Elon Musk

Elon Musk is a South African-born entrepreneur and business magnate who is best known as the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Inc.

Personal Stats

Education

Musk's educational journey started at Waterkloof House Preparatory School, followed by Bryanston High School and Pretoria Boys High School where he graduated from. To make it esier to immigrate to the United States, he applied for a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother, and while his application was being processed, he attended the University of Pretoria for five months.

In June 1989, Musk arrived in Canada, and in 1990, he enrolled at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) after two years. At UPenn, he completed his studies for a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the Wharton School. Musk claims he earned these degrees in 1995, but UPenn maintains it awarded them in 1997.

In 1994, Musk held two internships in Silicon Valley, one at Pinnacle Research Institute, an energy storage startup that researched electrolytic ultracapacitors for energy storage, and another at the Palo Alto-based startup, Rocket Science Games. In 1995, he was accepted to a PhD program in materials science at Stanford University. Instead, he chose to join the internet boom and dropped out two days after being accepted to apply for a job at Netscape, to which he reportedly never received a response.

Career

After graduating, Musk co-founded Zip2, a web software company that provided business directories and maps to newspapers. He sold Zip2 in 1999 for almost $300 million, which helped fund his next venture, X.com, an online payment company. X.com eventually became PayPal, which was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.

In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX with the goal of reducing the cost of space exploration and eventually colonizing Mars. The company has since become a major player in the aerospace industry, launching numerous successful missions to the International Space Station and developing reusable rockets and spacecraft.

In 2004, Musk became chairman of Tesla, Inc., an electric car company that he helped fund. He eventually took over as CEO and has since transformed the company into one of the most valuable car manufacturers in the world, with a focus on sustainable energy and autonomous driving technology.

Musk has also been involved in numerous other ventures, including SolarCity (a solar power company that he helped found), OpenAI (an artificial intelligence research company), and The Boring Company (which aims to reduce traffic congestion through underground tunnels).

In 2022, Musk made headlines when he expressed interest in buying Twitter and started purchasing Twitter shares, eventually becoming the largest shareholder with a 9.2% stake by April. He then agreed to a deal that would appoint him to Twitter's board of directors and prohibit him from acquiring more than 14.9% of the company. However, on April 13, he made a $43 billion offer to buy Twitter, launching a takeover bid to buy 100% of Twitter's stock at $54.20 per share. By the end of the month, he had successfully concluded the bid for approximately $44 billion, which caused Tesla's stock market value to sink by over $100 billion.

In addition to his business ventures, Musk is known for his outspoken personality and controversial statements on social media. He has been named to Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world multiple times and has won numerous awards for his entrepreneurship and innovation.

As of 2023, Elon Musk has an estimated net worth of approximately $196 billion, primarily due to his ownership stakes in Tesla and SpaceX. He is currently ranked as the second-wealthiest person in the world according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes's real-time billionaires list.

Personal Life

Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. He has British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry, and his mother is Maye Musk, a model and dietitian from Saskatchewan, Canada, while his father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, and property developer. He has a younger brother, Kimbal, and a younger sister, Tosca.

During Musk's youth, his family was wealthy, and his father was a representative of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party. Musk was mostly raised by his father after his parents divorced in 1980. Musk developed an interest in computing and video games at age ten and taught himself how to program from the VIC-20 user manual. 

Social Media 

Twitter - https://twitter.com/elonmusk