NO.1 RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD
NET WORTH : $230.4 Billion
Elon Reeve Musk is an investor and businessman who was born on June 28, 1971. In addition to being the owner, chairman, and chief technology officer of X Corp., Musk is also the founder, chairman, CEO, and chief technology officer of SpaceX; an angel investor; the CEO, product architect, and former chairman of Tesla, Inc.; the creator of the Boring Company; a co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and the president of the Musk Foundation. With an estimated net worth of US$207 billion as of October 2023 (based mostly on his ownership shares in Tesla and SpaceX), he is the wealthiest person in the world, according to Forbes and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk attended the University of Pretoria for a short time before moving to Canada at the age of 18, where he obtained Canadian citizenship through his mother's birth. He enrolled in Kingston, Ontario's Queen's University two years later. Later, Musk changed schools and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in physics and economics. 1995 saw him go to California so he could attend Stanford University. But Musk left after just two days and co-founded Zip2, an online city tour software startup, with his brother Kimbal. In 1999, Compaq purchased the business for $307 million, and Musk used $12 million of the proceeds to co-found the direct bank X.com in the same year. In 2000, X.com and Confinity combined to establish PayPal.
PayPal was purchased by eBay in 2002 for a sum of $1.5 billion. In the same year, Musk established SpaceX, a spaceflight services firm, with $100 million of his earnings. He made an early investment in the electric car maker Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.) in 2004. After becoming its chairman and chief architect of products, he was appointed CEO in 2008. Musk was involved in the founding of SolarCity in 2006; Tesla purchased the solar energy startup in 2016 and rebranded it as Tesla Energy. He put out a high-speed hyperloop vacuum train transportation concept in 2013. He was a founding member of the nonprofit artificial intelligence research group OpenAI in 2015. The next year, Musk co-founded the Boring startup, a tunnel construction business, and Neuralink, a neurotechnology startup that develops brain-computer interfaces. He paid $44 billion to purchase Twitter in 2022.
Early life and education
On June 28, 1971, Elon Reeve Musk was born in Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa. His heritage is mixed Pennsylvania Dutch and British. Maye Musk, née Haldeman, is his mother. She is a dietician and model who was reared in South Africa after being born in Saskatchewan, Canada. Errol Musk, his father, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, and real estate developer. He also owned a rental resort in the Timbavati Private Nature Reserve and a portion of an emerald mine in Zambia, close to Lake Tanganyika.Musk has a younger sister named Tosca and a younger brother named Kimbal.
When Musk was younger, his family had a large estate. As a spokesman of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party, his father was elected to the Pretoria City Council and said that his children also disapproved of apartheid. In a single-engine Bellanca airplane, his namesake and maternal grandfather, Joshua Elon Haldeman, was a Canadian of American descent who established world records while transporting his family to Australia and Africa. Haldeman was a supporter of Technocracy, a member of the Social Credit Party of Canada, and held antisemitic views. In 1980, Musk made the decision to live mostly with his father following the divorce of his parents. Musk subsequently started to regret his choice and grew apart from his father. He has a half-brother and a half-sister on his father's side.
Bullying of Musk was common. In one instance, Musk was violently assaulted and pushed down concrete steps for calling a youngster whose father had committed suicide "stupid". He became interested in computers and video games at the age of 10, and he taught himself how to program using the VIC-20 user manual. He made about $500 when he sold PC and Office Technology magazine his BASIC-based game Blastar when he was twelve years old.
Education
Musk completed his education at Pretoria Boys High School, Bryanston High School, and Waterkloof House Preparatory School. Musk had a B on his senior math certification and a 61 in Afrikaans, indicating that he was a decent but not outstanding student. Musk, aware that applying via his mother, who was born in Canada, would make it simpler to move to the United States, filed for a Canadian passport. He spent five months at the University of Pretoria while awaiting the processing of his application.
After arriving in Canada in June 1989, Musk spent a year living with a second cousin in Saskatchewan and doing several jobs at a timber plant and farm. He enrolled in Kingston, Ontario's Queen's University in 1990. He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) two years later, where he finished his studies for a Bachelor of Science in economics from the Wharton School and a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics. UPenn argues that the degrees were conferred in 1997, despite Musk's assertion that he obtained them in 1995. He allegedly prepared a business plan for an electronic book-scanning service that would be comparable to Google Books and threw sizable, ticketed home parties in order to help pay for his tuition.
Musk completed two internships in Silicon Valley in 1994: one at the Palo Alto-based business Rocket Science Games and another at the energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which looked into electrolytic ultracapacitors for energy storage. He got admitted to Stanford University's PhD program in materials science in 1995. Musk, however, made the decision to take advantage of the Internet explosion and dropped college two days after being admitted. He then sought for a position with Netscape, for which he apparently never heard back.
Business Career
ZIP2
ZIP2
Newspapers might obtain online city guide software through a license from Zip2 Corporation On November 9, 1995, Elon and Kimbal Musk, along with Greg Kouri, formed Global Link Information Network, Inc. in Palo Alto, California. Before being acquired by Compaq Computer in 1999, Global Link first helped local companies establish an online presence on the Internet. Later, however, the company started helping newspapers create online city guides.
Formerly : Global Link Information Network
Founded : November 6, 1995
Founder : Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk, Greg Kouri
Users and marketers might communicate in both directions using Zip2. Advertisers might get messages from users that they could transmit to their fax machine. Advertisers might also fax users, and consumers could utilize particular URLs to read the fax.
Companies Owned By Elon Musk
SPCACEX
With its headquarters located in Hawthorne, California, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., also known as SpaceX, is an American spacecraft manufacturer, launch service provider, defense contractor, and satellite communications corporation. Elon Musk established the business in 2002 with the intention of colonizing Mars and lowering the cost of space travel. The Dragon spacecraft and the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets are currently flown by the business.
The company offers internet service via its Starlink satellites, which became the largest-ever satellite constellation in January 2020 and as of November 2023 comprised more than 5,000 small satellites in orbit
Starship is a human-rated, completely reusable, super heavy-lift launch vehicle that the business is currently developing for use in orbit and interplanetary travel. In April 2023, it attempted a first flight that failed, making it the biggest and most potent rocket ever to fly.
As the first private corporation, SpaceX is credited for developing the first liquid-propellant rocket to reach orbit, as well as launching, orbiting, and recovering a spacecraft, sending humans to the International Space Station, and sending a spacecraft there. It is also the first organization of any kind to successfully land an orbital rocket booster vertically and to reuse one of these boosters. Over 200 landings and reflows have been accomplished by the company's Falcon 9 rockets.
Coporation Year : 2002
Revenue : $4.6 Billion
TESLA
With its headquarters located in Austin, Texas, Tesla is a multinational American automotive and clean energy company that designs and produces electric cars and trucks, grid-scale and residential stationary battery energy storage devices, solar panels, solar shingles, and related goods and services. With 6.5 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of battery energy storage systems deployed in 2022, its subsidiary Tesla Energy is one of the biggest global suppliers of energy storage systems and develops and installs photovoltaic systems in the United States.
Tesla is one of the world's most valuable companies and, as of 2023, is the world's most valuable automaker. In 2022, the company led the battery electric vehicle market, with 18% share.
Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning formed Tesla as Tesla Motors in July 2003. The name of the firm pays homage to Nikola Tesla, an electrical engineer and inventor. Elon Musk invested $6.5 million to become the company's largest shareholder in February 2004. In 2008, he was named CEO. Producing goods that "accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy" is Tesla's stated aim.
Coporation Year : 2003
Revenue : $81.46 Billion
THE BORING COMPANY
It was formally registered as "TBC – The Boring Company" on January 11, 2017, but Musk first revealed the concept of the company in December 2016. Musk first got the idea for the project from his frustration with traffic in Los Angeles and the shortcomings he saw in the city's two-dimensional transit system. The Boring Company was established as a division of SpaceX. Musk claims that the business wants to increase tunneling speed to the point where building a network of tunnels becomes financially viable.
Elon Musk launched The Boring Company (TBC), an American provider of equipment, tunnel building services, and infrastructure. In 2017, TBC was established as a SpaceX subsidiary, then in 2018, it was separated into its own independent company. TBC has finished a test tunnel and one tunneling project that is accessible to the general public.
The Las Vegas Convention Center, LVCC Loop is a three-station transit system with 1.7 miles (2.7 km) of tunnels that TBC completed in 2021. Tunnels to Encore and Westgate resorts are nearing completion, while a section leading to Resorts World is operational as of July 2023. It is intended for the system to grow to 68 miles of tunnels in Las Vegas. Additionally, TBC finished testing one tunnel in California's Los Angeles County. Numerous American communities, including Austin, Texas, have indicated interest in constructing tunnels.
Coporation Year : 2017
Revenue : $5.7 Billion
NEURALINK
As of 2022, Neuralink Corp., an American neurotechnology business located in Fremont, California, is creating implanted brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs. Neuralink was initially made public in March 2017 and was founded by Elon Musk and a group of seven scientists and engineers in 2016. The company was originally announced in 2016.
The firm has employed a number of well-known neuroscientists from different institutions since its start. It employed 90 people as of July 2019 and has raised $158 million in investment, of which $100 million came from Musk. Neuralink said at the time that it was developing a "sewing machine-like" gadget that could insert extremely tiny threads into the brain and showed off a system that could read data from a lab rat using 1,500 electrodes. They had previously projected that human experimentation would begin around 2020, but they have recently revised that estimate to 2023. They are authorized for use in human studies in the US as of May 2023.
Coporation Year : 2016
Revenue : $300 Million
SOLARCITY
SolarCity Corporation, located in Fremont, California, was a publicly listed corporation that sold and installed solar energy production systems, as well as other associated goods and services, to residential, commercial, and industrial clients. Peter and Lyndon Rive, cousins of SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, launched the firm on July 4, 2006. Tesla paid around US$2.6 billion for SolarCity in 2016 (equivalent to $3.2 billion in 2022) and restructured its solar division as Tesla Energy.
SolarCity concentrated extensively on door-to-door sales of leased systems, in which customers paid no upfront fees but committed to purchase the electricity generated by those panels from the firm for 20 years. The business model became the most popular in the United States, and the firm became the largest home solar installation, but also caused SolarCity to be over $1.5 billion in debt at the time of its purchase in 2016(equivalent to $1.8 billion in 2022).
Coporation Year : 2006
Revenue : $730 Million
TWITTER
Formerly known as Twitter, X is an online social media and networking website run by X Corp., an American business that took over from Twitter, Inc. Registered users on X are able to upload text, pictures, and videos. In addition, users may "like," "repost," "quote," "like," comment on posts, send direct messages, make audio and video calls, bookmark, join groups and lists, and interact with other registered users in public spaces. Aside from leaving Community Notes, registered users can also add context to posts made by other registered users. Tweeting, retweeting, and quote tweeting are terms used to describe publishing content to the website. November 2023 sees the service's major website address, twitter.com, moving to the renamed "X" account.
In March 2006, Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Noah Glass, and Biz Stone founded Twitter. The same year, in July, it was introduced. With more than 25 locations worldwide, Twitter, Inc., its parent business, was headquartered in San Francisco, California. In 2012, the service processed 1.6 billion daily search searches, and over 100 million users generated 340 million tweets daily.It ranked in the top ten most popular websites worldwide in 2013. Twitter had around 330 million monthly active users at the beginning of 2019. In reality, a small percentage of people create the great bulk of tweets. An estimated 48 million accounts, or 15% of all accounts, were thought to be fraudulent in 2020.
Billionaire Elon Musk became the CEO of Twitter and gained control of the site after he paid US$44 billion to purchase it in October 2022. The platform has come under fire for encouraging an upsurge in hate speech since the takeove. On June 5, 2023, Linda Yaccarino took over as CEO; Musk will still serve as Chairman and Chief Technology Officer. Musk declared in July 2023 that the bird emblem will be decommissioned and that Twitter will henceforth be known as X.
The corporation valued itself at around $19 billion in October 2023, almost 55% less than the purchase price a year prior. Around the same time, Fidelity determined that the value had decreased by 65% from the purchase price.
Coporation Year : 2006
Revenue : $5 Billion
OpenAI
Comprising of its for-profit subsidiary firm OpenAI Global, LLC and its non-profit OpenAI, Inc. established in Delaware, OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) organization based in the United States. With the stated goal of creating "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence—which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work" OpenAI conducts research on artificial intelligence.
The first board members of OpenAI were Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba created the company in 2015. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI Global LLC in 2019 and another $10 billion in 2023.
In December 2015, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research announced the formation of OpenAI and pledged over $1 billion to the venture. The actual collected total amount of contributions was only 130 million until 2019. The organization stated it would "freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public. OpenAI is headquartered at the Pioneer Building in Mission District, San Francisco.
Coporation Year : 2015
Revenue : $28 Million
Best Investment made by Elon Musk
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