an estimated net worth of $292.6 billion dollars as of 2021. This made him one of the richest men in the world. He is also ranked on the Forbes list of most powerful people in the world and as of November 2020, he leapfrogged Bill Gates to become the second richest man in the world, right behind Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
However, according to a Bloomberg report, Elon Musk’s net worth soared from $7.2 billion to $127.9 billion, driven by yet another surge in Tesla’s share price. The tech entrepreneur added $100.3 billion to his net worth in late 2020 and leaped from the 35th position as the world’s richest in January same year.
As of January 2021, Musk is worth a whopping sum of $185 billion. His company, Tesla Inc. is now the 5th most valuable company in the United States, taking its value from $86 billion to $815 billion, ahead of Facebook’s $754 billion.
Eron Musk has many exotic cars in his collection from several brands as well as several private jets including a Gulfstream G650 GR private jet. Also, he has some choice real estate properties across the U.S such as five luxury houses in the Bel Air neighborhood which reportedly cost $75 million each.
