Elon Musk
Elon Reeve Musk born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of Space; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; owner and CEO of Twitter; founder of the Boring Company; co-founder of Neural ink and Open-air; and president of the philanthropic Musk Foundation. With an estimated net worth of around $192 billion as of March 27, 2023, primarily from his ownership stakes in Tesla and Spice, Musk is the second-wealthiest person in the world, according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes's real-time billionaires list.
Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and briefly attended at the University of Pretoria before moving to Canada at age 18, acquiring citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. Two years later, he matriculated at Queen's University and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received bachelor's degrees in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University. After two days, he dropped out and, with his brother Kimball, co-founded the online city guide software company Zip2. In 1999, Zip2 was acquired by Compaq for $307 million and Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank. X.com merged with Continuity in 2000 to form PayPal, which eBay acquired for $1.5 billion in 2002.
With $175.8 million, Musk founded Space in 2002, a spaceflight services company. In 2004, he was an early investor in the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.). He became its chairman and product architect, assuming the position of CEO in 2008. In 2006, he helped create Salacity, a solar energy company that was later acquired by Tesla and became Tesla Energy. In 2015, he co-founded Open-air, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company. The following year, he co-founded Neural ink—a terotechnology company developing brain–computer interfaces—and the Boring Company, a tunnel construction company. Musk has also proposed a hyper loop high-speed Bactrian transportation system. In 2022, his acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion was completed.
Musk has made controversial statements on politics and technology, particularly on Twitter, and is a polarizing figure. He has been criticized for making unscientific and misleading statements, including spreading COVID-19 misinformation. In 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Musk for falsely tweeting that he had secured funding for a private takeover of Tesla. Musk stepped down as chairman of Tesla and paid a $20 million fine as part of a settlement agreement with the SEC.
Early life
Childhood and family
Further information: Musk family
Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, one of South Africa's capital cities. Musk has British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. His mother is Mayer Musk (née Hardeman), a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised in South Africa. His father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, and property developer, who was a half-owner of a Zambian emerald mine near Lake Tanganyika. Musk has a younger brother, Kimball, and a younger sister, Tosca.
Musk's family was wealthy during his youth. His father was elected to the Pretoria City Council as a representative of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party, with his children cited as sharing their father's dislike of apartheid. His maternal grandfather, Joshua Hardeman, was an adventurous American-born Canadian who took his family on record-breaking journeys to Africa and Australia in a single-engine Balance airplane. After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk chose to mostly live with his father. Musk regretted his decision and has become estranged from his father. He has a paternal half-sister and a half-brother.
Ashlee Vance described Musk as an awkward and introverted child. At age ten, he developed an interest in computing and video games, teaching himself how to program from the VIC-20 user manual. At age twelve, he sold his BASIC-based game Blister to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500.
Education
Musk attended Waterloo House Preparatory School, Bramston High School, and Pretoria Boys High School, from which he graduated. Musk applied for a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother, knowing that it would be easier to immigrate to the United States this way. While waiting for his application to be processed, he attended the University of Pretoria for five months.
Musk arrived in Canada in June 1989 and lived with a second cousin in Saskatchewan for a year, working odd jobs at a farm and lumber mill. In 1990, he entered Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Two years later, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania (Upon), where he completed studies for a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the Wharton School. Although Musk claims he earned the degrees in 1995, Upon maintains it awarded them in 1997. He reportedly hosted large, ticketed house parties to help pay for tuition, and wrote a business plan for an electronic book-scanning service similar to Google Books.
In 1994, Musk held two internships in Silicon Valley: one at the energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic ultra capacitors 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. However, Musk decided to join the Internet boom, instead dropping out two days after being accepted and applied for a job at Netscape, to which he reportedly never received a response.
Business career
Zip2
Main article: Zip2
In 1995, Musk, his brother Kimball, and Greg Koura founded Zip2. Errol Musk provided them with $28,000 in funding. The company developed an Internet city guide with maps, directions, and yellow pages, and marketed it to newspapers. They worked at a small rented office in Palo Alto, Musk coding the website every night. Eventually, Zip2 obtained contracts with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. The brothers persuaded the board of directors to abandon a merger with CitySearch;however, Musk's attempts to become CEO were thwarted. Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999, and Musk received $22 million for his 7-percent share
X.com and PayPal
Main articles: X.com, PayPal, and PayPal Mafia
Later in 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company. X.com was one of the first federally insured online banks, and over 200,000 customers joined in its initial months of operation. Even though Musk founded the company, investors regarded him as inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit CEO Bill Harris by the end of the year.
In 2000, X.com merged with online bank Continuity to avoid competition, as Concinnity's money-transfer service PayPal was more popular than X.com's service. Musk then returned as CEO of the merged company. His preference for Microsoft over Unix-based software caused a rift among the company's employees, and led Peter Thiel, Concinnity's founder, to resign. With the company suffering from compounding technological issues and the lack of a cohesive business model, the board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in September 2000. Under Thiel, the company focused on the money-transfer service and was renamed PayPal in 2001.
In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk—the largest shareholder with 11.72% of shares—received $175.8 million. In 2017, more than 15 years later, Musk purchased the X.com domain from PayPal for its sentimental value. IN 2022, Musk discussed a goal of creating "X, the everything app".
Following a series of escalating conflicts in 2007, and the financial crisis of 2007–2008, Bernhard was ousted from the firm.[page needed] Musk assumed leadership of the company as CEO and product architect in 2008. A 2009 lawsuit settlement with Bernhard designated Musk as a Tesla co-founder, along with Tar penning and two others. As of 2019, Musk was the longest-tenured CEO of any automotive manufacturer globally. In 2021, Musk nominally changed his title to "Techno king" while retaining his position as CEO
Tesla first built an electric sports car, the Roadster, in 2008. With sales of about 2,500 vehicles, it was the first serial production all-electric car to use lithium-ion battery cells. Tesla began delivery of its four-door Model S sedan in 2012. A cross-over, the Model X was launched in 2015. A mass-market sedan, the Model 3, was released in 2017. The Model 3 is the all-time bestselling plug-in electric car worldwide, and in June 2021 it became the first electric car to sell 1 million units globally. A fifth vehicle, the Model Y crossover, was launched in 2020. The Cyber truck, an all-electric pickup truck, was unveiled in 2019. Under Musk, Tesla has also constructed multiple lithium-ion battery and electric vehicle factories, named Gig factories.
SpaceX
In early 2001, Musk became involved with the nonprofit Mars Society and discussed funding plans to place a growth-chamber for plants on Mars. In October of the same year, he traveled to Moscow with Jim Cantrell and Adeo Ressi to buy refurbished intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could send the greenhouse payloads into space. He met with the companies NPO Lavochkin and Cosmotrons; however, Musk was seen as a novice and the group returned to the United States empty-handed. In February 2002, the group returned to Russia with Mike Griffin (president of In-Q-Tel) to look for three ICBMs. They had another meeting with Cosmotrons and were offered one rocket for $8 million, which Musk rejected. He instead decided to start a company that could build affordable rockets. With $100 million of his own money, Musk founded Spice in May 2002 and became the company's CEO and Chief Engineer.
Spice attempted its first launch of the Falcon 1 rocket in 2006.Though the rocket failed to reach Earth orbit, it was awarded a Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program contract from NASA Administrator and former Space consultant Mike Griffin later that year. After two more failed attempts that nearly caused Musk and his companies to go bankrupt, Spice succeeded in launching the Falcon 1 into orbit in 2008. Later that year, Space received a $1.6 billion Commercial Resupply Services contract from NASA for 12 flights of its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station, replacing the Space Shuttle after its 2011 retirement. In 2012, the Dragon vehicle docked with the ISS, a first for a commercial spacecraft. Working towards its goal of reusable rockets, in 2015 Space successfully landed the first stage of a Falcon 9 on an inland platform. Later landings were achieved on autonomous spaceport drone ships, an ocean-based recovery platform. In 2018, Spice launched the Falcon Heavy; the inaugural mission carried Musk's personal Tesla Roadster as a dummy payload. Since 2019,SpaceX has been developing Starship, a fully-reusable, super-heavy-lift launch vehicle intended to replace the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy. In 2020, Space launched its first crewed flight, the Demo-2, becoming the first private company to place astronauts into orbit and dock a crewed spacecraft with the ISS.
Starlink
In 2015, Space began development of the Star link constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to provide satellite Internet access, with the first two prototype satellites launched in February 2018. A second set of test satellites, and the first large deployment of a piece of the constellation, occurred in May 2019, when the first 60 operational satellites were launched. The total cost of the decade-long project to design, build, and deploy the constellation is estimated by Space to be about $10 billion. Some critics, including the International Astronomical Union, have alleged that Star link blocks the view of the sky and poses a collision threat to spacecraft.
During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Musk sent Star link terminals to Ukraine to provide Internet access and communication. However, Musk refused to block Russian state media on Star link, declaring himself "a free speech absolutist". In October 2022, Musk stated that about 20,000 satellite terminals had been donated to Ukraine, together with free data transfer subscriptions, which cost Space $80 million. After asking the United States Department of Defense to pay for further units and future subscriptions on behalf of Ukraine, Musk publicly stated that Space would continue to provide Star link to Ukraine for free, at a yearly cost to itself of $400 million.
Tesla
Tesla, Inc.—originally Tesla Motors—was incorporated in 2003 by Martin Bernhard and Marc Tar penning, who financed the company until the Series A round of funding. Both men played active roles in the company's early development prior to Musk's involvement. Musk led the Series A round of investment in February 2004; he invested $6.5 million, became the majority shareholder, and joined Tesla's board of directors as chairman. Musk took an active role within the company and oversaw Roadster product design but was not deeply involved in day-to-day business operations.
Since its initial public offering in 2010, Tesla stock has risen significantly; it became the most valuable carmaker in summer 2020,and it entered the S&P 500 later that year. In October 2021, it reached a market capitalization of $1 trillion, the sixth company in U.S. history to do so. In November 2021, Musk proposed, on Twitter, to sell 10% of his Tesla stock, since "much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance". After more than 3.5 million Twitter accounts supported the sale, Musk sold $6.9 billion of Tesla stock within a week, and a total of $16.4 billion by year end, reaching the 10% target. In February 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that both Elon and Kimball Musk were under investigation by the SEC for possible insider trading related to the sale. In 2022, Musk unveiled a robot developed by Tesla, Optimums.
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