a short biography of elon musk

South African entrepreneur Elon Musk is known for founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, which launched a landmark commercial spacecraft in 2012.

Who Is Elon Musk?

Elon Musk is a South African-born American entrepreneur and businessman who founded X.com in 1999 (which later became PayPal), SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla Motors in 2003. Musk became a multimillionaire in his late 20s when he sold his start-up company, Zip2, to a division of Compaq Computers.

In January 2021, Musk reportedly surpassed Jeff Bezos as the wealthiest man in the world.

Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. As a child, Musk was so lost in his daydreams about inventions that his parents and doctors ordered a test to check his hearing.

At about the time of his parents’ divorce, when he was 10, Musk developed an interest in computers. He taught himself how to program, and when he was 12 he sold his first software: a game he created called Blastar.

In grade school, Musk was short, introverted and bookish. He was bullied until he was 15 and went through a growth spurt and learned how to defend himself with karate and wrestling.

Musk’s mother, Maye Musk , is a Canadian model and the oldest woman to star in a Covergirl campaign. When Musk was growing up, she worked five jobs at one point to support her family.

Musk’s father, Errol Musk, is a wealthy South African engineer.

Musk spent his early childhood with his brother Kimbal and sister Tosca in South Africa. His parents divorced when he was 10.

At age 17, in 1989, Musk moved to Canada to attend Queen’s University and avoid mandatory service in the South African military. Musk obtained his Canadian citizenship that year, in part because he felt it would be easier to obtain American citizenship via that path.

In 1992, Musk left Canada to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with an undergraduate degree in economics and stayed for a second bachelor’s degree in physics.

After leaving Penn, Musk headed to Stanford University in California to pursue a PhD in energy physics. However, his move was timed perfectly with the Internet boom, and he dropped out of Stanford after just two days to become a part of it, launching his first company, Zip2 Corporation in 1995. Musk became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

Zip2 Corporation

Musk launched his first company, Zip2 Corporation, in 1995 with his brother, Kimbal Musk. An online city guide, Zip2 was soon providing content for the new websites of both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune . In 1999, a division of Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options.

In 1999, Elon and Kimbal Musk used the money from their sale of Zip2 to found X.com, an online financial services/payments company. An X.com acquisition the following year led to the creation of PayPal as it is known today.

In October 2002, Musk earned his first billion when PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock. Before the sale, Musk owned 11 percent of PayPal stock.

Musk founded his third company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, in 2002 with the intention of building spacecraft for commercial space travel. By 2008, SpaceX was well established, and NASA awarded the company the contract to handle cargo transport for the International Space Station—with plans for astronaut transport in the future—in a move to replace NASA’s own space shuttle missions.

Falcon 9 Rockets

On May 22, 2012, Musk and SpaceX made history when the company launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space with an unmanned capsule. The vehicle was sent to the International Space Station with 1,000 pounds of supplies for the astronauts stationed there, marking the first time a private company had sent a spacecraft to the International Space Station. Of the launch, Musk was quoted as saying, "I feel very lucky. ... For us, it's like winning the Super Bowl."

In December 2013, a Falcon 9 successfully carried a satellite to geosynchronous transfer orbit, a distance at which the satellite would lock into an orbital path that matched the Earth's rotation. In February 2015, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 fitted with the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, aiming to observe the extreme emissions from the sun that affect power grids and communications systems on Earth.

In March 2017, SpaceX saw the successful test flight and landing of a Falcon 9 rocket made from reusable parts, a development that opened the door for more affordable space travel.

A setback came in November 2017, when an explosion occurred during a test of the company's new Block 5 Merlin engine. SpaceX reported that no one was hurt, and that the issue would not hamper its planned rollout of a future generation of Falcon 9 rockets.

The company enjoyed another milestone moment in February 2018 with the successful test launch of the powerful Falcon Heavy rocket. Armed with additional Falcon 9 boosters, the Falcon Heavy was designed to carry immense payloads into orbit and potentially serve as a vessel for deep space missions. For the test launch, the Falcon Heavy was given a payload of Musk's cherry-red Tesla Roadster, equipped with cameras to "provide some epic views" for the vehicle's planned orbit around the sun.

In July 2018, Space X enjoyed the successful landing of a new Block 5 Falcon rocket, which touched down on a drone ship less than 9 minutes after liftoff.

BFR Mission to Mars

In September 2017, Musk presented an updated design plan for his BFR (an acronym for either "Big F---ing Rocket" or "Big Falcon Rocket"), a 31-engine behemoth topped by a spaceship capable of carrying at least 100 people. He revealed that SpaceX was aiming to launch the first cargo missions to Mars with the vehicle in 2022, as part of his overarching goal of colonizing the Red Planet.

In March 2018, the entrepreneur told an audience at the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, that he hoped to have the BFR ready for short flights early the following year, while delivering a knowing nod at his previous problems with meeting deadlines.

The following month, it was announced that SpaceX would construct a facility at the Port of Los Angeles to build and house the BFR. The port property presented an ideal location for SpaceX, as its mammoth rocket will only be movable by barge or ship when completed.

Starlink Internet Satellites

In late March 2018, SpaceX received permission from the U.S. government to launch a fleet of satellites into low orbit for the purpose of providing Internet service. The satellite network, named Starlink, would ideally make broadband service more accessible in rural areas, while also boosting competition in heavily populated markets that are typically dominated by one or two providers.

SpaceX launched the first batch of 60 satellites in May 2019, and followed with another payload of 60 satellites that November. While this represented significant progress for the Starlink venture, the appearance of these bright orbiters in the night sky, with the potential of thousands more to come, worried astronomers who felt that a proliferation of satellites would increase the difficulty of studying distant objects in space.

Tesla Motors

Musk is the co-founder, CEO and product architect at Tesla Motors, a company formed in 2003 that is dedicated to producing affordable, mass-market electric cars as well as battery products and solar roofs. Musk oversees all product development, engineering and design of the company's products.

Five years after its formation, in March 2008, Tesla unveiled the Roadster, a sports car capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds, as well as traveling nearly 250 miles between charges of its lithium ion battery.

With a stake in the company taken by Daimler and a strategic partnership with Toyota, Tesla Motors launched its initial public offering in June 2010, raising $226 million.

In August 2008, Tesla announced plans for its Model S, the company's first electric sedan that was reportedly meant to take on the BMW 5 series. In 2012, the Model S finally entered production at a starting price of $58,570. Capable of covering 265 miles between charges, it was honored as the 2013 Car of the Year by Motor Trend magazine .

In April 2017, Tesla announced that it surpassed General Motors to become the most valuable U.S. car maker. The news was an obvious boon to Tesla, which was looking to ramp up production and release its Model 3 sedan later that year.

In September 2019, using what Musk described as a "Plaid powertrain," a Model S set a speed record for four-door sedan at Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey County, California.

The Model 3 was officially launched in early 2019 following extensive production delays. The car was initially priced at $35,000, a much more accessible price point than the $69,500 and up for its Model S and X electric sedans.

After initially aiming to produce 5,000 new Model 3 cars per week by December 2017, Musk pushed that goal back to March 2018, and then to June with the start of the new year. The announced delay didn't surprise industry experts, who were well aware of the company's production problems, though some questioned how long investors would remain patient with the process. It also didn't prevent Musk from garnering a radical new compensation package as CEO, in which he would be paid after reaching milestones of growing valuation based on $50 billion increments.

By April 2018, with Tesla expected to fall short of first-quarter production forecasts, news surfaced that Musk had pushed aside the head of engineering to personally oversee efforts in that division. In a Twitter exchange with a reporter, Musk said it was important to "divide and conquer" to meet production goals and was "back to sleeping at factory."

After signaling that the company would reorganize its management structure, Musk in June announced that Tesla was laying off 9 percent of its workforce, though its production department would remain intact. In an email to employees, Musk explained his decision to eliminate some "duplication of roles" to cut costs, admitting it was time to take serious steps toward turning a profit.

The restructuring appeared to pay dividends, as it was announced that Tesla had met its goal of producing 5,000 Model 3 cars per week by the end of June 2018, while churning out another 2,000 Model S sedans and Model X SUVs. "We did it!" Musk wrote in a celebratory email to the company. "What an incredible job by an amazing team."

The following February, Musk announced that the company was finally rolling out its standard Model 3. Musk also said that Tesla was shifting to all-online sales, and offering customers the chance to return their cars within seven days or 1,000 miles for a full refund.

In November 2017, Musk made another splash with the unveiling of the new Tesla Semi and Roadster at the company's design studio. The semi-truck, which was expected to enter into production in 2019 before being delayed, boasts 500 miles of range as well as a battery and motors built to last 1 million miles.

Model Y and Roadster

In March 2019, Musk unveiled Tesla’s long-awaited Model Y. The compact crossover, which began arriving for customers in March 2020, has a driving range of 300 miles and a 0 to 60 mph time of 3.5 seconds.

The Roadster, also set to be released in 2020, will become the fastest production car ever made, with a 0 to 60 time of 1.9 seconds.

In August 2016, in Musk’s continuing effort to promote and advance sustainable energy and products for a wider consumer base, a $2.6 billion dollar deal was solidified to combine his electric car and solar energy companies. His Tesla Motors Inc. announced an all-stock deal purchase of SolarCity Corp., a company Musk had helped his cousins start in 2006. He is a majority shareholder in each entity.

“Solar and storage are at their best when they're combined. As one company, Tesla (storage) and SolarCity (solar) can create fully integrated residential, commercial and grid-scale products that improve the way that energy is generated, stored and consumed,” read a statement on Tesla’s website about the deal.

The Boring Company

In January 2017, Musk launched The Boring Company, a company devoted to boring and building tunnels in order to reduce street traffic. He began with a test dig on the SpaceX property in Los Angeles.

In late October of that year, Musk posted the first photo of his company's progress to his Instagram page. He said the 500-foot tunnel, which would generally run parallel to Interstate 405, would reach a length of two miles in approximately four months.

In May 2019 the company, now known as TBC, landed a $48.7 million contract from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to build an underground Loop system to shuttle people around the Las Vegas Convention Center.

In October 2022, Musk officially bought Twitter and became the social media company's CEO after months of back and forth.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S ELON MUSK FACT CARD

Musk’s Tweet and SEC Investigation

On August 7, 2018, Musk dropped a bombshell via a tweet: "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." The announcement opened the door for legal action against the company and its founder, as the SEC began inquiring about whether Musk had indeed secured the funding as claimed. Several investors filed lawsuits on the grounds that Musk was looking to manipulate stock prices and ambush short sellers with his tweet.

Musk’s tweet initially sent Tesla stock spiking, before it closed the day up 11 percent. The CEO followed up with a letter on the company blog, calling the move to go private "the best path forward." He promised to retain his stake in the company, and added that he would create a special fund to help all current investors remain on board.

Six days later, Musk sought to clarify his position with a statement in which he pointed to discussions with the managing director of the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund as the source of his "funding secured" declaration. He later tweeted that he was working on a proposal to take Tesla private with Goldman Sachs and Silver Lake as financial advisers.

The saga took a bizarre turn that day when rapper Azealia Banks wrote on Instagram that, as a guest at Musk's home at the time, she learned that he was under the influence of LSD when he fired off his headline-grabbing tweet. Banks said she overheard Musk making phone calls to drum up the funding he promised was already in place.

The news quickly turned serious again when it was reported that Tesla's outside directors had retained two law firms to deal with the SEC inquiry and the CEO's plans to take the company private.

On August 24, one day after meeting with the board, Musk announced that he had reversed course and would not be taking the company private. Among his reasons, he cited the preference of most directors to keep Tesla public, as well as the difficulty of retaining some of the large shareholders who were prohibited from investing in a private company. Others suggested that Musk was also influenced by the poor optics of an electric car company being funded by Saudi Arabia, a country heavily involved in the oil industry.

On September 29, 2018, it was announced that Musk would pay a $20 million fine and step down as chairman of Tesla's board for three years as part of an agreement with the SEC.

Inventions and Innovations

In August 2013, Musk released a concept for a new form of transportation called the "Hyperloop," an invention that would foster commuting between major cities while severely cutting travel time. Ideally resistant to weather and powered by renewable energy, the Hyperloop would propel riders in pods through a network of low-pressure tubes at speeds reaching more than 700 mph. Musk noted that the Hyperloop could take from seven to 10 years to be built and ready for use.

Although he introduced the Hyperloop with claims that it would be safer than a plane or train, with an estimated cost of $6 billion — approximately one-tenth of the cost for the rail system planned by the state of California — Musk's concept has drawn skepticism. Nevertheless, the entrepreneur has sought to encourage the development of this idea.

After he announced a competition for teams to submit their designs for a Hyperloop pod prototype, the first Hyperloop Pod Competition was held at the SpaceX facility in January 2017. A speed record of 284 mph was set by a German student engineering team at competition No. 3 in 2018, with the same team pushing the record to 287 mph the next year.

AI and Neuralink

Musk has pursued an interest in artificial intelligence, becoming co-chair of the nonprofit OpenAI. The research company launched in late 2015 with the stated mission of advancing digital intelligence to benefit humanity.

In 2017, it was also reported that Musk was backing a venture called Neuralink, which intends to create devices to be implanted in the human brain and help people merge with software. He expanded on the company's progress during a July 2019 discussion, revealing that its devices will consist of a microscopic chip that connects via Bluetooth to a smartphone.

High-Speed Train

In late November 2017, after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked for proposals to build and operate a high-speed rail line that would transport passengers from O'Hare Airport to downtown Chicago in 20 minutes or less, Musk tweeted that he was all-in on the competition with The Boring Company. He said that the concept of the Chicago loop would be different from his Hyperloop, its relatively short route not requiring the need for drawing a vacuum to eliminate air friction.

In summer 2018 Musk announced he would cover the estimated $1 billion needed to dig the 17-mile tunnel from the airport to downtown Chicago. However, in late 2019 he tweeted that TBC would focus on completing the commercial tunnel in Las Vegas before turning to other projects, suggesting that plans for Chicago would remain in limbo for the immediate future.

Flamethrower

Musk also reportedly found a market for The Boring Company's flamethrowers. After announcing they were going on sale for $500 apiece in late January 2018, he claimed to have sold 10,000 of them within a day.

Relationship with Donald Trump

In December 2016, Musk was named to President Trump’s Strategy and Policy Forum; the following January, he joined Trump's Manufacturing Jobs Initiative. Following Trump’s election, Musk found himself on common ground with the new president and his advisers as the president announced plans to pursue massive infrastructure developments.

While sometimes at odds with the president's controversial measures, such as a proposed ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, Musk defended his involvement with the new administration. "My goals," he tweeted in early 2017, "are to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy and to help make humanity a multi-planet civilization, a consequence of which will be the creating of hundreds of thousands of jobs and a more inspiring future for all."

On June 1, following Trump's announcement that he was withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, Musk stepped down from his advisory roles.

Personal Life

Wives and children.

Musk has been married twice. He wed Justine Wilson in 2000, and the couple had six children together. In 2002, their first son died at 10 weeks old from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Musk and Wilson had five additional sons together: twins Griffin and Xavier (born in 2004) and triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian (born in 2006).

After a contentious divorce from Wilson, Musk met actress Talulah Riley. The couple married in 2010. They split in 2012 but married each other again in 2013. Their relationship ultimately ended in divorce in 2016.

Girlfriends

Musk reportedly began dating actress Amber Heard in 2016 after finalizing his divorce with Riley and Heard finalized her divorce from Johnny Depp . Their busy schedules caused the couple to break up in August 2017; they got back together in January 2018 and split again one month later.

In May 2018, Musk began dating musician Grimes (born Claire Boucher). That month, Grimes announced that she had changed her name to “ c ,” the symbol for the speed of light, reportedly on the encouragement of Musk. Fans criticized the feminist performer for dating a billionaire whose company has been described as a “predator zone” among accusations of sexual harassment.

The couple discussed their love for one another in a March 2019 feature in the Wall Street Journal Magazine , with Grimes saying “Look, I love him, he’s great...I mean, he’s a super-interesting goddamn person.” Musk, for his part, told the Journal, “I love c’s wild fae artistic creativity and hyper-intense work ethic.”

Grimes gave birth to their son on May 4, 2020, with Musk announcing that they had named the boy "X Æ A-12." Later in the month, after it was reported that the State of California wouldn't accept a name with a number, the couple said they were changing their son's name to "X Æ A-Xii."

Musk and Grimes welcomed their second child, a daughter named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, in December 2021. The child was delivered via a surrogate.

Nonprofit Work

The boundless potential of space exploration and the preservation of the future of the human race have become the cornerstones of Musk's abiding interests, and toward these, he has founded the Musk Foundation, which is dedicated to space exploration and the discovery of renewable and clean energy sources.

In October 2019 Musk pledged to donate $1 million to the #TeamTrees campaign, which aims to plant 20 million trees around the world by 2020. He even changed his Twitter name to Treelon for the occasion.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Elon Musk
• Birth Year: 1971
• Birth date: June 28, 1971
• Birth City: Pretoria
• Birth Country: South Africa
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: South African entrepreneur Elon Musk is known for founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, which launched a landmark commercial spacecraft in 2012.
• Space Exploration
• Internet/Computing
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• University of Pennsylania
• Queen's University, Ontario
• Stanford University
• Nacionalities
• South African
• Interesting Facts
• Elon Musk left Stanford after two days to take advantage of the Internet boom.
• In April 2017, Musk's Tesla Motors surpassed General Motors to become the most valuable U.S. car maker.

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Elon Musk Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/business-leaders/elon-musk
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: October 31, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• I'm very pro-environment, but let's figure out how to do it better and not jump through a dozen hoops to achieve what is obvious in the first place.
• Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

Entrepreneurs

Sean “Diddy” Combs

The True Story of Pop-Tarts and ‘Unfrosted’

The Life and Hip-Hop Legacy of DJ Mister Cee

The Truth About Walt Disney’s Frozen Head

Frederick Jones

Lonnie Johnson

Oprah Winfrey

Madam C.J. Walker

Enzo Ferrari

The Tragic True Story of the ‘Ferrari’ Movie

Suge Knight

• Search Search Please fill out this field.

Early Life and Education

Notable accomplishments, personal eccentricities, the bottom line.

• Business Leaders
• Entrepreneurs

Who Is Elon Musk?

Nathan Laine / Bloomberg / Getty Images

Elon Musk, born in Pretoria, South Africa, is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time. Musk has achieved global fame as the chief executive officer (CEO) of electric automobile maker Tesla ( TSLA ) and the private space company SpaceX. Musk was an early investor in several tech companies, and in October 2022, he completed a deal to take X (formerly Twitter) private.

His success and personal style have given rise to comparisons to other colorful tycoons from U.S. history, including Steve Jobs , Howard Hughes, and Henry Ford . He was named the richest person in the world in 2021, surpassing Amazon ( AMZN ) founder Jeff Bezos. Musk is the richest person in the world as of Feb. 15, 2024.

Let’s look briefly at the life of the man who has scaled the pinnacle of the business world.

Key Takeaways

• Elon Musk is the charismatic CEO of electric car maker Tesla and rocket manufacturer SpaceX.
• Following a contested process, Musk completed a deal to buy the company behind X in October 2022, becoming the owner of the social media company.
• Born and raised in South Africa, Musk spent time in Canada before moving to the United States.
• Educated at the University of Pennsylvania in physics, Musk started getting his feet wet as a serial tech entrepreneur with early successes like Zip2 and X.com, which merged with a company that became PayPal.
• Musk has behaved eccentrically from time to time.

Bailey Mariner / Investopedia

Elon Reeve Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, the oldest of three children. His father was a South African engineer, and his mother was a Canadian model and nutritionist. After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk lived primarily with his father. He would later dub his father “a terrible human being...almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.”

“I had a terrible upbringing. I had a lot of adversity growing up. One thing I worry about with my kids is they don’t face enough adversity,” Musk would later say.

Bullied as a Child

Musk attended the private, English-speaking Waterkloof House Preparatory School—he started a year early—and later graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. A self-described bookworm, he made few friends in those places.

“They got my best (expletive) friend to lure me out of hiding so they could beat me up. And that (expletive) hurt,” Musk said. “For some reason, they decided that I was it, and they were going to go after me nonstop. That’s what made growing up difficult. For a number of years, there was no respite. You get chased around by gangs at school who tried to beat the (expletive) out of me, and then I’d come home, and it would just be awful there as well.”

Early Accomplishments

Technology became an escape for Musk. At 10, he became acquainted with programming using a Commodore VIC-20, an early and relatively inexpensive home computer. Before long, Musk had become proficient enough to create Blastar—a video game in the style of Space Invaders. He sold the BASIC code for the game to a PC magazine for $500.

In one telling incident from his childhood, Musk and his brother planned to open a video game arcade near their school. Their parents nixed the plan.

Musk’s College Years

At 17, Musk moved to Canada. He would later obtain Canadian citizenship through his mother.

After emigrating to Canada, Musk enrolled at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. It was there that he met Justine Wilson, an aspiring writer. They would marry and have six sons together, a first son, twins, and then triplets, before divorcing in 2008.

Entering the U.S.

After two years at Queen’s University, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. He took on two majors, but his time there wasn’t all work and no play. With a fellow student, he bought a 10-bedroom fraternity house, which they used as an ad hoc nightclub.

Musk graduated with a bachelor of science degree in physics, in addition to a bachelor of arts in economics from the  Wharton School . The two majors foreshadowed Musk’s career, but it was physics that left the deepest impression.

“(Physics is) a good framework for thinking,” he would say later. “Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.”

Musk was 24 years old when he moved to California to pursue a Ph.D. in applied physics at Stanford University. But, with the Internet exploding and Silicon Valley booming, Musk had entrepreneurial visions dancing in his head. He left the Ph.D. program after just two days.

In 1995, with $15,000 and his younger brother Kimbal at his side, Musk started Zip2, a web software company that would help newspapers develop online city guides.

In 1999, Zip2 was acquired by Compaq Computer Corp. for $341 million. Musk used his Zip2 buyout money to create X.com, a fintech venture before that term was in wide circulation.

X.com merged with a money transfer firm called Confinity, and the resulting company came to be known as PayPal. Peter Thiel ousted Musk as PayPal CEO before eBay ( EBAY ) bought the payments company for $1.5 billion, but Musk still profited from the buyout via his 11.7% PayPal stake.

“My proceeds from PayPal after tax were about $180 million,” Musk said in a 2018 interview. “$100 (million) of that went into SpaceX, $70 (million) into Tesla, and $10 (million) into SolarCity. And I literally had to borrow money for rent.”

In 2017, Musk purchased the X.com domain name back from PayPal, citing its sentimental value.

Musk became involved with the electric cars venture as an early investor in 2004, ultimately contributing about $6.3 million, to begin with, and joined the team, including engineer Martin Eberhard, to help run a company then known as Tesla Motors. Following a series of disagreements, Eberhard was ousted in 2007, and an interim CEO was hired until Musk assumed control as CEO and product architect. Under his watch, Tesla has become the world’s most valuable automaker.

In addition to producing electric vehicles, Tesla maintains a robust presence in the solar energy space, thanks to its acquisition of SolarCity. The company currently produces two rechargeable solar batteries. The smaller Powerwall was developed for home backup power and off-the-grid use, while the larger Powerpack is intended for commercial or electric utility grid use.

Musk used most of the proceeds from his PayPal stake to found Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the rocket's developer commonly known as SpaceX. By his own account, Musk spent $100 million to found SpaceX in 2002 .

Under Musk’s leadership, SpaceX landed several high-profile contracts with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Air Force to design space launch rockets. Musk has publicized plans to send an astronaut to Mars by 2025 in a collaborative effort with NASA.

The company was founded in March 2006 as Twitter by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. Originally a private company, it went public in November 2013. It raised $1.8 billion through its initial public offering (IPO) .

Musk joined the site in June 2009. A frequent poster on the messaging network, Musk disclosed a 9.2% stake in X in April 2022. The company responded by offering Musk a seat on the board, which he accepted before declining days later. Musk then sent a bear hug letter to the board proposing to buy the company at $54.20 per share.

The company’s board adopted a poison pill provision to discourage Musk from accumulating an even larger stake, but they ultimately accepted Musk’s offer after he disclosed $46.5 billion in committed financing for the deal in a securities filing.

In July 2022, Musk attempted to cancel the deal , arguing that X had failed to provide certain information regarding fake accounts. The company sued Musk to require him to complete the deal.

After months of legal wrangling, the billionaire’s plan to buy the social media platform came to fruition, and Musk took control of the company on Oct. 28, 2022. The company was renamed X the following year.

During his May 8, 2021, appearance on the TV show Saturday Night Live , Musk revealed that he has Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. “I’m actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger’s to host SNL . Or at least the first to admit it,” he said. How does the neurodevelopment condition manifest itself? “I don’t always have a lot of intonation or variation in how I speak, which I’m told makes for great comedy,” Musk explained.

On Sept. 7, 2018, Musk smoked cannabis during a filmed interview for a podcast.

Just a month earlier, Musk posted an infamous tweet claiming he was considering taking Tesla private and had secured the needed funding. Musk subsequently settled a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) complaint alleging he knowingly misled investors with the tweet by paying a $20 million fine along with the same penalty for Tesla and agreeing to let Tesla’s lawyers approve tweets with material corporate information before posting.

In March 2022, Musk filed a court motion to overturn the consent decree stemming from that case. In April 2022 during a live TED Talk, Musk called the SEC regulators on the case “bastards.”

Is Elon Musk Married?

Elon Musk has been divorced three times—twice from his second wife, Talulah Riley. From 2018 to 2022, he was in a relationship with Canadian singer/songwriter Claire Elise Boucher, professionally known as Grimes, with whom he had a son in 2020, a daughter in 2022, and a third child revealed in 2023. They remain best friends. He also has six boys from his first marriage to Justine Musk. He also shares twins with Shivon Zilis. Musk has a total of 11 children.

How Rich Is Elon Musk?

Elon Musk’s net worth was estimated at $205 billion as of Feb. 15, 2024, making him the wealthiest person on the planet.

Was Elon Musk Born Rich?

No, Elon Musk was born into a middle-class family. In 1995, when he founded X.com, he reportedly had more than $100,000 in student debt and struggled to pay rent.

What Does Elon Musk Do at Tesla?

Elon Musk is officially listed as the co-founder and chief executive officer of Tesla on the company’s website. In a 2021 securities filing, the company disclosed an additional Musk title as “Technoking of Tesla.”

What Companies Does Elon Musk Own?

Elon Musk is a large stakeholder in several companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Co., Neuralink, and X Corp .

Musk’s early interests in philosophy, science fiction, and fantasy novels are reflected in his idealism and concern with human progress—and in his business career. He works in fields he has identified as crucial to humanity’s future, notably the transition to renewable energy sources, space exploration, and the Internet.

Musk has defied critics, disrupted industries, and made the most money anyone ever has from PayPal, Tesla Motors, SolarCity, and SpaceX—game changers all, despite the inevitable missteps.

The New York Times. “ Elon Musk Has Become the World’s Richest Person, as Tesla’s Stock Rallies .”

Bloomberg. “ Bloomberg Billionaires Index .”

Rolling Stone. “ Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow .”

Bloomberg. “ Bloomberg Billionaires Index: Elon Musk .”

The Washington Post. “ The 22 Most Memorable Quotes from the New Elon Musk Book, Ranked .”

Gizmodo. “ Elon Musk: The Tech Maverick Making Tony Stark Look Dull .”

Anna Crowley Redding, via Google Books. “ Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World .” Feiwel & Friends, 2019.

Esquire. “ Elon Musk: Triumph of His Will .”

Marie Claire. “ ‘I Was a Starter Wife’: Inside America’s Messiest Divorce .”

CNBC. “ Elon Musk Ran a Nightclub Out of His College Frat House to Make Money for Rent .”

Inc. “ Elon Musk Just Said MBAs Are Overrated, and He’s Dead Right .”

TED. “ Elon Musk: The Mind Behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity... ,” read transcript, 19:19 (Video).

Fortune. “ Why Elon Musk Dropped Out of Stanford After Only Two Days .”

X. “ Elon Musk, Dec. 28, 2019, 6:22 PM .”

CNBC. “ Elon Musk Tried to Pitch the Head of the Yellow Pages Before the Internet Boom: ‘He Threw the Book at Me’ .”

Compaq Computer, via U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “ Form 10-Q for the Quarterly Period Ended Sept. 30, 1999 ,” Page 6.

PayPal, via U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “ Form S-1 ,” Page 9.

PayPal, via U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “ Form 10-K for the Fiscal Year Ended Dec. 31, 2001 ,” Pages 75–78.

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “ Exhibit 99.1: eBay to Acquire PayPal .”

YouTube. “ Elon Musk Interview [I Made 180 Million Dollars but Still Had to Borrow Money for Rent] ,” 1:58–2:14 (Video).

X. “ Elon Musk, July 10, 2017, 9:10 PM .”

Wired. “ How Elon Musk Turned Tesla into the Car Company of the Future .”

Tesla. “ Tesla and SolarCity .”

Tesla. “ Powerwall .”

Tesla, via Internet Archive. “ Powerpack .”

SpaceX. “ Updates .”

YouTube. “ People Should Arrive on Mars in 2025 .” (Video)

Britannica. " X ."

X. " Elon Musk ."

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “ Schedule 13G, March 14, 2022 .”

X. “ Parag Agrawal, April 5, 2022, 8:32 AM .”

X. “ Parag Agrawal, April 10, 2022, 11:13 PM .”

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “ Amendment No. 2 to Schedule 13D/A, April 13, 2022 .”

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “ Form 8-K, April 15, 2022 .”

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “ Amendment No. 3 to Schedule 13D, April 20, 2022 .”

CNBC. “ Elon Musk Now in Charge of Twitter, CEO and CFO Have Left, Sources Say .”

The New York Times. " From Twitter to X: Elon Musk Begins Erasing an Iconic Internet Brand ."

YouTube. “ Elon Musk Monologue—SNL .” (Video)

YouTube. “ Joe Rogan Experience #1169—Elon Musk ,” 2:10–2:11 (Video).

X. “ Elon Musk, Aug. 7, 2018, 12:48 PM .”

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “ Elon Musk Settles SEC Fraud Charges; Tesla Charged with and Resolves Securities Law Charge .”

U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York. “ Defendant Elon Musk’s Notice of Motion to Quash & to Terminate Consent Decree .”

YouTube. “ Elon Musk Talks Twitter, Tesla and How His Brain Works—Live at TED2022 ,” 27:15–29:11 (Video).

Vanity Fair. “ Elon Musk Splits with Actress Talulah Riley for the Second (or Third?) Time .”

TODAY. " Who Are Elon Musk's Children? "

X. “ Grimes, March 10, 2022, 11:32 AM .”

Vanity Fair. “‘ Infamy Is Kind of Fun’: Grimes on Music, Mars, and Her Secret New Baby with Elon Musk .”

The Economic Times. “ Elon Musk Had Over $100K of Student Debt When He Started 1st Company, Turned His Room into Nightclub to Pay Rent .”

Tesla. “ Elon Musk .”

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “ Form 8-K, March 15, 2021 .”

• Terms of Service
• Editorial Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Your Privacy Choices

• Collectibles

Elon Musk: The Complete Biography of an Extraordinary Innovator

• by history tools
• March 26, 2024

Elon Musk is one of the most famous entrepreneurs and business leaders of the 21st century. As the co-founder of PayPal, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, and driving force behind many other companies, Musk has had an outsized influence on technology, space exploration, and solving some of humanity‘s biggest challenges.

Let‘s take a closer look at Musk’s remarkable life story, complex persona, monumental successes and occasional setbacks, and what makes him such a polarizing character.

Childhood and Early Life in South Africa

Musk was born on June 28, 1971 in Pretoria, one of South Africa’s wealthiest and most segregated cities during apartheid. His mother Maye was a famous dietitian and model who grew up in Canada, while his father Errol was a wealthy white South African electromechanical engineer.

As a child, Musk was an avid reader and self-taught computer programmer. At age 12 he created and sold a video game called Blastar to a computer magazine for $500. But his relationship with his father was difficult – his parents divorced when he was 9 years old. Musk chose to live mostly with his father, which he would later regret considering they became estranged.

Discovering His Calling

After spending two years in the South African military, Musk moved to Canada at age 19. He studied at Queen‘s University in Ontario for two years, avoiding mandatory service in the South African military, before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania.

At Penn, Musk pursued a Bachelor’s degree in Physics as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Economics. Most notably, he rekindled an early passion by taking extra classes at the Stanford School of Engineering. It was a harbinger of innovations to come.

Founding Zip2 and PayPal

In 1995 Musk dropped out of Stanford’s PhD program to found his first startup Zip2 Corporation with his brother Kimbal. Zip2 provided online city guides to newspapers like the New York Times and Chicago Tribune.

Compaq bought Zip2 in 1999 for $307 million, earning Musk $22 million. He soon co-founded X.com, one of the first online banks providing services like checking accounts and money transfers.

X.com merged with its rival Confinity in 2000 to become PayPal, with Musk serving as the new CEO. Despite internal struggles at the new company, PayPal went on to revolutionize online payments. In 2002 eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk received $175 million.

“If something‘s important enough you should try, even if the probable outcome is failure.”

Making History with SpaceX

Flush with cash from the PayPal sale, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in 2002 with an audacious long-term goal: make humanity multi-planetary by establishing a human colony on Mars.

SpaceX develops rockets, spacecraft and satellites aimed at revolutionizing space transportation to eventually make it affordable for private citizens to travel into orbit and to other planets. It almost went bankrupt in 2008, but Musk kept it afloat with personal funds.

In 2012 SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial spaceship to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. And in 2020 SpaceX sent astronauts to the ISS for the first time, effectively resurrecting American manned spaceflight.

Tesla Accelerates Ahead with Musk at the Helm

Also in 2004 Musk made the series A investment round in Tesla Motors and joined Tesla’s board of directors as chairman. Founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003, Tesla aimed to prove electric cars could be better than gasoline-powered cars.

The original Roadster sports car impressed critics, but by 2007 Tesla was also on the verge of bankruptcy. Musk invested heavily in Tesla and took over leadership of the company, serving as CEO and product architect.

Under his guidance, Tesla went public in 2010 to raise funds and the Model S sedan was named Motor Trend‘s 2013 Car of the Year. By 2023 Tesla had become the world‘s most valuable automaker, dominating the rapidly growing EV market.

Expanding His Entrepreneurial Portfolio

In addition to SpaceX and Tesla, Musk has founded or co-founded a number of new companies over the last two decades. These include:

• The Boring Company (2016) – Develops tunnels aimed at eliminating street traffic to reduce transportation time
• Neuralink (2016) – Develops implantable brain-machine interfaces to connect human brains with computers
• OpenAI (2015) – Non-profit AI research company working to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits humanity
• Starlink (2019) – SpaceX project to provide global satellite Internet access coverage

Not all of these companies have proven successful so far. But Musk continues to think big while attracting top talent to bring innovative new technologies to reality.

Taking Over Twitter for $44 Billion

In January 2022, Musk started acquiring shares of social media company Twitter. By March he had accumulated a 9.2% stake to become Twitter‘s largest shareholder. This set in motion a tumultuous year that eventually led to his purchase of Twitter for $44 billion on October 27, 2022.

Shortly after acquiring Twitter, Musk laid off roughly half the company‘s 7,500 employees and radically changed the platform‘s operations. Many users have quit the platform over concerns about misinformation as Musk grants "amnesty" to suspended accounts. The long-term implications of his takeover remain uncertain.

“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

Marriages, Relationships and Family

In 2000, Musk married Canadian author Justine Wilson. Their first son died unexpectedly from SIDS at 10 weeks old. They share custody of 5 sons – a set of twins and a set of triplets – born through IVF. Musk and Wilson separated in 2008.

From 2010 to 2012, Musk was married to English actress Talulah Riley. After divorcing, they remarried in 2013 before finalizing their divorce again in 2016. Musk also had an on-and-off relationship with musician Grimes which began in 2018. They had 2 children – a son born in 2020 and daughter born in 2021 via surrogate.

In 2022 it was revealed that Musk secretly had twins in 2021 with Shivon Zilis, a top executive at his company Neuralink. He now has 10 children from 3 relationships. But his 18-year-old transgender daughter has disowned him, changing her name in opposition to Musk‘s "public transphobia."

Losing and Regaining Title of World‘s Richest Person

Thanks mostly to his shares in Tesla Motors, Musk experienced an astronomical rise in his personal net worth. He became the richest person in the world for the first time in January 2021 when he surpassed Jeff Bezos.

But his net worth dropped in 2022 and early 2023 as Tesla‘s share price declined. On January 6, 2023 Musk lost the title of world‘s richest person to Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH.

What‘s more, with an estimated $183 billion loss between November 2021 and January 2023, Musk holds the record for the largest loss of personal fortune in history according to Guinness World Records. Despite these setbacks, Musk’s supporters are betting he’ll reclaim the top spot someday.

What Makes Musk Such a Polarizing Figure

Musk has earned both ardent fans and vocal critics. So what makes him such a polarizing public figure?

Reasons supporters are drawn to Musk include:

• Daring vision for future innovations
• Willingness to take risks
• Commitment to tackling climate change with sustainable energy
• Power to make things happen that others consider impossible
• Relatable sense of humor on social media

However some people are strongly critical of Musk for:

• Poor treatment of employees by demanding unrealistic hours and goals
• Controversial public stances on issues like pandemic lockdowns
• Spreading misinformation and making questionable promises on Twitter
• Brash communication style and vindictiveness towards naysayers
• Concerns about concentration of power held by billionaires

But there‘s no questioning the outsized impact Musk already made on multiple industries. Even his detractors admit they‘re curious to see what he’ll achieve next.

• Jeff Bezos Complete Biography – Everything about the former richest person in the world
• Mark Zuckerberg Biography – The life story of another famous tech CEO
• Steve Jobs Biography – Get to know the late legendary co-founder of Apple

Related posts:

• Should Elon Musk Avoid Travel to Russia? Analyzing the Risks After Starlink‘s Role in Ukraine
• Is Jeff Bezos the Smartest Person Ever? Examining His IQ and Achievements
• Jeff Bezos: The Man Behind Amazon‘s Meteoric Rise
• Mastodon vs Twitter: A Detailed Comparison for Disillusioned Twitter Users
• Tesla is Reportedly Working on a Simulated San Francisco to Train its Autopilot
• Twitter vs Instagram in 2023: An Expert‘s In-Depth Feature and UX Comparison
• Bobby Murphy: The Innovator Propelling Snapchat into the Future of Social AR
• The Journey of Mark Zuckerberg: From Harvard Dropout to Tech Visionary

Tesla CEO Elon Musk: His career, life, and companies he started

• Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla. He's also cofounder other major companies, including SpaceX.
• He was born in South Africa and founded his first startup in the '90s.
• Musk is a polarizing figure who has incited lawsuits and SEC investigations. 

Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa.

His mother, Maye Musk , is a professional dietitian and model, appearing on boxes of Special K cereal and the cover of TIME magazine. Last year, at the age of 74, she was on the cover of Sport Illustrated's swimsuit edition.

Maye and Musk's father, Errol, were married for nearly a decade before they divorced. Maye said in her book that she'd wanted to end the marriage earlier, but the Divorce Act, which legalized the termination of a marriage in South Africa, was not enacted until 1979. Musk's parents divorced the same year the law was passed.

After their parents divorced, 9-year-old Musk and his younger brother Kimbal  decided to live with their father. It wasn't until after the move was made that his notoriously troubled relationship with his dad began to emerge. "It was not a good idea," Musk said of the move in an interview with Rolling Stone.

Musk's school days weren't easy — he was once hospitalized after being beaten by bullies. The bullies threw Musk down a set of stairs and beat him until he blacked out, as detailed in Ashlee Vance's book "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future." Musk's father told Business Insider the incident took place after Musk made some insensitive comments to a classmate.

The Tesla CEO has said he didn't always feel he was on the same wavelength as his classmates.

"Social clues were not intuitive," Musk said during a TED conference last year. In 2021, the billionaire said during his performance on " Saturday Night Live " that he has Asperger's syndrome.

Musk has said he spent a lot of his childhood reading and coding late into the night — and it paid off. At 17, he took a university-level aptitude test on his computer programming skills. Examiners made him retake the test because they had never seen such a high score, his mother said in a tweet. 

After graduating from high school, Musk moved to Canada with his mother, Maye; his sister, Tosca, and his brother, Kimbal, and spent two years studying at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, according to the school.

He later finished his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, earning degrees in physics and economics.

While studying at the  University of Pennsylvania , Musk and a classmate rented out a 10-bedroom frat house and turned it into a nightclub. The move, which Musk undertook with Adeo Ressi, was one of his first entrepreneurial experiments, Vogue reported.

After graduation, Musk traveled to Stanford University to study for his Ph.D. — but he barely started the program before leaving it. He deferred his admission after only two days in California, deciding to test his luck in the dot-com boom that was just getting underway. He never returned to finish his studies at Stanford.

Musk's college girlfriend Jennifer Gwynne would later auction a set of photos of Musk from his time studying at the University of Pennsylvania.

Late 1990s - 2000: Early career

With brother Kimbal, Musk launched Zip2. A cluster of Silicon Valley investors helped to fund the company, which provided city travel guides to newspapers like The New York Times and Chicago Tribune, per the Rolling Stone interview with Musk.

While Zip2 got off the ground, Musk lived in the office and showered at a local YMCA, he said in a Stanford University video. The hard work paid off when Compaq bought Zip2 in a deal worth $341 million in cash and stock, earning Musk $22 million.

Musk next started  X.com , an online banking company. He launched the company in 1999 using $10 million of the money he got from the Zip2 sale, Investopedia reported. About a year later, X.com merged with Confinity, a financial startup cofounded by Peter Thiel, to form PayPal.

Musk was named the CEO of the newly minted PayPal — but it wouldn't last long. While Musk was en route to Australia for a much-needed vacation, PayPal's board fired him and made Thiel the new CEO. "That's the problem with vacations," Musk told Fortune years later about his ill-fated trip in late 2000.

2002-2004: Elon Musk starts SpaceX and invests in Tesla

But things worked out for Musk — he made another windfall when eBay bought PayPal in late 2002. As PayPal's single biggest shareholder, he netted $165 million of the $1.5 billion price eBay paid, Money.com reported.

Even before the PayPal sale, Musk was dreaming up his next move, including a wild plan to send mice or plants to Mars. In early 2002, Musk founded the company that would be known as Space Exploration Technologies , or SpaceX, with $100 million of the money received from the PayPal sale. Musk's goal was to make spaceflight cheaper by a factor of 10.

One early SpaceX vehicle was named after the song "Puff the Magic Dragon." The name of the spacecraft, the Dragon, was Musk's jab at skeptics who told him SpaceX launches would never be able to put vehicles into space, Musk later shared on Twitter.

SpaceX's long-term goal is to make colonizing Mars affordable. Musk has said that SpaceX stock won't be available an initial public offering until what Musk calls the "Mars Colonial Transporter" is flying regularly.

Musk had also been keeping plenty busy here on Earth, particularly with Tesla Motors. In 2004, Musk made the first of what would be $70 million of total Tesla investments, an electric car company. Tesla's founders were veteran startup executives Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.

Musk has said he took an active product role at the carmaker, helping develop its first car, the Tesla Roadster , the Roadster.

The Roadster was built on the chassis of a Lotus Elise — a tiny British sports car that Tesla remade into an electric car with a lithium-ion battery. The all-electric Roadster debuted in 2006 when Musk was serving as Tesla's chairman. 

2008: Elon Musk becomes Tesla CEO

In 2007, Musk staged a boardroom coup at Tesla, first ousting Eberhard from his CEO seat and then from the company's board and executive suites entirely.

In 2008, with the financial crisis seriously limiting his options, a Tesla bankruptcy was personally halted by Musk. He invested $40 million in Tesla and loaned the company $40 million more. Not coincidentally, he was named CEO the same year.

But between SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, Musk nearly went broke. He described 2008 as "the worst year of my life" in an interview with 60 Minutes. Tesla kept losing money, and SpaceX was having trouble launching its Falcon 1 rocket. By 2009, Musk was living off personal loans just to survive.

Related stories

Right around Christmas 2008, Musk got two pieces of good news: SpaceX had landed a $1.5 billion contract with NASA to deliver supplies into space, and Tesla finally found more outside investors.

Musk's career was starting to get noticed in other circles, too, most notably in Hollywood. Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal of Tony Stark in the "Iron Man" movies is at least partially based on Musk, director Jon Favreau said on the "Recode Decode" podcast. Musk even had a cameo in " Iron Man 2 ."

2015: OpenAI

In late 2015, Musk also cofounded OpenAI , a nonprofit dedicated to researching artificial intelligence and ensuring it doesn't destroy humanity.

He later announced that he would step down from the board to avoid any potential conflicts of interest with Tesla , which has made strides into artificial intelligence for its self-driving car technology.

The billionaire has since spoken out against the company on multiple occasions and is even attempting to launch his own competitor, which he jokingly dubbed " Truth GPT " after the success of OpenAI's ChatGPT.

By the end of 2015, 24 SpaceX launches had been made on assignments like resupplying the International Space Station, setting some records along the way. 

That year, Tesla also released its first version of Autopilot , a driver-assist feature for its EVs. Musk later went on to release an enhanced version of Autopilot called Full Self-Driving beta several years later.

He has since said that Tesla FSD is the difference between being "worth a lot of money or worth basically zero." However, Autopilot has generated its fair share of lawsuits, as well as investigations from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over the years.

2016: SolarCity and The Boring Company

In late 2016, Tesla bought SolarCity in a $2.6 billion deal. That same year some Tesla shareholders filed a lawsuit accusing Musk of putting pressure on Tesla's board members to buy SolarCity and bail it out. Musk later won the lawsuit in 2022.

In 2016, he also started The Boring Company , which has a mission to dig a network of tunnels under and around cities for high-speed, no-traffic driving.

Boring's first tunnel network for commercial use, located in Las Vegas, opened in April 2021.

2017: Neuralink

Musk founded another company: Neuralink , in 2017, which is trying to build devices that can be implanted inside the human brain. The billionaire has described the device as a "Fitbit in your skull" and has said it will allow people to perform tasks using only their minds. The company has experimented with putting the device in pigs and monkeys and won approval from the US Food and Drug Administration to begin human trials in 2023.

In 2017, Musk also joined President Trump's business advisory council — a move that caused a huge public backlash. He initially defended the move but then quit after Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. Musk said he tried to convince Trump not to withdraw.

2018: Tesla Roadster in space

The Falcon Heavy, the successor to the Falcon 9 and the most powerful rocket SpaceX has built to date, completed a successful maiden launch in February 2018. The Falcon Heavy carried a unique payload: a dummy dubbed "Starman," and Musk's personal cherry red Tesla Roadster, which were launched toward Martian orbit.

"We really wanted to get the public here to wonder, to get excited about the possibility of something new happening in space — of the space frontier getting pushed forward," Musk told an audience at the 2018 South by Southwest conference. "The goal of this was to inspire you and make you believe again, just as people believed in the Apollo era, that anything is possible."

SEC subpoenas Tesla

Musk ran into some trouble in 2018 when he sent a tweet declaring he was considering taking  Tesla private at $420 per share and had already secured funding. Just a few days later, the SEC sent Tesla subpoenas about the company's plans to go private and Musk's comments.

By September, the SEC had formally filed a lawsuit against Musk, accusing him of making "false and misleading statements." Musk settled with the SEC, which resulted in both him and Tesla paying a $20 million fine and Musk stepping down as chairman of Tesla's board. Additionally, Tesla was required to appoint a committee to oversee Musk's communications.

One month later, Musk won a victory in court when a jury ruled he was not guilty of defaming the British diver Vernon Unsworth . Unsworth had filed a defamation lawsuit in 2018 after Musk called him a "pedo guy" on Twitter.

2021: Musk becomes richest person in the world

Musk's net worth has soared in recent years. The Tesla CEO became the richest man in the world in 2021 when his fortune surpassed $200 billion, passing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' net worth.

Musk said he commemorated the occasion by sending Bezos, his longtime rival, a silver medal. Musk's status as the richest man in the world was eclipsed by LVMH owner Bernard Arnault in 2023. Since, he has remained near the top of the list of wealthiest people in the world.

He also won Time's Person of the Year award in 2021.

2022: The 'Technoking' sets his sights on Twitter 

In 2022, Musk started buying up shares of Twitter and later turned down an offer to join the board in favor of buying Twitter outright for $44 billion.

Musk, who has become one of the most-followed accounts on the social media site, attempted to backtrack on his offer to buy Twitter in July.  Twitter sued Musk promptly, in order to force him to go through with the purchase. 

After months of back and forth leading up to a trial in the Delaware Court of Chancery, Musk agreed to buy the company in October. The same day he took over Twitter, he ousted several key executives including then-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. Musk took over as "Chief Twit" and proceeded to cut the Twitter workforce in half in the chaotic months following the Musk acquisition .

He later brought in a new CEO for Twitter in May 2023 after the billionaire said Twitter was no longer "in the fast lane to bankruptcy."

The platform was also rebranded "X" in July 2023.

The billionaire has also expressed interest in launching his own AI venture. In April 2023, Musk confirmed reports that he's planning to create an AI startup to build a ChatGPT rival .

Katie Canales, Matt Weinberger, and Mary Meisenzahl contributed to an earlier version of this story. 

• Main content

Elon Musk biography

Elon Reeve Musk was born on the 28th of June of 1972 in Pretoria, South Africa. He is known for being one of the founders of Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, OpenAl, and Hyperloop, among other companies. The entrepreneur and inventor appears in the list of the richest in the world, occupying the position number 56, in 2017, with 17.4 billion dollars. Forbes magazine, for the December 2016 publication, named him the 21st person with the most power in the world. His greatest goal, according to Musk, is to change humanity drastically; for this purpose, he works in SolarCity, SpaceX, and Tesla. One of his interests is the abandonment of petroleum fuels in order to reduce global warming. Perhaps Elon’s most ambitious project, so far, is the establishment of a human colony on Mars, with nearly a million people.

He spent his childhood in South Africa with his parents, an engineer from South Africa and a nutritionist from Canada. At age 10, with his first computer, a Commodore VIC-20, he began to learn to programme on his own. Two years later he sold his first videogame called Blastar for about $ 200. At that time he went through difficult times; his schoolmates subjected him to bullying because of his uncommon interests for them. Elon spent his money on science fiction books, comics, and video games.

In the period between 12 and 15 years of age, he entered into an existential crisis influenced by the readings of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. The situation went to the extreme of taking him to the hospital because of beatings by his companions. In his home things were not better, the relationship with his father was quite complicated. He suffered the emotional violence of a father unable to understand him. Compulsory military service bothered him. For these reasons, at age 17, after graduating from high school in Pretoria, he decided to leave South Africa and take refuge with his mother in Canada.

What Musk wanted most was to reach the United States. He found in that country a way to make possible everything he imagined. Elon’s father conditioned his support: he would not pay for a university outside of South Africa. In 1989, while in Canada, he found a chance to study thanks to his maternal relatives, who came from North America. By 1992, Elon counted on a scholarship in the University of Pennsylvania. The young entrepreneur began his studies in Business Administration, in parallel he began his career in Physics. He was fortunate to have the support of one of his teachers, who turned out to be the executive director of Los Gatos, a company located in the southern part of San Francisco Bay, California. The experience gained on ultracapacitors in that company, and then in Pinnacle Research, along with the inspiration it had for inventors such as Nikola Tesla, made him define the fields in which he would focus on the future: renewable energy, the Internet and outer space.

The beginning on the Internet began with Zip2, in 1995, along with his brother Kimbal Musk and a friend named Greg Curry. The company was dedicated to the development and maintenance of web pages dedicated to the media. The idea was a success, managing around 200 sites on the Internet in the year of 1999. For that year the company was sold to Compaq for 300 million dollars; money that would help him found X.com. The next plan was to systematize payments and money management through the Internet, offering security and speed. The ease offered by X.com and security made the project a very profitable idea, as well as merging, in 2000, with Confinity; company that provided a similar service, but only between Palm Pilot devices. In 2001 X.com decided to change its name to Paypal.inc a well-known company that provides the service to make online payments internationally.

With the growing success, problems soon appeared. Different companies tried to close Paypal, including eBay, which ended up buying it in October 2002, for 1.5 billion dollars. The sale of Paypal gave way to the creation, by its former members, of companies such as LinkedIn and YouTube. The next Musk project was called Tesla Motors, the company that created the first functional electric car. The main investment in Tesla was solar energy. The idea was born in 2003 in the company AC Propulsion, which had a prototype electric car. Musk wanted to help design a sports car with the same base of AC Propulsion.

In 2004, along with Matt Tappenhig and Martin Eberhard, Tesla Motors was created, with the intention of mass producing the model T-Zero of AC Propulsion. Musk invested nearly 98% of the capital. The start of the company was hard; the budget for the first models exceeded what was expected, but they managed to sell enough to continue developing models. For 2012, 2100 Tesla Roadster was sold in different countries. In 2015 the Tesla Model X was launched, designed to cover all types of terrain.

Another of Musk’s three projects involves SpaceX. Thinking of establishing a colony on Mars, he began, in 2002, to investigate how to send a rocket to Mars. His initial idea was to obtain reusable rockets to carry out the two trips for reconnaissance missions. For that year, Space Exploration Technologies was founded, focused on launching rockets and reducing fuel costs and materials for launch with increases in viability. In 2008, an agreement was made between NASA for twelve rocket flights. Currently, SpaceX is responsible for the development of Falcon rockets, which use liquid fuel.

You may like

Paris Hilton

Tina Turner

Walter Scott

Vicente Guerrero

Nipsey Hussle

Nipsey Hussle Biography

Ermias Asghedom (August 15, 1985 – March 31, 2019), better known as Nipsey Hussle, was an American rapper, businessman, and community activist, who rose to fame in 2018 with his debut album Victory Lab . Nipsey began his career towards the mid-2000s releasing several successful mixtapes such as Slauson Boy Volume 1, Bullets Ain’t Got No Name series and The Marathon. His fame came to him, along with his first Grammy nomination, with his debut album in 2018. He had previously created his label All Money In No Money Out (2010).

Following his death, he received two posthumous Grammys for the songs Racks in the Middle and Higher. He was known for his social work on behalf of the Crenshaw community.

Early years

He was born in Los Angeles, United States, on August 15, 1985 . Son of Angelique Smith and Eritrean immigrant Dawit Asghedom, he grew up in Crenshaw, a neighborhood located south of Los Angeles, with his siblings Samiel and Samantha. He attended Hamilton High School but dropped out before graduating. Since he was little he looked for a way to help around the home, so over time, he began to work selling different products on the street.

After leaving school he became involved in the world of gangs, however, he turned away from it when he realized that it was not what he expected for his future. Decided then to dedicate himself to music, he sold everything that linked him to the gangs and worked for a time to buy his own production tools. After finishing his studies, he began to write and produce his own mixtapes, which he sold from a car. After finding inspiration from a trip he took to Eritrea with his father and spending time in prison, Nipsey turned fully to his career and business. He always looked for ways to start and help the community in which he grew up: giving jobs, helping students, renovating public spaces, etc …

Community activist

Nipsey was admired for his work at Crenshaw because instead of moving or investing in hedge funds, he preferred to help the community by boosting the local economy.

In late 2005, Nipsey Hussle released his first mixtape, Slauson Boy Volume 1, independently, to great local success. By then he already had a fan base at the regional level, so it took him a while to sign a contract with the Epic Records and Cinematic Music Group labels. Later, the first volumes of the Bullets Ain’t Got No Name series appeared, with which he expanded his popularity. Burner on My Lap, Ridin Slow, Aint No Black Superman, Hussle in the House and It’s Hard out Here , were some of the songs included in the series.

By 2009, Nipsey would make a name for himself collaborating with Drake on Killer and with Snoop Dog on Upside Down. He also released Bullets Ain’t Got No Name vol.3 and in 2010, he left Epic and opened his own label All Money In No Money Out. Under this label, he would soon release The Marathon, a mixtape in which hits such as Love ?, Mr. Untouchable, Young Rich and Famous and Late Nights and Early Mornings appeared. He also created The Marathon Clothing at that time, a sports and casual clothing brand that was based in his neighborhood. He then released the mixtape The Marathon Continues (2011), participated in the We Are the World 25 for Haiti campaign, and was featured in the popular XXL Magazine Annual Freshman Top Ten.

In 2013 came Crenshaw , a mixtape that would become famous because Jay-Z himself bought 100 copies for $ 100 each.

Victory Lap

After many delays, Nipsey would release his long-awaited debut album Victory Lap , on February 16, 2018, to great success. It was praised by critics and received a Grammy nomination for best rap album of the year. It was such a success that many singles entered the Billboard and Itunes charts. However, Nipsey did not enjoy much fame.

Hussle was assassinated on March 31, 2019, outside his store in South Los Angeles. He was shot multiple times by a man he had previously clashed with, he was arrested and charged with murder on April 2 of the same year. After his death, many personalities expressed the pain caused by the news. It is worth mentioning that the Mayor of Los Angeles himself gave his condolences to the family, recognizing Hussle’s social work in Crenshaw.

He was the partner of actress Lauren London and was the father of two children.

Sales strategies and greatest hits

Hussle was known for his sales strategies, since, he used to upload his singles in free download and then sell some limited editions for a cost of 100 to 1000 dollars . It promoted the sale of his work with campaigns such as Proud2Pay and Mailbox Money, in which he gave special incentives (autographed photos, dedication calls, tickets to his studio, and special events) to buyers. His revolutionary ideas promised him a fruitful career.

Some of his greatest hits

• Rose Clique
• Forever On My Fly Shit
• Thas Wat Hoes Do Proud of That (with Rick Ross)
• Face the world
• Bless, 1 of 1
• Where Yo Money At
• Fuck Donald Trump
• Young Rich and Famous

Jimmy Hoffa

Jimmy Hoffa Biography

James Riddle Hoffa (February 14, 1913 – July 30, 1975), better known as Jimmy Hoffa, was an American union activist. A reference to the working class of the 20th century, Hoffa began his union activity at the age of 18 within the trucker union. With time, he was gaining importance and enemies. He mixed with the mob and was the leader of the most important union organization in the U.S.A ., the International Brotherhood of Truckers. His actions took a toll on him and in 1967 he was arrested for bribery. In 1975, he disappeared after having dinner at a Detroit restaurant. To date, it is unknown what happened or where his body is. His disappearance was portrayed in Scorsese’s The Irishman .

He was born in Brazil, Indiana, on February 14, 1913. James was the son of John Hoffa and Viola Riddle. His father passed away when he was 7 years old, of Irish descent and working as a miner. When the dad died, the family moved to Detroit, where Hoffa lived the rest of his life. He studied until he was 14 years old and began working as a teenager, to help the family. At the age of 18, he began to participate in the union demonstrations of the truck driver’s union, and over time he gained recognition. However, Hoffa had never driven a truck.

Jimmy Hoffa, the truckers, and the mob

Despite his clear inexperience, Hoffa managed to earn the respect of all road workers thanks to his charisma and effective acting. He was thus elected president of the famous International Brotherhood of Truckers or “Teamsters” in 1957. From then on he would be known for his aggressive methods and connections with the Cosa Nostra (Italian mafia). It is known that Jimmy used the mob to gain notoriety and destroy his competitors, while the union served as a front to clean up dirty money from the mob.

As time went by, his relationship with Cosa Nostra became increasingly evident, becoming the target of various investigations (fraud, conspiracy, evasion, extortion, laundering…). Behind them was the prosecutor Robert Kennedy, who later became a solicitor, his sole objective being the capture of Hoffa. Although he managed to leave the courts unscathed on several occasions – thanks to his intimidation and bribery strategies – he was finally locked up in 1967.

Hoffa had faced justice several times, so the confinement did not scare him, he planned to continue running the union and all its businesses from jail, leaving someone manageable in command. But this did not turn out as he expected, his puppet rebelled and the mafia took advantage of his confinement to expand their business with more facilities. It was clear that everyone was better off without Hoffa at the helm.

The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa

In 1971 his sentence was commuted and Hoffa returned to work, he tried to regain his place and strength, but had little luck, because the mafia was clear that the business was better without him. The day he arrived, on July 30, 1975, he was summoned by Anthony Provenzano and Anthony Giacalone, two gangster bosses who were tired of his instance. They summoned him to a restaurant in Detroit, but never showed up, Hoffa waited for more than an hour and then got into a car, disappearing ever since. Nobody saw him again.

Jimmy was powerful, but he had made many enemies and was in the crosshairs of the mob, making his disappearance one of the most famous of the 20th century. His body was never found and in 1982 he was presumed dead. Although over time many took credit for his disappearance (and his death) from him, little is known for sure.

One of the possible culprits is perhaps Frank Sheeran, the Irishman , Hoffa’s henchman, who, pressured by the gangsters, would have killed the union leader. According to Sheeran’s version, that day he would have taken Hoffa to a house, where he shot him three times, and then moved his body to a still uncertain place.

His body and his disappearance became one of the best-known mysteries of the time . To date, the fate of his body is unknown. Many say it is buried, others that it was dismembered and thrown into a river, and others that it was compacted. There were many complaints about the discovery of his body, but all false.

His legacy was continued by his son, the current head of the International Brotherhood of Truckers, James P. Hoffa.

He was married to Josephine Poszywak and was the father of James P. Hoffa and Barbara Ann Crancer.

On July 30, 1982, he was declared legally dead.

Scorsese’s The Irishman

Scorsese’s The Irishman premiered on Netflix in 2019. The film follows Hoffa’s hitman and right-hand man, Frank Sheeran, as he thus narrates his story and participation in the disappearance of Hoffa. In the film, Hoffa is played by Al Pacino , while Sheeran and the prosecutor Kennedy are played by Robert De Niro and Jack Huston.

Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker biography

Peter Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) writer, consultant, entrepreneur, and journalist. He was born in Vienna, Austria. He is considered the father of the Management to which he devoted more than 60 years of his professional life. His parents of Jewish origin and then converted to Christianity moved to a small town called Kaasgrabeen. Drucker grew up in an environment in which new ideas and social positions created by intellectuals, senior government officials and scientists were emerging. He studied at the Döbling Gymnasium and in 1927, Drucker moved to the German city of Hamburg, where he worked as an apprentice in a cotton company.

Then he began to train in the world of journalism, writing for the Der Österreichische Volkswirt. Then he got a job in Frankfurt, his job was to write for the Daily Frankfurter General-Anzeiger. Meanwhile, he completed a doctorate in International Law. Drucker began to integrate his two facets and for that, he was a recognized journalist. Drucker worked in this place until the fall of the Weimar Republic. After this period he decided to move to London, where he worked in a bank and was also a student of John Maynard Keynes .

Although he was a disciple of Keynes, he assured, decades later, that Keynesianism failed as an economic thesis where it was applied. Because of the ravages of Nazism and persecution of Jews, he emigrated to the United States, where he served as a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, from 1939 to 1949 and simultaneously was a writer. His first job as a consultant was in 1940. He then returned to teaching at Bennington College in Vermont. Thanks to his popularity he received a position to teach in the faculty of Business Administration of the University of New York.

He was an active contributor for a long period of time to magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and was a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. The quality and recognition of his writings assured him important contracts both as a writer and as a consultant with large companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Quickly and surprisingly his fortune grew. Drucker served as honorary president of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management.

In 1971, he obtained the Clarke Chair of Social Sciences and Administration at the Graduate School of Management at the University of Claremont. Now, at present Drucker is considered the most successful of the exponents in matters of administration, his ideas and terminologies have influenced the corporate world since the 40s. Drucker was the first social scientist to use the expression “post-modernity” something that caught the attention of this man is that he does not like receiving compliments. He was simple, visionary, satirical and vital.

Within his studies, he says that his greatest interest is people. His work as a consultant began in the General Motors Multinational Companies, from that moment begins to raise the theory of Management, Management trends, the knowledge society. Thanks to this theory he has published several books, these are consulted often and are fundamental for the career of business administrator. In his works, he deals with the scientific, human, economic, historical, artistic and philosophical stage.

He was founder and director of a business school that bears his name. For Drucker, it was beneficial that many of his ideas have been reformed because of the innovative way of thinking and analyzing business issues. Although approaches such as the knowledge society are the basis of the current company and the future is still maintained. He has published more than thirty books, which include studies of Management, studies of socio-economic policies and essays. Some are Best Sellers. The first book was The end of economic man (1939), The future of industrial man (1942), The concept of Corporation (1946). Later he published The Effective Executive (1985). He focused on personal effectiveness and changes in the direction of the 21st century. In 2002 the society of the future was published.

His first book caused much controversy because he talked about the reasons why fascism initiated and analyzed the failures of established institutions. He urged the need for a new social and economic order. Although he had finished the book in 1933, he had to wait because no editor wanted to accept such horrible visions. Now, Drucker has dealt with such controversial issues as individual freedom, industrial society, big business, the power of managers, automation, monopoly, and totalitarianism.

We must indicate that his analysis of the Administration, is a valuable guide for the leaders of companies that need to study their own performance, diagnose its failures and improve its productivity, as well as that of your company. Several companies have taken their approaches and put them into practice, such as Sears Roebuck & Co., General Motors, Ford, IBM, Chrysler, and American Telephone & Telegraph.

The consultant assured that there are some differences between the figure of the manager and that of the leader. For him, true leaders recognize their shortcomings as mortal beings, but they systematically concentrate on the essentials and work tirelessly to acquire the decisive competences of management. Actually, the contributions of this character in the world of administration and in the economic and social world have been significant. Drucker died on November 11, 2005, leaving a great legacy.

Jeff Bezos biography

Jeff Bezos (January 12, 1964). His birth name is Jeffrey Preston Bezos. Businessman and founder and CEO of Amazon. He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States. His mother, Jacklyn Gise, had him as a teenager and his biological father, Ted Jorgensen, left them as soon as he heard the news. Years later his mother married Miguel Bezos a Cuban. Now, Miguel adopted Jeffrey and he received his last name. The family moved to Houston, Texas. Jeffrey Bezos studied at River Oaks Elementary, he was always a very smart and witty little boy.

They moved to Miami, where he studied at Miami Palmetto Senior High School. And upon graduating he entered Princeton University to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, his thesis was cum laude. In 1996, he started working in a fiber optic company, FITEL, where he was responsible for the development of computer systems, his performance was so good that he became vice president. After moving to New York with the idea of ​​entering the world of finance, in Bankers Trust, he also held the position of vice president in 1990. In the following four years, Bezos worked with another Wall Street company: D.E. Shaw and Co.

Bezos realized that the purchase/sale of products and services on the internet or other electronic means would be a great field to explore and exploit. For this reason, he founded the electronic commerce company Amazon in 1995. Its service was something new for the netizens, which produced an increase in the visits quickly. Only in the first month of operation had books been sold in all corners of the United States. Months later it reached 2,000 daily visitors, a figure that would multiply abysmally in the next year. In 1997, the success made Amazon become one of the most important companies online.

Bezos had managed to conquer the internet business. Encouraged by the reception of consumers, he undertook the diversification of products, including CD and DVD media and electronic devices. As demand increased, this ingenious man included new products to his virtual store. The growth and its popularity were such that today it distributes from food to home, clothes and shoes, video games and music, to toilet paper and diapers. Amazon has experimented with the lucrative benefit of advertising since it gives the possibility to companies to advertise their products and mark them as featured products.

Bezos established independent Amazon websites for United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Austria, France, China, Italy, Spain, Japan, the Netherlands, Brazil, India and Mexico, the variety of products can be several in each country. Currently, the services are enjoyed by companies such as Target Corporation, Marks & Spencer, the NBA, Sears Canada, Timex or Bombay Company. The AOL online sales service also supports. In 2007, Bezos shook the world with the creation and launch of Amazon’s alter ego: Amazon Kindle, a device specially designed for the visualization of electronic books. Amazon Kindle was launched for the first time in North America and is currently available in 45 countries.

In 2011, The Economist awarded Bezos and Gregg Zehr an Innovation Award for the Amazon Kindle. The following year, Bezos was named Entrepreneur of the Year by Fortune. It is part of the Bilderberg Group. Bezos has given several conferences in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and participated in the conference in Watford, Hertfordshire, England. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Business Council in 2011 and 2012. In 2018, he appeared on the Forbes list, where a net wealth of 106 billion dollars was estimated. He has also received other awards as the best CEO in the world by Harvard Business Review. Jeff Bezos has also been on Fortune’s list of the 50 best leaders in the world. In September 2016, he was awarded the Heinlein Prize for advances in Space Marketing. He donated the prize money to the international student organization Students for the Exploration and Development of Space by Bezos.

Since 2017, he has seen an increase in Amazon shares. They went up more than 130%, which made him have a profit of more than 100 billion dollars, after this, he returned to be the richest person in the world. He was named Person of the Year in Time magazine and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science and Technology degree at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. Really, the awards and awards have been impressive. Much of this is because Bezos, started in the field of journalism, looking beyond its commercial horizons; beyond the web. Bezos entered the world of media, acquiring the traditional newspaper The Washington Post for the sum of 250 thousand dollars.

Henry Gantt

Henry Gantt Biography

Henry Laurence Gantt (May 20, 1861 – November 23, 1919) industrial engineer . He was born in Calvert County, Maryland, United States. During his childhood and youth, he and his family lived devastating moments, especially in the economic part. His parents owned crops in Calvert but remained in ruins after the devastation caused during the Civil War. After that political and social event, they did not overlap economically so they had to live various hardships.

In spite of this, his parents did everything possible so that the young Gantt finished his school training at McDonogh School in 1878 and went to Johns Hopkins University to study industrial engineering. His performance was very good, when he graduated he started working as a teacher and draftsman, Gantt had a great skill for drawing since he was a kid. Then he studied mechanical engineering at the same university. In 1887, he was hired in Frederick W. Taylor to carry out an application of the principles of the Scientific Administration with his work in Midvale Steel and Bethlehem Steel, he carried out this work until 1893. In his career as a consultant, he invented the Gantt diagram.

Later, he designed some systems to measure the efficiency and productivity of workers, such as task bonds and the payment system and other methods that facilitate this process. This diagram became very popular for its simplicity, performance, and quality at that time, as well as at this time, pointed out the various tasks to be performed in a horizontal timeline, it has been used as a tool in operations that require strict temporal planning. However, Henry Gantt’s studies focused on the analysis of the performance of work methods, which depends on his judgment of the willingness to use the correct methods and skills.

Gantt was very concerned about leaving his knowledge embodied in paper, therefore, in 1908 presented before the American Society of Mechanical Engineers the text: Training of workers in habits of diligence and collaboration, in which he exposed the need to change the employer’s tactics; it is not a way of acting in the place, in the techniques, in the work, in the information, in the habits, in the possibilities, in the efficiency and in the efficiency of his work. As a complement to this, it is a bonus system that has been added to work and work done in a standardized time standard.

With these measures we tried to raise, not only the quantity, but above all the quality of work, following Taylor’s theory, the so-called common prosperity theory: what he says is that the worker has a kind of personal satisfaction to do the job well, this generates a feeling of pride that will make you try harder. For his part, the employer will notice an increase in productivity and the sum of a reduction in labor disputes. This is exposed with mastery in work, wages, and benefits (1913).

In the field of administration, his most known contribution is the graph of the bars such as the chart or the Gantt chart, which is composed in a diagram in which the horizontal axis represents the units of time, and in the vertical is recorded the different functions, which are represented by horizontal bars. With the help of this engineer, companies and the discipline of business administration is very broad, some of them are: the Gantt diagram, the development of the concept of industrial efficiency, the implementation of the system of Bonds of Tasks, with this adopted the premium to the workers. And he also implemented the Daily Balance Chart.

It was also very emphatic to ensure that companies have a social responsibility, in their opinion, companies have obligations for the welfare of society. His support for the scientific organization of work is also highlighted. When he worked for Frederick W. Taylor, with whom he collaborated in the application of his own doctrine to improve productivity, and in the second stage of the Industrial Revolution .

After 14 years of being at Taylor’s side, he made the decision to separate from this because his interest was the humanization of industrial practices and the dehumanized theories of Frederick Taylor . Unfortunately, in his last years of life, Gantt did not have the opportunity to finish several of his projects because his health was undermined. Finally, Henry Gantt died on November 23, 1919, in the town of Pine Island in New York .

His importance lies in the fact that it is the founder of scientific administration , an activity developed in the United States that later spread throughout the world with the idea of ​​achieving humanization, rationalization, and performance.

Related Content: Industrial Engineering

Celebrities

Nicola Porcella

Nicola Porcella Biography Nicola Emilio Porcella Solimano (February 5, 1988), better known as Nicola Porcella, is an actor and TV...

Wendy Guevara

Wendy Guevara Biography Wendy Guevara Venegas (August 12, 1993), better known as Wendy Guevara, is an influencer, actress, singer, and...

Paris Hilton Biography Paris Whitney Hilton (February 17, 1981), better known as Paris Hilton, is a socialite, businesswoman, model, DJ,...

Leonardo DiCaprio

Biography of Leonardo DiCaprio Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio is a renowned actor and film producer who has won numerous awards within...

Denzel Washington

Biography of Denzel Washington Denzel Washington is an African American actor born on December 28, 1954 in Mount Vernon, New...

Ryan Reynolds

Biography of Ryan Reynolds Ryan Rodney Reynolds was born on October 23, 1976 in Vancouver, Canada, and he is a...

Biography of Brad Pitt William Bradley Pitt, better known as Brad Pitt, was born on December 18, 1963 in Shawnee,...

Entrepreneurs

Luciano Benetton

Luciano Benetton Biography Luciano Benetton (May 13, 1935) Born in Ponzano, Treviso, Italy. An Italian businessman and fashion designer, co-founder...

Louis Vuitton

Louis Vuitton Biography Louis Vuitton (August 4, 1821 – February 25, 1892) businessman and fashion designer. Founder of the leather...

Peter Drucker biography Peter Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) writer, consultant, entrepreneur, and journalist. He was born...

Paul Allen biography Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953) entrepreneur, business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He was born in Seattle,...

Nik Powell biography Nik Powell (November 4, 1950) businessman and co-founder of the Virgin Group. He was born in Great...

Most Popular

Henri Fayol

Walt Disney

Taiichi Ohno

Philip B. Crosby

Kaoru Ishikawa

Ariana Grande

Adolf Hitler

• World Biography

Elon Musk Biography

1971 • South Africa

Entrepreneur, philanthropist.

Elon Musk was a multi-millionaire by the time he reached the age of thirty-one thanks to his creation of the company that became PayPal, the popular money-transfer service for Web consumers. Musk has become one of a new breed of what the New York Times called "thrillionaires," or a class of former high-tech entrepreneurs who are using their newfound wealth to help turn science-fiction dreams into reality. Musk is the founder of Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, a company based in El Segundo, California. In 2005 SpaceX was busy building the Falcon rocket, which he hoped could some day make both space tourism and a colony on the planet Mars realistic goals for humankind.

Sells homemade video game

Musk is a native of South Africa, born in 1971 to parents who later divorced. His father was an engineer and his mother—originally from Canada—was a nutritionist. Musk was fascinated by science fiction and computers in his adolescent years. When he was twelve, he wrote the code for his own video game and actually sold it to a company. In his late teens, he immigrated to Canada in order to avoid the required military service for white males in South Africa. It was still the era of apartheid, the South African legal system that denied political and economic rights to the country's majority-black native population. Musk was uninterested in serving in the army, which was engaged at the time in a battle to stamp out a black nationalist movement. Thanks to his mother's Canadian ties, he was able to enroll at Queen's University in Kingston, one of Ontario's top schools.

Musk had planned on a career in business, and he worked at a Canadian bank one summer as a college intern. This was his only real job before he became an Internet entrepreneur. Midway through his undergraduate education, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor's degree in economics and a second bachelor's in physics a year later. From there, he won admission to the prestigious doctoral program at Stanford University in California, where he planned to concentrate on a Ph.D. in energy physics. He moved to California just as the Internet boom was starting in 1995, and he decided he wanted to be in on it, too. He dropped out of Stanford after just two days in order to start his first company, Zip2 Corporation. This was an online city guide aimed at the newspaper publishing business, and Musk was able to land contracts with both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune to provide content for their new online sites.

Musk was just twenty-four when he started the company, and he devoted all of his energies to see it succeed. At one point,

"Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

he lived in the same rented office that served as his company's headquarters, sleeping on a futon couch and showering at the local YMCA, which "was cheaper than renting an apartment," he explained in an interview with Roger Eglin of the Sunday Times of London. Still, the company struggled to fulfill its contracts and meet the payroll and other costs, and he looked for outside financing. Eventually a group of venture capitalists, investors who provide start-up money to new businesses, financed Zip2 with $3.6 million, but he gave up majority control of the company in exchange.

Starts online bank

In the end, Musk's decision was a smart one. In February 1999 Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash, which was one of the largest cash deals in the Internet business sector at the time. Out of that amount, Musk was paid $22 million for his 7 percent share, which made him a millionaire at twenty-eight. In 1999, he used $10 million of it to start another company, which he called X.com. This was an online bank with grand plans to become a full-range provider of financial services to consumers. The company's one major innovation was figuring out how to securely transfer money using a recipient's e-mail address.

Musk's proven track record from Zip2 helped it gain serious attention and generous investors right away. Two important executives signed on with him: investment banker John Story and Bill Harris, the former chief executive officer of Intuit Corporation, the maker of the best-selling Quicken accounting software as well as TurboTax, a tax-preparation program. Harris was appointed president and chief executive officer of X.com, with Musk serving as company chair. The company received a generous infusion of $25 million in start-up capital from Sequoia Capital, a leading venture-capital firm in California.

X.com went online in December 1999 with a bold offer for new customers: those who opened an online checking account with X.com received a $20 cash card that they could use at an automatic-teller machine (ATM). If they referred a friend, they received a $10 card for each new member who signed up. Within two months, X.com had one hundred thousand customers, which was close to the number reached by its major competitor, Etrade Telebank. But consumer skepticism about the security of online banking was X.com's biggest obstacle to success, and there was a setback when Musk and the other executives had to admit that computer hackers had been able to perform some illegal transfers from traditional bank accounts into X.com accounts. They immediately started a new policy that required customers to submit a canceled check in order to withdraw money, but there were tensions in the office about the future of the company.

Buys PayPal

In March 2000, X.com bought a company called Confinity, which had started an Internet money-transfer presence called PayPal. PayPal was originally set up to let users of handheld personal digital assistants, or PDAs, transfer money. It had only been in business a few months when X.com acquired it, and Musk believed that its online-transfer technology, which was known as "P2P" for "person-to-person," had a promising future. He and Harris did not agree, and Harris resigned from X.com in May 2000. Five months later, Musk announced that X.com would abandon its original online bank and instead concentrate on turning itself into the leading global payment transfer provider. The X.com name was dropped in favor of PayPal.

PayPal grew enormously through 2001, thanks in part to its presence on eBay, the online auction Web site where person-to-person sales were happening in the hundreds of thousands. When PayPal became a publicly traded company with an initial public offering (IPO) of stock in February 2002, it had an impressive debut on the first day of Wall Street trading. Later that year, eBay bought the company outright for $1.5 billion. At the time, Musk was PayPal's largest shareholder, holding an 11.5 percent stake, and he netted $165 million in valuable eBay stock from the deal.

By then Musk had already moved on to his next venture. In June 2002 he founded SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies. He had long been fascinated by the possibility of life on Mars and was a member of the Mars Society, a nonprofit organization that encourages the exploration of the red planet. Filmmaker James Cameron (1954–) is one of several notable Mars Society members. Musk wanted to create a "Mars Oasis," sending an experimental greenhouse to the planet, which in favorable alignment of the planets is about 35 million miles distant from Earth. His oasis would contain a nutrient gel from which specific Mars-environment-friendly plant life could grow. His plan had a cost of $20 million. But then he learned that to send something into space with the standard delivery method, a Delta rocket made by the Boeing Corporation, would add another $50 million to the cost. Musk even tried to buy a rocket from Russia, but realized that dealing with the somewhat suspect international traders who dealt in such underground, or illegal, items was just too risky.

Borrows star Wars >name

Musk thought that maybe he might be able to build his own rocket instead. He began contacting innovators and technicians in the American aerospace industry, and he managed to lure some experienced engineers and technical specialists away from companies like Boeing and TRW to come and work for him at SpaceX's headquarters in El Segundo, California. He had a much more difficult time attracting venture capital for this idea, however. "Space is pretty far out of the comfort zone of just about every VC on Earth," he admitted to Matt Marshall of the San Jose Mercury News. Instead, he was forced to put up his own money to build what would become the first reusable rocket in the private sector.

Musk and his new SpaceX team began to build two types of Falcon rockets. The name came from the "Millennium Falcon," the spacecraft in the Star Wars movies. The plan was to build a rocket by using existing technology and at the lowest possible cost. The Falcon I, for example, uses a pintle engine, which dates from the 1960s. It has one fuel injector, while standard rockets used by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) generally use what is known as a "showerhead" design that features several fuel injectors. The company also needed a theodolite, which is used to align rockets, and instead of buying it new, they saved $25,000 by finding one on eBay.

There are other, equally expensive costs associated with rocketry. Since Musk's design would be reusable, the company needed to get back the rocket's first stage, which the rocket sheds as it leaves the Earth's atmosphere. The part usually falls into the ocean, according to safety plans, but retrieval at sea is expensive.

The New "Thrillionaires"

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (1953–) is ranked the seventh richest person in the world. Allen has used his wealth to finance SpaceShipOne. This private manned spacecraft, built by aircraft design pioneer Burt Rutan (1943–), was the first of its kind to reach suborbital space twice, which it did in 2004. For this two-time achievement, SpaceShipOne met the conditions of the $10 million Ansari X prize, established by the X Prize Foundation to encourage private entrepreneurship in aerospace.

Doom video game co-creator John Carmack (1970–; see entry) founded a computer game development company called id Software in 1991. He is considered one of the most gifted programmers ever to work in the gaming industry. He was one of the creators of the successful Doom and Quake games, which sold millions in the 1990s and attracted legions of devoted fans. In 2000, Carmack funded a new venture, Armadillo Aerospace in Mesquite, Texas, with the goal of building a manned suborbital spacecraft. It lost its bid to win the Ansari X prize when its vehicles ran into technical problems and crashed in 2004 and 2005.

Companies that contract with NASA charge $250,000 to bring such parts back, but Musk found some ocean-salvage companies that knew how to handle sensitive material. He found one that agreed to do the job for just $60,000. The Falcon does not have a specialty computer on board, which can cost $1 million alone to install and maintain. Instead its computer is a basic one that uses the same technology as an automatic teller machine and costs just $5,000.

Envisions Hondas in space

By building a reliable rocket at an affordable cost, SpaceX hopes to be able to take small satellites into orbit for a fee of around $6 million. This is half the standard rate in the aerospace business to take something into space. The company already had two customers—the U.S. Department of Defense and the government of Malaysia. "Many times we've been asked, 'If you reduce the cost, don't you reduce reliability?' This is completely ridiculous," Musk explained to Fast Company writer Jennifer Reingold. "A Ferrari is a very expensive car. It is not reliable. But I would bet you 1,000–to–1 that if you bought a Honda Civic that that sucker will not break down in the first year of operation. You can have a cheap car that's reliable, and the same applies to rockets."

Musk serves as the chief technology officer of SpaceX. All employees are shareholders, and the company's casual but committed atmosphere is reinforced by the workday presence of Musk's four dogs. He no longer sleeps at the office, however, for he has a home, a wife there, and in the garage a McLaren F1, a $1.2 million car that is the fastest production, or non-customized race car, in the world. He has testified before members of the U.S. Congress on the possibility of commercial human space flight and has also established the Musk Foundation, which is committed to space exploration and the discovery of clean energy sources. The Foundation runs the Musk Mars Desert Observatory telescope in southern Utah, as well as a simulated Mars environment where visitors can experience what life on Mars might be like, including waste-burning toilets. "I think human exploration of space is very important," he told Reingold. "Certainly, from a survival standpoint, the probability of living longer is much greater if we're on more than one planet."

For More Information

Periodicals.

Corcoran, Elizabeth. "Something Better than Free." Forbes (February 21, 2000): p. 62b.

Eglin, Roger. "Silicon Valley Shows How to Reach Stars." Sunday Times (London, England) (December 1, 2002): p. 7.

Lubove, Seth. "Way Out There." Forbes (May 12, 2003): p. 138.

Marshall, Matt. "Venture Capital Column." San Jose Mercury News (July 13, 2004).

Ptacek, Megan J. "X.com Scraps Bank Strategy to Focus on PayPal System." American Banker (October 11, 2000): p. 1.

Reingold, Jennifer. "Hondas in Space." Fast Company (February 2005): p. 74.

Schwartz,John."Thrillionaires: The New Space Capitalists." New York Times (June 14, 2005): p. F1.

Wallace, Nora K. "Vandenberg Air Base, Calif., to Launch SpaceX Reusable Rocket in January." Santa Barbara News-Press (October 5, 2003).

The Mars Society. http://www.marssociety.org/ (accessed on August 23, 2005).

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation. http://www.spacex.com/ (accessed on August 23, 2005).

User Contributions:

Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic:.

Home — Essay Samples — Business — Elon Musk — Short Biography Of Elon Musk

Short Biography of Elon Musk

• Categories: Biography Elon Musk

About this sample

Words: 468 |

Published: Apr 29, 2022

Words: 468 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

• Vance, A. (2015). Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the quest for a fantastic future. HarperCollins Publishers.
• Musk, E. (2017). Elon Musk's TED talk : The future we're building with hyperloop, rockets, and electric cars. TED Conferences LLC. https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_future_we_re_building_and_boring
• Vance, A. (2020). Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the quest for a fantastic future. Ecco.
• O'Connell, M. (2021). Becoming Elon Musk: How to build a tech giant from scratch. Scribe Publications.
• Vance, A. (2013). Elon Musk: The real Iron Man. Bloomberg Businessweek.
• Musk, E. (2019). Tesla, SpaceX, and the future of technology. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/01/132834/elon-musk-on-how-to-save-humanity/
• Hanlon, M. (2017). How Elon Musk's first principles thinking can help you problem solve. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelhanlon/2017/05/22/how-elon-musks-first-principles-thinking-can-help-you-problem-solve/?sh=2f069e4116db
• Vance, A. (2017). Elon Musk: How the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is shaping our future. Virgin Books.
• Vance, A. (2018). Elon Musk: The unauthorized autobiography. Lulu.com.
• Musk, E. (2013). The Elon Musk interview: Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity and his plans for colonizing Mars. AllThingsD.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr. Heisenberg

Verified writer

• Expert in: Life Business

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

1 pages / 642 words

1 pages / 477 words

2 pages / 803 words

3 pages / 1555 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Elon Musk

Elon Musk, the visionary entrepreneur and CEO of companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, has made significant contributions to the world of technology and space exploration. His entrepreneurial spirit, vision for the future, and [...]

Twitter has become an indispensable tool for businesses to manage their public relations and respond to crises effectively. With its real-time nature and wide reach, Twitter allows companies to communicate directly with their [...]

Elon Musk, renowned for his ambitious ventures in technology and space exploration, made waves in the social media sphere with his acquisition of Twitter. His involvement in the platform's operations has raised questions about [...]

Customer service and engagement play a crucial role in the success of businesses in today's competitive corporate landscape. With the rise of social media platforms, companies have been leveraging these tools to connect with [...]

Dodds, C. (2017, December 28). Elon Musk: Early Life and Education. Retrieved from https://astrumpeople.com/elon-musk-biography/

In a world dominated by oil and an increasing in environmental pollution, a little number of people try to change this situation. People with the intention of using alternative energies and create new technologies to improve our [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

• Famous Personalities /

Elon Musk Education & Biography

• Updated on  
• Nov 21, 2022

Elon Musk has become a global figure and a symbol of invention, innovation, technology, entrepreneurial creativity, and leadership. The younger generation wants to be like him. He motivates individuals by showing them what is achievable and how to manage a high-performance team to develop a worldwide corporation. Musk is the creator of numerous futuristic firms that have become brands in their own right, such as Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX , and The Boring Company, but he is most known for the electric vehicle manufacturing company Tesla. Musk has amassed a net worth of $57.9 billion via hard work, perseverance, and of course his smart work. But, what young and fresh entrepreneurs or leaders can learn about leadership from this renowned and ambitious billionaire? Here are the top 10 leadership lessons that you should be learning and inculcating from Elon Musk. 

This Blog Includes:

Elon musk biography, about elon musk, elon musk early childhood, elon musk personal life, elon musk education, elon musk career, elon musk startups, elon musk’s net worth, elon musk rewards & recognitions, 1. always believe in having a vision, 2.  stretch goals like musk, 3.  stop blindly following trends, 4.  believe in micromanaging , 5. talent plays a vital role, 6. embrace failures, 7. always use feedback to find solutions, 8. communication is the key , 9.  waive the need for unnecessary meetings , 10.  adapt to change, some lesser known facts about elon musk.

Elon Musk is a visionary entrepreneur and CEO. He co-founded PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX. He serves as CEO of Tesla and CEO of SpaceX, which he founded with the goal of reducing traffic congestion on the roads by using tunneling systems to create quick, cheap tunnels in urban areas.

He is also the founder of The Boring Company, which will build a network of high-speed tunnels in Los Angeles to relieve traffic congestion. The company’s first tunnel was completed in December 2017 and was officially opened in December 2018.

Furthermore, Musk’s companies have been valued at $82 billion by Forbes as of November 2017. At that time, Musk owned 30% or more of Tesla (TSLA), SolarCity (SCTY), and SpaceX.

The point is that Musk made his fortune from disrupting an industry (electric cars) with a product that makes financial sense while threatening traditional incumbents (automobiles). He did it by reinvesting his profits into research and development, improving production efficiency, and making good business decisions. That’s what makes him a visionary leader in our eyes — not only did he create new markets, but he also managed to make money while doing so.

Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa . His parents are Canadian: his mother is a former model and dietician , while his father is an electromechanical engineer. *

Elon’s childhood was marked by tragedy. He was pushed down the stairs and suffered serious injuries when he was a child. Luckily, he recovered. He even suffered from a serious accident when he has pushed down a flight of stairs at the age of ten. This experience, however, made him determined to succeed and to create a world that would be better for everyone in the future.

When Elon was ten years old, his father bought him a Commodore VIC-20 microcomputer. He taught himself how to program it. Back then, computer programming was considered a very challenging skill that most kids could not master. But Elon not only mastered it but developed a genuine passion for it as well.

He loved to read as a child. He later developed a deep fascination for computers and taught himself computer programming when he was ten.

Later in life, Elon severed ties with his father: “I had absolutely no contact with my father from the age of about 12 or 13 until I left for university,” he said in an interview last year. “When I came back two or three years later [for a visit], I had a million questions for him about how to do various things on the computer… And he just wasn’t interested in talking about it at all. He was like ‘I don’t know anything about computers. You’re on your own now.

His personal life has been the subject of significant public interest. He dated actress Talulah Riley for several years before marrying British actress Talulah Riley in 2002, with whom he had two sons, then divorced in 2008. In October 2017, he married Canadian Grimes, who released her first solo single “Flesh Without Blood” on April 7, 2018.

Elon Musk and his wife are the parents of six children. Griffin, Xavier, Damian, Saxon, Kai, and  X Æ A-Xii are among those present.

Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, grew up in Canada . The son of a Canadian model and a South-African engineer, Musk studied physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in physics (1992) and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics (1994).

He then attended Stanford University where he earned his Masters of Business Administration degree (1998) and Ph.D . in business administration (2002).

After graduating from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Musk worked for an Internet startup called Zip2 before going to work at PayPal as vice president of business development. After that, he founded his own company X.com, which later merged with Confinity and then PayPal. In 2002, he sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion – around 13 times what Musk had invested.

In his early career, Musk was known for taking bold risks. In 2000, he co-founded X.com, online financial services, and electronic payment company, with Kimbal Musk and the sale of zip2 to Compaq in 1999. After some initial success, the company was eventually acquired by PayPal in October 2002.

When PayPal was purchased by eBay in 2002, Elon Musk became a vice president at the company where he focused on new product development and strategic matters. In 2004, Musk left PayPal to form SpaceX as CEO and lead the development of the Dragon spacecraft family.

In addition to his work at SpaceX, Musk is a co-founder of Tesla Motors, Inc., an American automobile manufacturer specializing in electric cars. In 2003, he formed SolarCity (now owned by Tesla) as well as Zip2. He also owns a private rocket company called The Boring Company, which is developing a high-speed transportation system called the Hyperloop.

Although his companies are all cutting-edge technology companies that aim to revolutionize transportation and space travel, Musk tends to think big. He famously described his goal with Tesla as “to accelerate the advent of electric cars and renewable energy,” and he hopes that SpaceX will help us colonize Mars by making interplanetary travel a reality.

• Tesla Motors

The billionaire has recently unveiled Hyperloop, which is a transit system designed to transport people on high-speed trains between major cities in the world at speeds of over 1,200 mph (1,931 km/h), reducing journey times between cities significantly compared with conventional rail

The man behind Tesla and SpaceX is not only a tech pioneer but also a problem solver. He’s been credited with revolutionizing the electric car market, while at the same time working on improving space exploration technology. Elon Musk is an entrepreneur who has achieved the unimaginable, making him the most influential person of our times.

He started off working as a programmer in Silicon Valley before founding PayPal and Tesla Inc. In 2003 he founded SpaceX and SolarCity, with the aim to change the world for the better.

In 2016, he became only the second person to reach $20 billion in stock market value after Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos. At that point, Musk was worth more than $19 billion, according to research firm Bloomberg.

He has received numerous accolades for his work in the fields of business, engineering, and philanthropy.

Some of Elon Musk’s most notable achievements include:

● Co-founding both SpaceX and Tesla with the goal of creating a more sustainable future.

● Creating one of the first modern hyperloop(a type of transportation system), which aims to connect major cities in a way that is faster than a plane but safer than driving on surface streets.

● Pushing forward the development of rocket technology through his company SpaceX

• In 2006, Musk was an individual from the United States National Academy of Sciences Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board.
• Inc. magazine Entrepreneur of the Year grant for 2007 for his work on Tesla and SpaceX.
• 2007 Index Design grant for his plan of the Tesla Roadster. Worldwide Green 2006 item configuration grant for his plan of the Tesla Roadster, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev.
• American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics George Low honor for “the most extraordinary commitment in the field of room transportation in 2007/2008”. Musk was perceived for his plan of the Falcon 1, the main secretly evolved fluid fuel rocket to arrive at circle.
• Public Wildlife Federation 2008 National Conservation Achievement grant for Tesla and SolarCity. Other 2008 beneficiaries incorporate writer Thomas Friedman, U.S. Congressperson Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and Florida Governor Charlie Crist.
• Public Space Society’s Von Braun Trophy in 2008/2009, given for authority of “the main accomplishment in space”. Earlier beneficiaries incorporate Burt Rutan and Steve Squyres.
• Recorded as one of Time’s 100 individuals who most impacted the world in 2010.
• The world overseeing body for aviation records, Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, introduced Musk in 2010 with the most noteworthy honor in air and space, the FAI Gold Space Medal, for planning the main secretly evolved rocket to arrive at circle. Earlier beneficiaries incorporate Neil Armstrong, Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites and John Glenn.
• Named as one of the 75 most powerful individuals of the 21st century by Esquire magazine.
• Perceived as a Living Legend of Aviation in 2010 by the Kitty Hawk Foundation for making the replacement to the Space Shuttle (Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon space apparatus). Different beneficiaries incorporate Buzz Aldrin and Richard Branson.
• In February 2011, Forbes recorded Musk as one of “America’s 20 Most Powerful CEOs 40 And Under.”
• In June 2011, Musk was granted the US$250,000 Heinlein Prize for Advances in Space Commercialization
• In 2012, Musk was granted the Royal Aeronautical Society’s most elevated honor: a Gold Medal.
• In 2013, Musk was named the Fortune Businessperson of the year for SpaceX, SolarCity, and Tesla.
• Granted the President’s honor for Exploration and Technology of the Explorers Club at the yearly occasion on March 16, 2014.
• In 2014, Elon Musk was regarded with an Edison Achievement Award for his “obligation to advancement all through his vocation”.
• 2015 at Yale’s 314th Commencement Ceremony, got Honorary Doctorate in Engineering and Technology.
• In 2015, he was granted IEEE Honorary Membership.
• In June 2016, Business Insider named Musk one of the “Main 10 Business Visionaries Creating Value for the World” alongside Mark Zuckerberg and Sal Khan.
• In May 2017, Musk was granted the Oslo Business for Peace Award.
• In 2018, Musk was positioned 25th on Forbes rundown of The World’s Most Powerful People.
• Musk was chosen a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2018.
• Recorded among the Time 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2010, 2013, 2018 and 2021.
• Musk was granted as part (fifth class) of the Most Admirable Order of the Direkgunabhorn on March 4, 2019 for his commitment in the salvage at Tham Luang cave, Chiang Rai Province, Thailand.
• In 2019, Musk was granted the Starmus Festival’s Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication
• Musk was recorded joint first on the Forbes rundown of the “Most Innovative Leaders of 2019”.
• Musk was refered to as one of the Top 100 most powerful Africans by New African magazine in 2020.
• On December 1, 2020, Musk was granted the Axel Springer Award.
• Musk Ranked No.1 on Businessperson Of The Year 2020 List By Fortune Magazine.
• On January 7, 2021, Musk was positioned as the richest individual on the planet as indicated by Bloomberg.
• On January 10, 2021, Musk was positioned #1 on Forbes’ Billionaires List
• Monetary Times is naming Musk Person Of the year for his commitment to speed up the world’s vehicle industry towards EVs.
• Musk added to Newsweek Hall of popularity for his disturbance in the Auto and Space Industry
• On December 13, 2021 Time magazine named Musk Person of the Year.

10 Leadership Lessons to Learn from Elon Musk

One of the most important tenets of leadership is to have a vision and further inspire people and your followers to make that vision come true. Musk explains, “You need to have a very compelling goal for the company. Then, putting yourself in someone’s shoes who is talented at a global level, they have to trust that there is a potential for a great outcome and must believe the leader of the company that you’re the right person to work with.” 

Elon Musk is a wildly ambitious individual when it comes to innovation and chasing his vision to come true. He has proven it to the world multiple times, whether by creating brain chips to revolutionize neuroscience or finding ways to colonize Mars. These are all a part of his ‘stretch goals’ strategy. Such objectives are considered as truly important sources of individuals and organizational achievement & motivation. 

Did you know? Elon Musk created and sold a video game to a magazine when he was 12 years old. The space battle game ‘Blastar’ was sold for $500 to PC and Office Technology magazine. Musk also worked at ‘Rocket Science,’ a game start-up.

Meet the CEO Captain Raghu Raman Mentoring the World with His Army Lessons

Elon Musk believes that one should have his way of looking at everything. It’s definite that to achieve things that have never been conquered before, one has to do things that have never been done before. He is a firm believer in questioning and challenging the status quo. This approach has led SpaceX to create a truly innovative vehicle on its terms. 

Being a well-known workaholic, this serves as both a blessing and a curse for his employees. He has always led by example by taking an interest in every single aspect of his projects. Musk describes, “If you are a co-founder or CEO of a brand, you have to perform all the kinds of tasks you might not want to do. If you don’t do your chores, the company would never succeed because no task is too menial.” 

Did you know? PayPal, formerly X.com, was the source of Musk’s fortune. Paypal was founded in 1999 and was later bought by eBay for $1.5 billion, $165 million of which was handed to Musk in shares.

Elon Musk has always been meticulous about hiring employees of his company. There is no question that he sees the value in building an excellent team. Talent plays an extremely important role. To create such a fruitful team, Musk said, “Hire great people; this is 90% of the solution, as hiring wrong can cost you so much.” 

The Marvelous Matthew Perry a.k.a Chandler Bing: Could He Be More Inspirational!

Failure never derailed his visions. Instead, he has always embraced it as a way to prove that his team is doing something disruptive. Musk said, “A failure is always an option; if things are not failing, you are not innovating.” 

Did you know? Both of Musk’s triumphs and accomplishments, SpaceX and Tesla, were on the verge of failure. While the first three rockets failed to launch, the fourth did, and the Roadster had many production issues.

When an individual uses failure as a lesson, it allows them to tackle solutions and finally reach the goal. Musk’s piece of advice is, “I feel it is important to have a feedback loop, where you are constantly thinking about what you have done and how it could have been done better. Always think about how things can be done in a better manner and keep questioning yourself.” 

Communication is something Elon Musk has always urged his friends to do as efficiently as possible. The issues come from poor communication between departments. The only way out is to allow the free flow of information at all levels. To make something work between departments, people must talk to each other directly and make the right decisions. 

Did you know? Elon Musk was awarded the FAI Gold Space Medal by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale in 2010 for developing the first privately constructed rocket to reach orbit.

Musk has waived unnecessary meetings because that usually results in wasting time that doesn’t result in meaningful takeaways. He describes, “Excessive meet-ups are the blight of the big companies and almost always get worse with time. So get off the large meetings unless there’s something valuable to the audience, in which case keep them precise.” 

Did you know? Elon Musk also made an appearance in The Simpsons episode, “The Musk Who Fell to Earth”, Iron Man 2, The Big Bang Theory, and Rick and Morty

The billionaire is well-known for changing his mind based on whatever needs attention at that moment or to quickly change course on projects. Elon Musk has an erratic sense of decision making, especially in reaction to things he reads on social media platforms, and can sometimes give his employees a breakdown. 

Did you know? Musk named one of his sons Xavier, after Professor Xavier from the X-Men, as he admitted.

• His initial startup was Zip2
• Musk exited Stanford after only two days
• Musk made an appearance on ‘The Simpsons’, The Big Bang Theory
• Musk purchased James Bond’s submarine vehicle for near $1 million
• Musk ran a club to pay lease
• Musk started a non-profit school to teach his kids

Elon Musk helped to establish the electronic installment firm PayPal and established the rocket organization SpaceX. He became CEO of the electric-vehicle creator Tesla.

He started his career at the University of Pennsylvania in material science, Musk began considering making the plunge as a sequential tech business person with early victories like Zip2 and X.com. He was instrumental in making the organization that became PayPal.

He has invented Musk’s the Electric jet apart from starting new ventures, He is a great inventor too.

Musk was brought into the world by a Canadian mother and South African dad and brought up in Pretoria, South Africa.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you know Elon Musk is all over the news and it makes sense to look at exactly what Musk is doing and what you can learn from him. We hope you found our blog on 10 leadership lessons you can learn from Elon Musk thought-provoking. For more insightful content, keep reading on Leverage Edu ! 

Team Leverage Edu

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Contact no. *

Leaving already?

8 Universities with higher ROI than IITs and IIMs

Grab this one-time opportunity to download this ebook

Connect With Us

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. take the first step today..

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

September 2024

January 2025

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

Talk to our experts

1800-120-456-456

• Elon Musk Biography

Elon Musk Story

Elon Musk life story begins in South Africa, where he was born. Later, he went on to become an American entrepreneur who co-founded PayPal and established SpaceX, a launch vehicle and spacecraft manufacturer. He was also one of the original major investors in and the CEO of Tesla, an electric car company.

Elon Reeve Musk is the eldest of his parents' three children, and a citizen of three countries: South Africa, Canada, and the United States. He was born in 1971 to Maye Musk, a model and nutritionist, and Errol Musk, an electromechanical engineer whom Elon has described as "a dreadful human being." Read the entire article to learn about Elon Musk History which is inspiring for generations to come.

(Image will be uploaded soon)

Elon Musk Early Life

Musk was born in Canada to a Canadian mother and a South African father. Musk grew up with his head stuck in books and computers. He was bullied by his classmates and often beaten up by class bullies as a little, timid youngster until he grew strong enough to defend himself during a growth spurt in his teens. He developed a video game at the age of 12 and sold it to a computer magazine. Musk left South Africa in 1988 after getting a Canadian passport because he refused to support apartheid through compulsory military duty and wanted to pursue the higher economic prospects offered in the United States.

Elon Musk Qualification

Musk travelled to Canada at the age of 17 to attend Queen's University and evade military service in South Africa. Musk got his Canadian citizenship the same year, partly because he thought it would be easier to get American citizenship that way. Musk moved to the United States in 1992 to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned an undergraduate degree in economics before continuing on to earn a second bachelor's degree in physics. Musk went to Stanford University in California to earn a Ph.D. in energy physics after leaving Penn. But that Ph.D couldn’t make it to Elon Musk Degrees since he walked out of Stanford after only two days to start his first firm.

Elon Musk Works

In the summer of 1995, Musk relocated to Silicon Valley. He enrolled at Stanford University's PhD programme in applied physics, but dropped out after only two days. Kimball Musk, Elon's 15-month younger brother, had recently graduated from Queen's University with a business degree and had travelled to California to join him. As the early Internet grew in popularity, the brothers decided to develop a company called Zip2, an internet business directory with maps. That’s how Elon Musk started entering into the business world.

Zip2 eventually recruited angel investors and grew into a profitable firm thanks to the brothers' efforts. Zip2 was sold to Compaq for ＄307 million in 1999 by the brothers. Elon subsequently went on to create his own online financial services company, X.com. Confinity, a company formed by Peter Thiel and two others mere months after X.com and with headquarters in the same building, was its main competitor. In March 2000, the two firms joined and adopted the name of their major product, PayPal, an online money transfer service for individuals. In October 2002, Ebay, the online auction site, purchased PayPal for ＄1.5 billion in Ebay stock. Elon Musk, who had been the largest shareholder in PayPal with 11.7% of the company's equity shares, found himself with ＄165 million in Ebay stock at the age of 31.

Since leaving PayPal, he has founded, co-founded, and/or led companies focused on addressing three distinct existential risks to humanity's long-term survival: climate risk, single-planet dependency risk, and human species obsolescence risk. Two of these companies, SpaceX and Tesla Motors, he risked his entire early fortune to build.

Elon Musk Success Story

Musk joined engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning to help operate Tesla Motors in 2004, where he played a key role in the development of the world's first electric vehicle, the Tesla Roadster. Musk took over as CEO and product architect after Eberhard was fired from the company in 2007 due to a series of conflicts. Tesla has grown to be one of the most popular and desirable vehicle brands in the world under his leadership.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has signed many high-profile contracts with NASA and the US Air Force to manufacture rockets and execute military missions. Musk has been vocal about his desire to work with NASA on a collaborative mission to deploy an astronaut to Mars by 2025. Elon Musk has always been a proponent of various space-age technologies, but it hasn't always been a smooth journey for him. He went on to become a small business owner and eventually the CEO of two creative firms after being bullied in school. But he made the decision to ascend from there and never settle for anything less.

Tesla, in addition to creating electric automobiles, has a strong presence in the solar energy sector, courtesy to its purchase of SolarCity. This clean-energy services company, which was founded in 2006, now develops two rechargeable solar batteries that are primarily used for stationary energy storage. The Powerwall is designed for residential backup power and off-grid use, whereas the Powerpack is designed for business or electric utility grid use.

Facts about Elon Musk

Elon Musk was born in the year 1971 in South Africa.

He is best known for co-founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, but he first got his wealth as a PayPal co-founder.

Tony Stark, the fictional character created, was heavily influenced by Musk (a.k.a. Iron Man). Indeed, elements of Iron Man 2 were shot both inside and outside of SpaceX. Even Elon Musk makes an appearance in the film!

Musk's official annual pay for Tesla Motors is ＄1, similar to that of Steve Jobs and other well-known entrepreneurs.

Musk taught himself computer programming at the age of 12 and produced the video game Blastar, which he sold for $500.

Elon Musk did not become an American citizen until he was 31 years old, in 2002.

Elon Musk immigrated to Canada from South Africa when he was 17 years old. He eventually went to the University of Pennsylvania in the United States for college.

Musk moved to California after graduation to pursue physics graduate school at Stanford University. He dropped out of Stanford after only two days, opting to take advantage of the booming Internet industry.

Musk swiftly founded his first startup, Zip2, which supplied online newspapers with maps and business directories, after dropping out of graduate school. In 1999, he sold the company for ＄307 million.

Musk co-founded X.com in 1999, an online payment startup that later became PayPal before being purchased by eBay for ＄1.5 billion in equity (of which Musk received ＄165 million).

Tesla Motors, a firm that designs and manufactures electric sports automobiles, was co-founded by Musk. Tesla was able to flourish where other significant manufacturers failed in the electric vehicle sector. He is presently Tesla's CEO and chief product architect.

The National Highway Safety Administration gave the Tesla Model S a 5.4/5 safety rating, the highest ever given to a car.

Musk is one of the driving drivers behind SolarCity, which he and his cousins created. He is also the company's main shareholder.

Elon Musk also created SpaceX (formerly known as Space Exploration Technologies), a corporation that designs and manufactures space launch vehicles, with a concentration on rocket technology. His goal is to lower the cost of space travel in order to expand human life beyond the Earth.

Musk originally struggled to raise funds for SpaceX, which investors dismissed as a pipe fantasy. Musk put all of his personal funds into SpaceX in order to make it a reality (going against every piece of business advice ever written).

Elon Musk has shown entrepreneurial inclinations since he was a child. His Engineer father and Dietician mother, who recognised and encouraged his son's passion in technology, accepted him warmly. He got his first computer when he was ten years old and taught himself how to programme. At the age of 12, the young boy built a fully playable video game called "Blastar," which he allegedly sold for ＄ 500. Elon Musk attended Pretoria Boys High School and graduated in 1988. To avoid South Africa's obligatory military duty, he went to Canada in 1989 and enrolled at Queen's University in Ontario. He only stayed at the University of Pretoria for five months after that. Musk went on to the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business to earn a bachelor's degree in economics. He also left after two days to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions after being accepted into the University of Stanford's Physics Graduate Program. As we learn about Elon Musk biography, we understand that he has pursued goals that have motivated not only himself, but also the team of people he has engaged to work with him. Whether it's interplanetary space flight or electric vehicles, these objectives are all geared toward the future and dramatically improving existing conditions.

FAQs on Elon Musk Biography

1. What is Elon Musk's Full Name?

Ans: Elon Musk is an American entrepreneur and businessman who was born in South Africa. His full name is Elon Reeve Musk.

2. What Did Elon Musk Study?

Ans: Elon earned a double major in physics and business at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Elon says that while his business schooling was superb, he loved physics.

3. What are Some Interesting Facts About Elon Musk?

Ans: Some interesting facts about Elon Musk are:

Musk was born in the country of South Africa.

Musk developed a video game when he was 12 years old and sold it for ＄500.

Fun fact about Elon Musk qualification is that he dropped out of Stanford after only two days.

Musk is the father of six boys, all of which are boys.

To date, Musk has started eight businesses.

Musk earns ＄1 million a year at Tesla.

Musk has appeared in a number of Hollywood films and shows.

Find out when — and how — to retire the way you want with the AARP retirement calculator.

AARP daily Crossword Puzzle

Hotels with AARP discounts

Life Insurance

AARP Dental Insurance Plans

AARP MEMBERSHIP 

AARP Membership — $12 for your first year when you sign up for Automatic Renewal

Get instant access to members-only products, hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine.

• right_container

Work & Jobs

Social Security

AARP en Español

• Membership & Benefits
• AARP Rewards
• AARP Rewards %{points}%

Conditions & Treatments

Drugs & Supplements

Health Care & Coverage

Health Benefits

Staying Fit

Your Personalized Guide to Fitness

Get Happier

Creating Social Connections

Brain Health Resources

Tools and Explainers on Brain Health

Your Health

8 Major Health Risks for People 50+

Scams & Fraud

Personal Finance

Money Benefits

View and Report Scams in Your Area

AARP Foundation Tax-Aide

Free Tax Preparation Assistance

AARP Money Map

Get Your Finances Back on Track

How to Protect What You Collect

Small Business

Age Discrimination

Flexible Work

Freelance Jobs You Can Do From Home

AARP Skills Builder

Online Courses to Boost Your Career

31 Great Ways to Boost Your Career

ON-DEMAND WEBINARS

Tips to Enhance Your Job Search

Get More out of Your Benefits

When to Start Taking Social Security

10 Top Social Security FAQs

Social Security Benefits Calculator

Medicare Made Easy

Original vs. Medicare Advantage

Enrollment Guide

Step-by-Step Tool for First-Timers

Prescription Drugs

9 Biggest Changes Under New Rx Law

Medicare FAQs

Quick Answers to Your Top Questions

Care at Home

Financial & Legal

Life Balance

LONG-TERM CARE

​Understanding Basics of LTC Insurance​

State Guides

Assistance and Services in Your Area

Prepare to Care Guides

How to Develop a Caregiving Plan

End of Life

How to Cope With Grief, Loss

Recently Played

Word & Trivia

Atari® & Retro

Members Only

Staying Sharp

Mobile Apps

More About Games

Right Again! Trivia

Right Again! Trivia – Sports

Atari® Video Games

Throwback Thursday Crossword

Travel Tips

Vacation Ideas

Destinations

Travel Benefits

Outdoor Vacation Ideas

Camping Vacations

Plan Ahead for Summer Travel

AARP National Park Guide

Discover Canyonlands National Park

History & Culture

8 Amazing American Pilgrimages

Entertainment & Style

Family & Relationships

Personal Tech

Home & Living

Celebrities

Beauty & Style

Movies for Grownups

Summer Movie Preview

Jon Bon Jovi’s Long Journey Back

Looking Back

50 World Changers Turning 50

Sex & Dating

Spice Up Your Love Life

Friends & Family

How to Host a Fabulous Dessert Party

Home Technology

Caregiver’s Guide to Smart Home Tech

Virtual Community Center

Join Free Tech Help Events

Create a Hygge Haven

Soups to Comfort Your Soul

AARP Solves 25 of Your Problems

Driver Safety

Maintenance & Safety

Trends & Technology

AARP Smart Guide

How to Clean Your Car

We Need To Talk

Assess Your Loved One's Driving Skills

AARP Smart Driver Course

Building Resilience in Difficult Times

Tips for Finding Your Calm

Weight Loss After 50 Challenge

Cautionary Tales of Today's Biggest Scams

7 Top Podcasts for Armchair Travelers

Jean Chatzky: ‘Closing the Savings Gap’

Quick Digest of Today's Top News

AARP Top Tips for Navigating Life

Get Moving With Our Workout Series

You are now leaving AARP.org and going to a website that is not operated by AARP. A different privacy policy and terms of service will apply.

Go to Series Main Page

Inside the Mind of Elon Musk: What We Learned From His Biography

Walter isaacson’s 688-page book reveals the (strange) man behind the tech mogul.

Tim Appelo,

Billionaire Elon Musk, 52, let Walter Isaacson, 71, bestselling biographer of Steve Jobs, follow him for two years and interview his family and colleagues. The resulting book, Elon Musk (September 12), provides fascinating insights into the mogul’s weird mind, titanic achievements and astounding failures.

Yes, he grew Tesla into a company worth more than its five biggest rivals put together; built a spacecraft company, SpaceX, that sent astronauts into orbit; and bought Twitter — which he famously renamed X and is a huge force in American politics and culture.

Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine.

But there’s so much more to those stories, and Musk’s life, which Isaacson details in this weighty, 688-page portrait.

Here are some of the more interesting points from the buzzy biography.

Musk was bullied as a child

While Musk was growing up in his native South Africa, a schoolyard bully stomped on his head, leading to injuries that required decades of corrective surgery. The worst part? His father, Errol Musk, sided with his assailant, berating Elon for an hour. “He yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless,” Musk reports.

But at age 12, Musk learned an important lesson at a wilderness survival camp: "If someone bullied me, I could punch them very hard in the nose, and then they wouldn’t bully me again.”

Musk’s dad was probably the scariest person in his life

Musk compares his father — whom he refuses to speak with — to Jekyll and Hyde: bright and jolly one moment, darkly frightening the next. He says that Errol spins fantasies he seems to believe, embraces bizarre conspiracy theories, has made and lost fortunes, is addicted to high drama and has a peculiar love life. Musk’s mother, the model Maye Musk , 75, fears that her son will become like his father.

He may be on the autism spectrum

“He was never actually diagnosed as a kid,” Maye Musk told Isaacson, “but he says he has Asperger’s, and I’m sure he’s right.” (The term Asperger’s, which once was used to describe someone with autism spectrum disorder who has strong intellectual abilities, is no longer used by the autism community .) He does seem to display some characteristics associated with autism spectrum disorders; the book suggests that he is bad at picking up social cues, for instance. And he said, “It was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really meant.”

AARP NEWSLETTERS

%{ newsLetterPromoText  }%

%{ description }%

Privacy Policy

ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT

He's got a very dark side

“He’s attracted to chaotic evil,” said the singer Grimes, Musk’s former partner. She told Isaacson, “He associates love with being mean or abusive.” Musk demanded, for example, that she shame him for being fat. Grimes says that when he goes into “demon mode,” he “goes dark and retreats inside the storm in his brain. Demon mode causes a lot of chaos. But it also gets shit done.”

$20 off a Walmart+ annual membership

He chose unique names for many of his 10 children

​​With his first wife, Justine Wilson Musk, he has five children: Vivian Jenna, Griffin, Kai, Saxon and Damian.

​With Grimes’ friend Shivon Zilis, an executive at his company Neurolink, he has two more kids, Strider and Azure.

He had no children with the actress Talulah Riley, who married and divorced him twice.

Estrangement from his child Jenna helped downsize his lifestyle

Jenna, who has criticized her father’s wealth, has stopped talking to him. Stung by her rejection and criticism, Musk sold his six extravagant homes and moved to a small tract house rented from SpaceX in Boca Chica, Texas. "Possessions kind of weigh you down and they’re an attack vector,” he explains.

He wasn’t exactly happy in 2021 when he became the richest person on earth

When Tesla stock went from $25 a share in late 2019 to $260 on Jan. 7, 2021, Musk's wealth hit $190 billion, surpassing the fortune of the previous richest human, Jeff Bezos, 59. “He just couldn’t let himself enjoy the moment,” Musk's sister-in-law Christiana Musk told Isaacson. “He was throwing up and stricken with excruciating stomach pain.”

LEARN MORE ABOUT AARP MEMBERSHIP.

He falls to the floor when he's depressed — or extremely amused

When Musk is too depressed to stand up, his executives have to conduct meetings lying down next to him. And when he discovered that Twitter banned the word “turdburger,” he laughed so hard he fell to the floor, wheezing.

Musk likes to play with fire

When forbidden to play with fire as a child, Musk lit a boxful of matches. He once floored his $1 million McLaren sports car, flipping it and flying into the air, risking death for himself and passenger Peter Thiel, 55, another billionaire entrepreneur, who refused to wear a seatbelt. Both survived unscathed. Amber Heard, the actress whose marriage with Johnny Depp sparked lawsuits and whose affair with Musk was also fiery, told Isaacson, “Elon loves fire, and sometimes it burns him.” 

His impulsive actions are sometimes bad for business

After Musk loaned Ukraine communications satellites to help resist Russia’s invasion, the Pentagon offered $145 million to support his effort, but there was backlash on Twitter. So he angrily tweeted, "The hell with it ... we'll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free." When he abruptly unplugged Twitter’s computer servers and sent them from California to Oregon, it destabilized Twitter for two months and caused a meltdown while he was hosting a Twitter Spaces event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

He has regrets. Or does he ?

“My main regret,” Musk told sister-in-law Christiana Musk, “is how often I stab myself in the thigh with a fork, how often I shoot my own feet and stab myself in the eye.” But when Isaacson asked him about regrets, Musk quoted a line from his favorite movie, Gladiator : “Are you not entertained?”

Tim Appelo covers entertainment and is the film and TV critic for AARP. Previously, he was the entertainment editor at Amazon, video critic at  Entertainment Weekly , and a critic and writer for  The Hollywood Reporter, People , MTV,  The Village Voice  and  LA Weekly .

Discover AARP Members Only Access

Already a Member? Login

More From AARP

9 Essentials for a Happier Life, According to Oprah Winfrey

Her new book ‘Build the Life You Want’ with Arthur C. Brooks offers an action plan for ‘happierness’

The Big Fall 2023 Book Preview

Streisand and Winkler Among the Celebs With Big Memoirs Out This Fall

AARP Value & Member Benefits

Calm Sleep, Meditation & Relaxation App

$21 off a Calm Premium annual subscription

AARP Fitness Center

Workout videos, tips and tricks to help you on your fitness journey

Hollywood.com

5% off all movie tickets

AARP® Staying Sharp®

Activities, recipes, challenges and more with full access to AARP Staying Sharp®

SAVE MONEY WITH THESE LIMITED-TIME OFFERS

• Get Featured
• Our Patreon
• Biographies

Elon Musk Biography: Success Story of The 21st Century Innovator

In this success story, we will share the biography of Elon Musk, the CEO and CTO of SpaceX CEO, chief product architect of Tesla Motors, and co-founder of PayPal. Musk is also involved in developing a high-speed transportation system known as Hyperloop. Elon Musk invests in projects that can change our world. He is not only an entrepreneur but also an inventor, innovator, and engineer. Musk personally participates in designing electric cars and spaceships.

Elon Musk was the second entrepreneur in Silicon Valley (the first was James H. Clark) who created three companies with a market cap of more than $1 billion – PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors. Elon Musk dedicates himself to space and alternative energy technologies.

He plays by some different rules and does that quite successfully. The distinctive personality traits of Elon Musk are perseverance, critical thinking, accurate self-analysis, and hard work (he works 80-100 hours per week).

Table of Contents

Elon Reeve Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on June 28, 1971. He was the oldest of three children. His father is a South African-born British engineer, Errol Musk, and his mother is a Canadian-English and dietetics expert, Maye Musk. Musk spent his childhood in South Africa, and at the age of 9, he got his first personal computer, the Commodore VIC-20. Elon immediately got interested in programming and started to learn it by himself. At 12, he earned $500 by selling the computer game Blastar (a shooter similar to Space Invaders) he had created.

Biographies of famous people usually contain key episodes leading them to an overwhelming success. In Elon Musk’s biography, there were at least two such episodes. The first one was Musk’s decision when he was only 17. After graduating from a secondary school in Pretoria, he decided to leave his home and, without the support of his parents, to immigrate to the United States. However, he did not get into the United States right away.

How did Elon Musk become successful?

Elon Musk is the co-founder of PayPal and the founder of SpaceX, two companies that manufacture payment systems and spacecraft, respectively. He was an early investor in Tesla, which manufactures electric vehicles and batteries. He became Tesla CEO in 2008. In 2022, he acquired Twitter for $44 billion.

In 1989, Elon Musk moved to Canada to his mother’s relatives. Having obtained Canadian citizenship, Elon went to Montreal. At first, he worked in low-paid jobs and, for almost a year, was teetering on the brink of poverty. At 19, he entered Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. In 2000, he met his future wife, Justine Musk, who gave birth to his five sons: Damian, Griffin, Xavier, Saxon, and Kai. However, he broke up with Justine after eight years and, in 2010, got married a second time to a British actress named Talulah Riley, with whom he has lived for four years. He got divorced in 2014.

Elon Musk had been studying in Ontario for two years, and then, finally, his dream came true – in 1992, he relocated to the United States. He moved to the U.S. after receiving a scholarship from The University of Pennsylvania. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Physics Bachelor the following year. Still, he continued his studies at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for one more year. He obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics as well.

Elon Musk graduates from The University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in physics and from The Wharton School with a B.S. in economics.

When Elon Musk struggled with adolescent depression, he began actively absorbing philosophical and religious literature. Yet the most valuable lessons he eventually learned from Douglas Adams’ book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy .

Elon Musk learned that the most challenging thing was to come up with the right questions, and when he began to do that, the rest was obtained very simply. An episode that guided him to this conclusion was when a giant supercomputer, after several million years of thinking about the primary purpose of life, responded with the meaningless number 42.

Musk figured out that humanity had to expand the limits of its consciousness to learn to ask the right questions, and he had found his question: what things would have a significant impact on the future of humanity’s destiny? Elon Musk decided those would be the Internet, the transition to renewable energy sources, and space colonization. He wanted to try to contribute to all three of them. To do that, he needed funds.

Zip2 and PayPal

In the summer of 1995, Elon Musk made the second and the most crucial decision. Having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, he enrolled in graduate school at Stanford University to pursue studies in applied physics and materials science. However, after two days, he left graduate school, and with his brother, Kimbal Musk, he created his first I.T. company, Zip2. He worked from early morning until late evening. He lived in the same warehouse where he rented the office, and when he needed to shower, he had to go to the locker rooms of a local stadium. In return, he accumulated savings and kept the company afloat during the most difficult first two years.

At that moment, the Internet was experiencing a period of rapid growth and development; however, nobody had ever earned a considerable fortune from it. Musk’s company was one of the first ones to do this: he created a platform where newspapers – including credible ones like the New York Times – could offer their customers additional commercial services.

In 1999, the biggest search engine of that time, AltaVista (later acquired by Compaq), bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in securities. This deal set a record for selling a company for cash. Musk spent $20 million on a 1,800-square-foot condominium and completely renovated it. Also, he bought the McLaren F1, which he would wreck in 2000, and a 12-seat Dassault 900 private jet.

In 1999, Musk started to work on electronic payment systems that were gaining popularity. The X.com startup became his new business. In March 2000, X.com merged with a rival company, Confinity; Peter Thiel and Max Levchin ran that. Confinity developed software to allow owners of PalmPilots and other PDAs to store encrypted information on their devices, creating the first digital wallet. In 2001, after the merger, X.com was renamed to PayPal, and Elon Musk became the chairman and chief executive of PayPal.

There were disagreements on strategy and management between new teams, but they have never affected the company’s dynamics and growth. Musk was involved in developing new business models and conducted a successful viral marketing campaign, which led to a rapid increase in customers. In 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion. Elon Musk received $180 million for his share from PayPal and had enough funds to pursue his other interests: space engineering and alternative energy sources. That was when Elon stopped investing in the Internet business.

Tesla Motors

In 2003, engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla Motors . From the beginning, the company positioned itself as the first serial manufacturer of electric vehicles, and its founders dreamed of freeing the customers from the oil burden. Musk significantly supported such aspirations.

Elon Musk came into the project in 2004, leading an investment round in the startup with a personal contribution of $70 million. He became the chairman of the board of directors and, at first, did not take over the company’s operational management. Musk participated in designing their first electric car, a Tesla Roadster sports car based on the British Lotus Elise. He insisted on using carbon fiber composite materials in the hull to minimize weight, developed the battery module, and even some design elements, like the headlights. By 2006, the project had gotten into newspapers, and Musk received the Global Green 2006 product design award for the Tesla Roadster design. Tesla Motors continued to grow, and now the pool of investors, including the creators of Google, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin , and the total amount of the investments reached over $100 million.

However, when the Tesla Roadster was about to enter production in 2007, a run of bad luck started for Musk. Some management failures led to the fact that the actual selling price of the electric vehicle was almost twice as high as the initially implicit price of $92,000. In addition, Martin Eberhard made a strategic miscalculation: his concept of transmission for Tesla Roadster proved ineffective, and the car’s release had to be postponed for more than a year.

During this crisis, Elon showed incredible critical management skills: he fired everyone who stalled the project’s development, including Eberhard and a few other key players. After the cleanup, he headed the company by himself. Eberhard appealed to the court after being replaced by an interim CEO, Michael Marks. Still, the problem has been solved peacefully and so effectively that no details of the conflict were leaked to the public. In December 2007, Ze’ev Drori was appointed CEO and president of Tesla Motors. Elon Musk was a much better CEO and succeeded Ze’ev Drori. Drori became Vice Chairman and left the company in December 2008.

On the verge of crisis, Elon Musk continued vigorously cutting costs effectively: he reduced staff, demanded lower prices from suppliers, closed some offices, etc. As a result, the Tesla Roadster saw the world in 2008 with a minor – less than $20,000 – price increase.

In his most challenging moment in the late spring of 2008, Elon filed for divorce from his spouse, Justine, for reasons he did not want to make public. To save Tesla Motors, Musk received additional funds for the takeover of a software development company, Everdream, for $120 million by Dell; Elon Musk was the principal shareholder of it. He invested his last $20 million in Tesla Motors, saving the company from bankruptcy. Musk even gave personal guarantees to customers to make a refund in case of a business failure.

Soon, things went smoothly, which was especially impressive against the stagnating traditional auto industry. A German multinational automotive corporation, Daimler, made critical investments of $50 million in Tesla Motors, which helped save the company. Soon, the U.S. Department of Energy authorized the inclusion of Tesla Motors in a pool of innovative transport companies and authorized it to receive a preferential interest-bearing loan. Later, some skeptics criticized the Government for supporting Tesla Motors, whose product was focused exclusively on wealthy buyers.

The expression “electric vehicle” often evokes associations with something slow and clumsy, but in the case of Tesla Motors, it is not so. Tesla’s electric vehicles are fast and similar in appearance to luxury sports cars. However, there are plans to create more straightforward and affordable models. Tesla Motors’ engineers cooperate with Daimler and Toyota.

These companies’ so-called “hybrid” cars, equipped with an electric motor and an internal combustion engine, use Tesla Motors’ technology. In 2007, the Vice Chairman of General Motors, Bob Lutz, called Tesla the main reason for the decision to begin developing the electric car Chevy Volt. “If some Silicon Valley startup can solve this equation, no one is going to tell me anymore that it’s unfeasible,” Lutz said.

On June 29, 2010, Tesla Motors started its initial public offering (IPO). It was the second (after Ford) car-manufacturing company in U.S. history to enter the IPO market. Despite being unprofitable for ten years, Tesla Motors got listed on NASDAQ at $17 per stock and attracted more than $225 million of investments. It was indeed the best time to enter the IPO market. The oil slick due to the fault of British Petroleum covered a significant part of the Gulf of Mexico and was continuing to grow, and raising the issue of the transition to new fuels seemed more than logical at that time. As of February 05, 2015, one share of Tesla Motors, Inc. stock cost $220.99, and its total market cap reached $27.44 billion. Elon Musk owns 30% of Tesla Motots, Inc. (TSLA).

The main reason for Tesla’s financial success became a premium sedan, the Tesla Model S, with a battery that supplies 265 miles (426 km) of range in the EPA 5-cycle test. The production of Model S started in June 2012 with a price tag starting at $69,900. It was ranked 99 out of 100 points by Consumer Reports and the highest safety rating from the National Highway Safety Administration, a 5.4 out of 5 points.

At the presentation of Model S, Musk categorically stated that in twenty years, more than half of the produced vehicles would be electric ones. He was even ready to bet on that, as were many others. Yet even the most optimistic analysts’ estimates state that Musk’s forecast cannot be realized. However, that does not scare Tesla’s CEO: He changes reality by embellishing it.

Elon Musk believes that the world has become dependent on oil. This dependence leads to climate change and permanent geopolitical tensions. Refusing internal combustion engines in favor of electric motors can make a difference. Therefore, Tesla Motors is not a small business for Musk.

Musk continued to keep publicity interested in the company by starting a media argument with The New York Times columnist John M. Broder about one of the test drives of the Model S. It is worth mentioning that these publicity stunts gave their results. During the first half of 2013, 10,500 Model S were sold.

On October 09, 2014, The Tesla Motors team unveiled Model S 85D and P85D. That is the first electric car with a dual motor. Model S P85D has 691 hp motor power and an ‘insane mode’ acceleration: a 0-60 mph (0-97 kmh) run of 3.2 seconds. Additionally, the car can be equipped with a revolutionary autopilot system: a forward-looking camera, radar, and 360-degree ultrasonic sensors that actively monitor the surrounding roadway. With an enabled autopilot system, Model S can automatically change lanes, indicate and avoid pedestrians and collisions, and even read speed limit signs, adjusting the car’s speed accordingly. In addition, the new Model S has increased battery capacity. The cost starts at $79,900. Visually, however, the vehicle will be very similar to its counterpart, the Model S 60. In February 2014, the Tesla Model S was rated by Consumer Reports as the best car in the world for the second year.

A released crossover, the Tesla Model X, was delivered for new reservations in the latter half of 2016. On September 29, 2015, the first six deliveries of the Tesla X model started at a market launch event in the Fremont factory. The Tesla Motors team has designed the Model X P90D and 90D. Model X P90D has 259 hp front, 503 hp rear motor power, and a 0-60 mph (0-97 kmh) run of 3.2 seconds with Ludicrous Speed Upgrade. Additionally, Tesla X has a panoramic windshield with ample seating for seven adults and all their gear. The car is equipped with the first true HEPA filter with a “Bioweapon Defense Mode” button in a vehicle. Musk stated that when the HEPA filter operates at maximum performance, no pollen, bacteria, or viruses could be detected in the cabin—model X equipped with Falcon Wing doors automatically adjusted to the optimal opening arc.

On March 31, 2016, Elon Musk unveiled the five-seater Tesla Model 3. That is the most affordable Tesla car yet, with a price tag starting at $35,000. The base vehicle can run 0-60 mph (0-97 kmh) under 6 seconds. The range is at least 215 miles (346 km), and supercharger support is capable. Model 3 includes all the autopilot safety features and will be equipped in rear-wheel and all-wheel-drive versions. Musk said that it would be one of the world’s safest cars. Deliveries of Model 3 began in late 2017.

Elon Musk plans to cover the U.S., Europe, and Asia with a network of Supercharger stations. As of April 04, 2016, there are 613 Supercharger stations with 3,628 Superchargers worldwide.

In November 2017, Musk unveiled the new Tesla Semi Truck and Roadster. Tesla Motors started producing semi-trucks in 2019. The truck can drive 500 miles (804km), and its battery capacity is designed to last 1 million miles (1,60 million km).

Roadster and Model Y

In March 2019, Musk revealed the long-awaited Tesla Model Y to the world. The compact crossover will be available in four powertrains: Standard Range, Long Range, or Long Range with Dual Motor All-Wheel Drive and Performance. It is expected to be released in 2020. The Tesla Model Y’s range is approximately 300 miles (482 km), and it can do a 0-60 mph (0-97 kmh) run for 3.5 seconds. The Roadster is planned to be available in 2020 with a 0-60 mph (0-97 kmh) time of 1.9 seconds.

On May 01, 2015, within the Tesla Energy project, Tesla Motors introduced a wall-mounted, rechargeable lithium-ion battery with liquid thermal control called Powerwall. There are two models: one goes with 10 kWh with a price tag of $3,500, applicable for backup applications, and another battery goes with 7 kWh – $3,000, which can be used for daily cycle applications. Powerwall batteries can be combined in arrays to increase the total storage capacity. Each battery is provided with a 10-year manufacturer’s warranty.

For more demanding energy consumers, Tesla Motors provides a solution called Powerpack. It can be used in offices, industrial facilities, and utilities. In this case, it is possible to store much more energy. Moreover, 100 kWh batteries can be combined into 500 kWh to 10 MWh arrays. According to Elon Musk, 160 million Powerpack units would be enough to provide energy to all consumers in the United States, and 2 billion Powerpack units would be sufficient for the whole world.

SolarCity Corporation was an energy services provider headquartered in San Mateo, California, USA. The co-founders of SolarCity are two cousins, Lyndon and Peter Rive. Elon Musk is a shareholder of the company. In 2003, he invested $10 million after selling his 11 percent of PayPal stock.

SolarCity provided solar power systems for homes, businesses, and governments before Tesla acquired them. The company offered several programs for homeowners: the “MyPower” loan program, solar lease, and solar power purchase agreement (PPA).

In May 2008, the company built solar-powered electric systems for British Motors and eBay to power their headquarters and servers.

On January 15, 2015, SolarCity partnered with Credit Suisse Group AG to start a new solar financing facility worth $200 million. This credit facility is targeted at assisting customers in investing in solar energy systems through SolarCity’s “MyPower” loan program. This energy plan enabled customers to own their solar systems and pay less for electricity when compared to leasing them through power purchase agreements (PPAs). For example, it helped to decrease the price per kilowatt-hour, and customers must pay back the loan at 16 cents a kilowatt-hour for the first year.

SolarCity’s concepts were cost-efficient and environmentally friendly, coinciding with Elon Musk’s principles. The company, in particular, provided solar energy systems for Tesla Motors’ supercharger stations.

However, leadership in the industry did not save SolarCity from criticism. Some skeptics stated that solar electric power would never become an efficient business model, and because the competition was too high in this industry, keeping a company in the leading position would be challenging. However, on December 10, 2012, since SolarCity entered the IPO market, the value of its stock shares jumped from $8 to $11.79. As of February 13, 2015, the stock share price was $57.60, and the total market cap was $5.53 billion. Now, Elon Musk used to own 25% of SolarCity (SCTY).

Analysts consider his assurance in the company’s prospects to be the primary reason for the phenomenal success. If the creators of SpaceX and Tesla Motors bet on that technology, it means there is genuinely something to it. The Wall Street Society even devised a term for The Musk Effect .

Tesla reorganized its solar business into Tesla Energy after acquiring SolarCity in 2016 for approximately US$2.6 billion (equivalent to $3.2 billion in 2022).

Elon Musk started thinking of creating a space exploration technologies corporation ( SpaceX ) at the turn of the century. He was inspired by an ambitious idea of reducing space transportation costs to enable people to colonize Mars. SpaceX was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in Hawthorne, California, USA.

Elon Musk was fascinated by the opportunity of colonizing Mars and created Mars Oasis. The goal of the project was to create automated greenhouses, which, in the future, could have become a basis for a self-sustaining ecosystem. The main problem was the enormous delivery cost of greenhouses to Mars. Musk even tried to order launch vehicles from the Russian Federation and discussed that with Russian officials, but he decided not to make a deal with them. Later, Musk came up with the idea of designing his reusable launch vehicles and spaceships.

In March 2006, Elon Musk invested more than $100 million in SpaceX. The prices per launch vehicle ranged from $15 million in the Russian Federation to $65 million in the U.S., which seemed too high to the entrepreneur. He calculated that the cost of all the parts required for constructing a launch vehicle was only 2% of the launch vehicle price in the United States. This fact outraged Musk. He saw the root of the problem in the space industry’s bureaucratization, the small competitiveness of large corporations, and their lobbying efforts to prevent the entry of new players.

Musk was assured that the costs of creating and launching launch vehicles and spaceships could be reduced tenfold. First, he needed to redefine the goal of spaceflights. The primary mission of SpaceX is not the delivery of astronauts and cargo into orbit, but the colonization of other planets like Mars, and Musk wants to do that efficiently. In August 2008, one of the first investors who financially supported Elon Musk was Founders Fund, which belonged to his former PayPal partners, Peter Thiel and Dave McClure. In June 2009, on behalf of DFJ Venture, Steve Jurvetson led an undisclosed investment round, including Founders Fund, which executed at least $15 million of the proposed $60 million. On November 09, 2010, DFJ Venture and Founders Fund led another round of investments, and SpaceX raised $50.2 million. Yet, after all the investment rounds, Elon Musk owns 66% of SpaceX shares.

SpaceX started working on the Falcon 1 launch system in 2002. Designing it has taken four years and hundreds of millions of private investments. From 2006 through 2015, companies like DARPA, NASA, ORS, Celestis, ATSB, SpaceDev, Orbcomm, NSPO, and Astrium got interested in SpaceX and ran several test launches of the Falcon 1 rocket.

In 2006-2008, the first three flight attempts failed. On September 28, 2008, during the fourth flight attempt, Falcon 1 finally reached the orbit. If the fourth launch also failed, SpaceX would have never existed. NASA was impressed by these achievements and signed a $1.6 billion contract to fly American astronauts to and from Earth orbit. NASA plans to fly 12 delivery flights using SpaceX robotic Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket.

As of October 2012, SpaceX developed several types of rocket engines, Kestrel, Merlin 1, Draco, and Super Draco, without any support from the government. The last was designed for the Falcon family of launch vehicles, Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and the Dragon spacecraft.

However, Elon Musk does not want to rush with IPO this time. According to Elon Musk, all the achievements of SpaceX are a background for his biggest dream – an expedition to Mars. SpaceX is in the design process of the Mars Colonial Transporter. Also, Musk’s engineers work on innovative rocket engines (Grasshopper and the Falcon 9 rockets) and the Red Dragon spacecraft that uses Falcon Heavy rockets (a modified version of the Dragon capsule) to transport people from Earth to Mars. He said, “I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact.”

Falcon Heavy rocket flight animation:

Grasshopper and Falcon 9 are experimental launch vehicles that can make vertical landings and vertical takeoffs. On January 10, 2015, the first attempt to land the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Earth after the launch failed – it landed too roughly. Nevertheless, the SpaceX team made a tricky maneuver and landed a rocket on a floating platform off the coast of Florida.

Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 10, 2015

CEO Elon Musk reported through Twitter about the soft vertical landing of the rocket in the ocean within 10 meters. That gives hope for a successful landing next time at sea in non-stormy weather. According to the entrepreneur, 10-20 years from now, science fiction can become a reality.

Rocket soft landed in the ocean within 10m of target & nicely vertical! High probability of good droneship landing in non-stormy weather. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 11, 2015

On April 08, 2016, after four unsuccessful attempts, SpaceX made history by landing the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship at sea.

Landing from the chase plane pic.twitter.com/2Q5qCaPq9P — SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 8, 2016

Elon Musk demonstrated that SpaceX can reuse rockets in the future, which means cost savings for the company.

The incredible life of Elon Musk is an excellent example of a man who has accomplished his childhood dream: he conquers space. The colonization of Mars will soon become a reality thanks to SpaceX’s innovations in the space industry.

Interplanetary Transport System

On September 27, 2016, at the International Astronautical Conference in Mexico, Elon Musk gave a keynote speech called Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species. It announced that SpaceX was working on the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS). ITS will be equipped with at least 42 Raptor rocket engines capable of 128 meganewtons of thrust. Raptor is the first type of cryogenic methane-fueled rocket engine developed by SpaceX that was successfully test-fired at a McGregor, Texas testing facility in September 2016.

The spaceship can carry around 100 passengers in the pressured cabin, cargo, luggage, and materials to construct foundries and factories.

Elon Musk plans to achieve a population of 1 million for a Mars colony; that means 100 people per trip is 10,000 trips. Musk thinks implementing this plan can take from 40 to 100 years.

The initial trip time from Earth to Mars can take 80 days. However, Musk is intended to reduce the journey time to as little as 30 days in the distant future.

The biggest challenge is reducing the cost per flight per passenger beyond $200,000 or even $100,000. Based on the traditional space flight model, the cost per passenger reaches $10 billion.

Elon Musk anticipates that the first crew flight may happen within the next ten years if things go well.

Elon Musk is a demanding perfectionist and innovator in the high-tech industry. His education in physics and economics helped him see the objective truth and separate it from emotional and speculative forecasts. He thinks big. A bright example would be his concept of the fifth mode of transport called Hyperloop.

On August 12, 2013, Musk published a blog post about Hyperloop and a 58-page Alpha Hyperloop presentation , which shed some light on its structure and function. Hyperloop is a solar-power high-speed transportation system driven by linear induction motors and air compressors that should deliver people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes, covering a distance of 381.8 miles (614.44 km). Hyperloop is based on technology similar to magnetic levitation trains. An electromagnetic impulse is used to move the “pods” or “capsules,” and a low air pressure makes it possible to achieve higher speeds than any other ground transportation.

Hyperloop would be two times faster than a plane and would not be limited to any schedule. Elon Musk wanted to share the Hyperloop concept with the Governor of California, Jerry Brown, and U.S. President Barack Obama to build an efficient transportation system. Musk thinks that Hyperloop can be a great alternative to the Government’s plans to construct a high-speed railroad between San Francisco and Los Angeles, which will cost more than $70 billion. In his opinion, spending so much on such a slow type of transportation is wrong.

The transportation system would be composed of steel tubes. These tubes would be mounted on columns 50 to 100 yards apart (45.72 to 91.44 meters), and the capsules inside would speed up to 800 mph (1287 kmh).

Solar panels would power the Hyperloop transportation system mounted along the track. In addition, the heritage of other Musk companies comes in handy here: the motors and electronics of the capsules can be inherited from Tesla Motors, the engineers from SolarCity can help with the solar panels, and SpaceX can share the materials tested in space.

One capsule would accommodate up to 28 people, and if the project budget were increased from $6 to $10 billion, the Hyperloop cargo capsules could carry up to three cars in one cargo capsule. The starting acceleration of the capsule would be similar to that of a plane. There would be 70 capsules on the preliminary route with a minimum delay interval of 30 seconds; the safe distance between the capsules would be 5 miles (8 km). The payback period of investments is 20 years if a one-way ticket price is $20 and the annual number of transported passengers each way reaches 7.4 million.

The first Hyperloop transportation system is planned to be built along the California highway Interstate 5. Musk promises passengers an unprecedented level of security. Project engineers considered the possibility of emergency braking at depressurization of the capsule. They even offered solutions for bridge building anti-seismic design of columns for leveling the risk of destruction by an earthquake.

Hyperloop will be a great way of transportation for large cities located at a distance of not more than 900 miles (1500 km) from each other. For longer distances, aircraft is more suitable, the inventor believes.

Even though Musk is not ready to devote sufficient time to the Hyperloop concept, he is still willing to finance the development of the prototype. He also made the Hyperloop design an open source, allowing everyone to improve the current version of it, guaranteeing all possible support. Elon Musk said he was not afraid of losing something on Hyperloop financially, but it would be great to make a new mode of transport.

On January 15, 2015, Elon Musk, during his speech at the 10th Annual Texas Transportation Forum, announced the creation of a Hyperloop beta test track somewhere in Texas with a total length of 5 miles (8 km). In the future, this track will be used by different companies and a group of talented engineering students to test capsules of their designs. Musk also plans to organize an annual student Hyperloop capsule racer competition, like Formula SAE.

On February 26, 2015, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT or HyperloopTT) signed an agreement to begin construction of the first full-scale test track in 2016 of Hyperloop in the California model town of Quay Valley and complete the construction by 2017. In 2016, HyperloopTT received $100 million in investments to build a test track. On June 25, 2019, HyperloopTT presented its full-scale 1049ft (320m) passenger system to U.S. officials from the U.S. Department of Transportation in Toulouse, France. Also, they highlighted the first certification guidelines for Hyperloop systems to the USDOT in Washington, D.C.

The Boring Company

In January 2017, Musk unveiled The Boring Company , an enterprise dedicated to boring and building tunnels for vehicles to reduce city street traffic. Musk started with a test tunnel on the SpaceX facilities in Los Angeles. In October 2017, he uploaded the first photo of the tunnel on his Instagram account. The test tunnel was supposed to be 2 miles (3.31km), and Musk planned to reach such length in approximately four months.

Elon Musk’s Boring Company is reportedly working on a hyperloop project called “X-Tunnel.” The project is still in the early stages of development, but Musk has said he hopes to build a hyperloop tunnel between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Twitter Acquisition for $44 Billion

Elon Musk took over the social media company Twitter, Inc. in April 2022. By April, he began purchasing shares in January 2022 and had become the company’s largest shareholder, with a 9.1 percent ownership stake. Twitter invited Musk to join its board of directors, but he declined before making an unsolicited offer to buy the company on April 14; Twitter’s board responded with a “poison pill” strategy designed to resist a hostile takeover by Elon Musk but unanimously accepted his $44 billion buyout offer on April 25, 2022. Musk stated that he intended to introduce new features to the platform, open-source its algorithms so that anyone interested in studying them can do so, combat spambot accounts that impersonate real people by using fake profiles, and promote free speech on Twitter by allowing any user to post whatever they want without censorship.

Twitter was renamed to X on July 23, 2023, following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company in October 2022.

Elon Musk Book List

In one of his interviews , Elon Musk said that he liked to read fiction books and biographies of famous people, namely “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” by Walter Isaacson, “Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age” by B. Carlson, “Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down” by J.E. Gordon, etc.

In addition, he loves Dale Carnegie’s books and, of course, a lot of literature on engineering, design, business, and physics. Elon’s favorite book is “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams.

Elon Musk is a 21st-century industrialist who brings the most fantastic ideas to life. Elon Musk’s life story shows that all his success was thanks to his perseverance, hard work, and absolute faith in his projects. We hope you have enjoyed exploring Elon Musk’s biography and success story of Tesla Motors SpaceX, and they have inspired you to make discoveries.

Similar Posts:

• Top 20 Richest Americans of All Time
• Top 30 Richest People in the World
• Jeff Bezos Biography: Success Story of Amazon Founder
• Larry Ellison Biography: Success Story of Oracle Co-Founder
• Ole Kirk Christiansen Biography: Amazing History of LEGO Company

Related posts

George washington: biography, the first u.s. president, antoninus pius: biography, roman emperor, constantine the great: biography, roman emperor, vespasian: biography, facts, roman emperor.

June 6, 2024

Life Story of Famous People

Short Bio » Entrepreneur » Elon Musk

Elon Musk is a South African-born Canadian-American business magnate. He is also an investor, engineer, and inventor. He is the founder, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX, co-founder, CEO, and product architect of Tesla Motors, co-founder, and chairman of SolarCity, co-chairman of OpenAI, co-founder of Zip2, and founder of X.com which is merged with PayPal of Confinity. As of June 2016, he has an estimated net worth of US$11.5 billion, making him the 83rd wealthiest person in the world.

Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa. He is the son of Maye Musk, who is a Canadian model and dietitian. His full name is Elon Revee musk. After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk lived mostly with his father in locations in South Africa. Musk’s childhood was quite rough. Musk was severely bullied throughout his childhood. He was also hospitalized once. Because a group of boys threw him down a flight of stairs. Then they beat him until he blacked out. But he survived.

Elon Musk became interested in computing and computer programming at the age of 10. Two years later, he sold the code for a BASIC-based video game called Blastar. He sold it to a magazine called PC and Office Technology for approximately 500US$.

At the age of 19, Musk started his undergraduate study at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in 1992. After spending two years at Queen’s University, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. At the age of 24, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from its College of Arts and Sciences. He also got a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from its Wharton School of Business. Musk extended his studies for one year to finish the second bachelor’s degree.

While at the University of Pennsylvania, Elon Musk and fellow Penn student Adeo Ressi rented a 10-bedroom fraternity house. After that, They used it as an unofficial nightclub. In 1995, at age 24, Musk moved to California to begin a Ph.D. in applied physics and materials science at Stanford University. But he left the program after two days to pursue his entrepreneurial aspirations in the areas of the Internet, renewable energy, and outer space. In 2002, he became a U.S. citizen.

In 1995, Musk and his brother, Kimbal, started Zip2, a web software company. The company developed and marketed an Internet “city guide” for the newspaper publishing industry. Musk also obtained contracts with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.

In March 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services, and e-mail payment company, with US$10 million from the sale of Zip2. One year later, the company merged with Confinity, which had a money transfer service called PayPal.

• Born: June 28, 1971
• Birth Place: Pretoria, South Africa
• Height: 6′ 2″
• Net worth: 12 billion USD (2017) Forbes
• Education: Stanford University (1995–1995), More
• Spouse: Talulah Riley (m. 2013–2016), Talulah Riley (m. 2010–2012), Justine Musk (m. 2000–2008)
• Children: Xavier Musk, Kai Musk, Griffin Musk, Nevada Alexander Musk, Damian Musk, Saxon Musk

External Links

More Info:  Wiki | Twitter | Official Website

Fans Also Viewed

Published in Businesman and Enterpreneur

More Celebrities

• Español NEW

Elon Musk facts for kids

Elon Reeve Musk (born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO , and chief engineer of SpaceX ; angel investor, CEO, and product architect of Tesla, Inc. ; founder of the Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI ; president of the Musk Foundation ; and owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc. As of November 11, 2022, Musk had a net worth of about $174 billion. He is the wealthiest person in the world according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes 's real-time billionaires list.

Leadership style

Philanthropy, existential threats, media appearances, awards and honors, elon musk quotes, interesting facts about elon musk.

Musk was born and grew up in Pretoria , South Africa . Musk has British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. His mother is Maye Musk ( née  Haldeman), 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, Kimbal , and a younger sister, Tosca . After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk chose to live primarily with his father. Musk later regretted his decision and became estranged from his father.

Musk had been described as an awkward and introverted child. He was an enthusiastic reader of books, later attributing his success in part to having read Benjamin Franklin: An American Life , The Lord of the Rings , the Foundation series , and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy .When he was ten, he became interested in computers and video games. He taught himself how to program Commodore VIC-20 user manual and created a game. When he was twelve, he sold his BASIC -based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500.

Musk graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. When he was 17, he became a Canadian citizen and moved to Canada. Two years later, in 1990, he attended Queen's University, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania , where he received bachelor's degrees in economics and physics .

Business career

In 1995, Musk moved to California to attend Stanford University but decided to instead pursue a business career. He partnered with his brother Kimbal and Greg Kouri to begin Zip2. Errol Musk provided them with $28,000 to start the company, which developed an Internet city guide with maps, directions, and yellow pages . Compaq purchased Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999, and Musk received $22 million for his 7 % share.

In 1999, Musk co-founded the online bank X.com, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal . eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

In early 2001, Musk became involved with the nonprofit Mars Society. He wanted to help pay for placing a growth-chamber for plants on Mars . Because of his inexperience, companies did not want to pattern with him, so he began his own company, SpaceX , in 2002. Musk wants to make rockets that are reusable so they can make many trips to space. The first rocket, Falcon 1, failed to reach earth's orbit three times, but it succeeded in 2006. Another rocket, the Falcon 9 , has been launched over 100 times. In 2008, SpaceX signed a contract with NASA to fly 12 flights of its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station to resupply it. Since 2019, SpaceX has been developing Starship , a fully-reusable, super-heavy-lift launch vehicle. In 2020, SpaceX launched its first crewed flight, the Demo-2 . It became the first private company to place astronauts into orbit and dock a spacecraft with its crew at the International Space System. SpaceX has also developed a group of satellites called Starlink . They provide satellite Internet access to customers on earth. SpaceX also designs and launches custom military satellites for the Space Development Agency as part of a new missile defense system in low Earth orbit.

In 2004, Musk invested in the electric vehicle company Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc. ). He became its chairman and was active in creating several vehicles for the company. In 2008, he became Tesla's CEO. In 2022, Musk unveiled a robot developed by Tesla, Optimus.

In 2006, he helped create SolarCity, a solar energy company that was later purchased by Tesla and became Tesla Energy. By 2013, SolarCity was the second largest provider of solar power systems in the United States.

In 2013, Musk announced plans for a version of a vactrain—a vacuum tube train. The purpose of the train was to travel quickly between major cities. He called it the hyperloop . In 2015, he began a design competition for students and others to build Hyperloop pods that would run on a mile-long track owned by SpaceX.

In 2016, Musk co-founded Neuralink , a neurotechnology startup company. Neuralink believes it is able to merge the human brain with artificial intelligence (AI) by creating devices that are implanted in the brain to help it merge with the machines. This kind of technology could improve memory or allow the devices to communicate with software. The company also hopes to create devices with which to treat neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's disease , dementia , and spinal cord injuries.

In 2017, Musk founded the Boring Company to construct tunnels. He revealed plans for specialized, underground, high-occupancy vehicles that could travel up to 150 miles per hour. His goal is to reduce above-ground traffic in large cities. Two tunnel projects announced in 2018, in Chicago and West Los Angeles , have been canceled. However, a tunnel under the Las Vegas Convention Center was completed in early 2021. Local officials have approved further expansions of the tunnel system. In 2021, tunnel construction was approved for Fort Lauderdale , Florida.

Elon Musk Twitter @elonmusk I made an offer April 14, 2022

Since joining Twitter in 2009, Musk has been an active user and has over 100 million followers as of June 2022 [update] . Musk expressed interest in buying Twitter as early as 2017. In January 2022, Musk started purchasing Twitter shares. He quickly became the company's largest shareholder. On April 13, Musk made a $43 billion offer to buy Twitter. On October 27, 2022, the deal was final, and Musk became the owner of Twitter. He immediately fired many of the company's top executives .

Musk is often described as a micromanager and has called himself a "nano-manager." He expects his employees to work hard. Musk's leadership has been praised by some, who credit it with the success of Tesla and his other businesses. It has been criticized by others who see him as insensitive and too harsh.

Musk is the president of the Musk Foundation. The foundation has many goals.

• It helps provide solar-power energy systems in areas that have been hit by disasters.
• It supports research and development for human space exploration, pediatrics , renewable energy , and safe artificial intelligence .
• It supports education in science and engineering.

In 2015, Musk founded OpenAI , a not-for-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research company, whose goal is to make artificial general intelligence that is meant to be safe and helpful to humanity. He left OpenAI in 2018 so that someone else could run it and still use Tesla products and ideas.

In July 2018, Musk arranged for his employees to build a mini-submarine to help rescue the children trapped in a flooded cavern in Thailand. Engineers worked hard on this project. However, by the time it was ready to use, eight of the 12 children had already been rescued using full face masks, oxygen, and anesthesia . Rescuers helped the other children in this way, too, so the submarine was never used.

Musk made $175.8 million when PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002. He was first listed on the Forbes Billionaires List in 2012, with a net worth of $2 billion. In January 2021, Musk became the richest person in the world. He says he is gathering resources for humanity's outward expansion to space .

Personal views

Musk has stated that AI could be a great existential threat to humanity. In order to prevent AI taking over humanity, as is seen in several movies, he believes the government should be careful to limit how AI is used.

After AI, Musk sees climate change as the greatest threat to humanity. He believes there should be a carbon tax so people are more careful about preventing global warming.

Musk said fewer people being born each year is one of the biggest risks to human civilization. He believes that humans have the ability to live on Mars , and we will need many from earth to move there.

Musk has called himself "politically moderate" and was a registered independent voter when he lived in California. Musk voted for the Democratic party candidate for President in the 2016 and 2020 elections. However, he has since stated that he could "no longer support" the Democrats because they are the "party of division & hate." He encouraged "independent-minded voters" to vote Republican in the 2022 U.S. elections.

Musk criticized COVID-19 lockdowns, but closed the Tesla Fremont Factory because of the shelter-in-place order. In May 2020, he reopened the Tesla factory, even though the shelter-in-place order was still in effect.

Musk bought and donated BiPAP and CPAP machines, which are non-invasive ventilators. These machines helped many people who had to be treated for COVID-19.

In September 2020, Musk stated that he would not get the COVID-19 vaccine ; however, he did receive the vaccine because he had to travel to visit Tesla Giga Berlin and felt that he was given no choice. He said on Twitter, "I had major side effects from my second booster shot. And my cousin, who is young & in peak health, had a serious case of myocarditis ."

Musk has stated that he does not believe the U.S. government should provide subsidies to companies; instead they should impose a carbon tax to discourage poor behavior. He says that the free market would achieve the best solution.

Musk has promoted cryptocurrencies and supports them over traditional government-issued fiat currencies . However, when Musk was shown that cryptocurrency mining took more energy than it was worth from the environment, he announced on Twitter that Tesla would not use Bitcoin until the energy consumption issues are solved.

Musk has been known to criticize public transportation and encourage the use of private vehicles. Urban planners have pointed out that public transportation in dense urban areas is more economical, more energy efficient, and requires much less space than private cars.

Personal life

From the early 2000s until late 2020, Musk resided in California, where both Tesla and SpaceX were founded. In 2020, he moved to Texas, stating that California had become "complacent" about its economic success. While hosting Saturday Night Live in May 2021, Musk stated that he has Asperger syndrome .

Musk has 10 surviving children. He met his first wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson, while attending Queen's University in Ontario, Canada; they married in 2000. In 2002, their first child died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of 10 weeks. After his death, the couple had twins in 2004 followed by triplets in 2006. The couple divorced in 2008 and shared custody. In 2022, the eldest twin officially changed her name to reflect her gender identity as a trans woman and to use Wilson as her last name because she no longer wished to be associated with Musk. Musk blamed the estrangement of his daughter on what the Financial Times characterized as "the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists."

In 2008, Musk began dating English actress Talulah Riley . They married two years later at Dornoch Cathedral in Scotland. In 2012, the couple divorced, before remarrying the following year. After briefly filing for divorce in 2014, Musk finalized a second divorce from Riley in 2016. Musk then dated Amber Heard for several months in 2017; he had reportedly been pursuing her since 2012.

In 2018, Musk and Canadian musician Grimes said that they were dating. Grimes gave birth to their son in May 2020. According to Musk and Grimes, his name was "X Æ A-12" ; however, the name would have violated California regulations as it contained characters that are not in the modern English alphabet, and was then changed to "X Æ A-Xii" . This drew more confusion, as Æ is not a letter in the modern English alphabet. The child was eventually named X AE A-XII Musk, with "X" as a first name, "AE A-XII" as a middle name , and "Musk" as surname.

In December 2021, Grimes and Musk had a second child, a daughter named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk (nicknamed "Y"), born via surrogacy . Despite the pregnancy, Musk confirmed reports that the couple were "semi-separated" in September 2021; in an interview with Time in December 2021, he said he was single. In March 2022, Grimes said of her relationship with Musk: "I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, but we're very fluid." Later that month, Grimes tweeted that she and Musk had broken up again. In September 2023 it was reported that the pair had a third child, a son named Techno Mechanicus "Tau" Musk. In October 2023, Grimes sued Musk over parental rights and custody of their eldest son.

In July 2022, Insider published court documents revealing that Musk had had twins with Shivon Zilis, director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, in November 2021. They were born weeks before Musk and Grimes had their second child via surrogate in December. The news "raise[d] questions about workplace ethics", given that Zilis directly reported to Musk.

Musk was one of the three men who were an inspiration for the character of Tony Stark in the Marvel film Iron Man . The other two men were Steve Jobs and Donald Trump . He has made guest and cameo appearances in several movies, TV shows, and documentaries.

• Received an honorary doctorate in engineering and technology from Yale University (2015)
• Awarded an IEEE Honorary Membership (2015)
• Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) (2018)
• Won the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics George Low Transportation Award (2008)
• Won the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale Gold Space Medal (2010)
• Won the Royal Aeronautical Society Gold Medal (2012)
• Listed among Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People (2010, 2013, 2018, and 2021)
• Selected as Time ' s " Person of the Year " (2021)
• Elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2022)
• "I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary."
• "I'm nauseatingly pro-American. I would have come here from any country. The U.S. is where great things are possible."
• "If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic."
• "Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."
• When Musk was 12 years old, he created the video game Blastar. He ended up selling it to a computer magazine in 1984 for $500.
• Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla in 2003. Musk and his money joined a year later.
• He almost sold Tesla to Google for $6 billion in 2013.
• His first cameo was in the 2010 movie Iron Man 2 and he played himself on TV’s The Big Bang Theory .
• Musk was able to start SpaceX with the $100 million he earned when eBay bought PayPal .
• He has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome , a milder form of autism .
• Musk’s wealth is based on stocks and his ownership of companies. He takes no salary .
• Musk’s son Xavier has a special inspiration for his name: Comic book character Professor Xavier of Marvel ’s X-Men .
• Musk purchased James Bond ’s classic submarine car at a London auction in 2013 for close to $1 million.
• Maye Musk , Elon's mother, is currently a model .
• This page was last modified on 31 May 2024, at 15:05. Suggest an edit .

• Memberships

Elon Musk biography, net worth and quotes

Elon Musk is a South-African-Canadian-American entrepreneur who lives in the United States. He is the founder of SpaceX, Tesla, and Zip2, among others. He was also one of the people responsible for the success of PayPal. Currently, Elon Musk serves as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chief Designer (CDO) of SpaceX, CEO and product architect of Tesla (electric vehicles), and chair of SolarCity.

Who is Elon Musk? His biography

Where was Elon Musk born? Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South-Africa on 28 June 1971. He’s the son of a Canadian model (Maye Musk) and a South-African electromechanical engineer (Errol Musk). His parents divorced in 1980, after which Musk lived with his father. This was the start of Elon Musk history.

When he was 10 years old, he discovered the Commodore VIC-20. He taught himself to programme and sold a video game coded in BASIC two years later. BASIC is an imperative programming language that was originally intended to help people learn programming very quickly. The game was called Blastar, and he sold it to PC and Office Technology magazine for 500 dollars soon after.

As a child, Musk attended the independent Waterkloof House Preparatory School. He did his final exams at Pretoria Boys High School and moved to Canada in June of 1989. He then became a Canadian citizen through his Canadian mother.

In 1989 Elon Musk was admitted to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In 1992, after two years at Queen’s University, Musk left for the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Penn’s College of Arts and Sciences and his Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Musk continued for another year to get his second bachelor.

During his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Musk and fellow student Adeo Ressi bought a student house to use as a nightclub. In 1995, at the age of 24, Musk moved to California to get his PhD in physics from Stanford University, but left the university after just two days to start his own businesses in the fields of Internet, sustainable energy, and space. He became an American citizen in 2002.

When he’s just twelve years old, he’s already a better programmer than his teachers. At 24 he gave up his studies at Stanford University to start his first business.

Four years later, that business is worth 300 million dollars and is bought by Compaq. In 2002 eBay buys one of his other businesses – PayPal – for the considerable sum of 1.5 billion dollars. He invests his considerable fortune in SpaceX (2002), Tesla Motors (2004), and SolarCity (2006).

Musk and his brother Kimbal founded Zip2 in 1995, an internet company. They did so with investments from a group of business angels.

One of the things the company developed was an online city guide for newspapers. Elon Musk approached The New York Times, Wall street journal and the Chicago Tribune. During his time at Zip2, Elon wanted to become CEO of the company, but none of Zip2’s board members agreed. Compaq bought Zip2 for 307 million American dollars, of which 7% went to Musk, amounting to 22 million dollars.

X.com and PayPal

In March of 1999, Musk founded X.com, an online payment platform. He invested 10 million in it.

A year later the company merged with Confinity which had its own payment platform named PayPal. The merged company focused on the services PayPal already had and continued under that name in 2001.

PayPal’s early growth was driven by a promotion that offered money to new customers if they signed up. PayPal was acquired by eBay in October of 2002, for one-and-a-half billion dollars. 165 million of that sum went to Musk. Before the takeover, Musk had been the largest shareholder with 11.7% of PayPal’s shares.

In 2001 Musk came up with the concept ‘Mars Oasis’; a project to have a small, experimental greenhouse with food crops land on Mars to generate public interest in space exploration and setting up an international space station. In October of 2001, Musk, Jim Cantrell, and Adeo Ressi travelled to Moscow to purchase old ICBMs that could shoot things into space with reusable rockets.

In Russia, Musk was received by companies NPO Lavochkin and Kosmotras. However, he was seen as an amateur and was even allegedly spat at by one of the Russian designers of the rocket. In a video circulating on the internet, Musk says that he said he was looking for a rocket, but that they could keep the nuke.

Later, Musk and his team met again with the people behind Kosmotras, after which they were offered the rocket for 8 million US dollars. Musk declined the offer and decided to start his own company with which he would build affordable rockets. With 100 million of his own earnings, he then started SpaceX in 2002 (Space Exploration Technologies Corp.) As of 2021, he remains the CEO of the company and also holds the position of Chief Engineer.

His venture into commercial space travel inspired several Elon Musk quotes.

Elon Musk joined Tesla Motors, Inc. in 2004 as chairman and product architect. In 2008 he became CEO of the company. Tesla first built an electric car in 2008, the Tesla Roadster. He would later launch one of the earlier models into space. The electric car was the starting point for a whole series of new models.

His initiative to build electric cars is reflected by an Elon Musk quote about Ford.

One day, Musk thought of the idea of having SEXY in his Tesla portfolio. So he named the following models: Model S, Model 3, Model X and Model Y (S3XY). He could not name the second in the series Model E because Ford has registered this trade name.

Self-landing rockets

With SpaceX, Musk launched the first Falcon 1 rocket in 2006. The rocket did not make it to orbit, but despite this, the company was awarded a contract by NASA (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services).

SpaceX failed twice more, causing Musk so much stress that he reported physical pain and woke up screaming from nightmares.

In 2008, Musk succeeded in launching the Falcon 1 rocket and putting it into orbit. This made SpaceX the first commercial company to do so.

In the same year, SpaceX received a new contract from NASA, called the Commercial Resupply Services contract, for a total of 12 flights with the Falcon 9 rocket in combination with the Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS).

In 2012, the time had come. SpaceX’s Dragon capsule docked at the ISS, a true first for commercial spaceflight. The organisation’s goal was still to develop reusable rockets and capsules. The first stage of the Falcon Heavy rocket had successfully landed. Subsequent launches even landed the rocket on a self-propelled ship, just off the coast.

The Boring Company

The good ideas keep coming from Elon Musk. His many business initiatives and the risks he takes in business are reflected by several Elon Musk quotes.

In 2006, he started The Boring Company, aimed at building a tunnel network under cities to relieve the heavy traffic. In early 2017, the company started building a test trench on SpaceX’s premises. In 2021, a tunnel under the Las Vegas Convention Centre was completed. Local government authorities have since approved the tunnel system.

In 2018, Musk produced and sold flamethrowers for the company, inspired by the movie Spaceballs, directed by Mel Brooks.

Tesla Roadster in space

In 2018, Elon Musk launched the Falcon Heavy containing Musk’s personal Tesla Roadster. On the screen in the cockpit is a message for aliens who might enter the vehicle in the future: don’t panic!

In 2017, SpaceX unveiled the Starship. A year later, SpaceX announced it planned a trip to the moon in 2023. In 2020, the company performed its first manned flight, making them the first commercial company to put a person into orbit.

In 2018, Elon Musk launched the Falcon Heavy containing Musk’s personal Tesla Roadster. On the screen in the cockpit is a message for aliens who might enter the vehicle in the future: don’t panic!

Starlink satellites

In 2015, SpaceX began developing the Starlink satellites that were put into low Earth orbit. The constellation of satellites would be shot into space in phases and the whole project would take around 10 years and cost $10 billion.

SpaceX has faced a lot of criticism from astronomers who say that this satellite constellation will cause danger in space. Musk firmly rejects the criticism and states that the impact of the satellites is zero.

Elon Musk is very optimistic when it comes to crypto currencies, especially about Dogecoin. The founder of Tesla and SpaceX tweeted several times about this digital currency, which he himself calls the people’s coin.

In a statement, he explains that many people around him have bought Dogecoin and that he therefore also supports this token. He feels that this is the crypto currency of the general public. Musk acknowledges that he has invested in Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin.

Elon Musk wife and children (spouse)

It is clear that Elon Musk is a busy man. Besides his businesses, he also has six children to look after. In 2020, Musk had a son with his then girlfriend Grimes. Before that, he had five other children with his ex-wife Justine Wilson. His first child with Justine died of cot death. Nevada Alexander Musk was only 10 weeks old.

Little is known about most of his children. The name of his last child was the subject of much debate. He and partner Grimes named the child XÆ A-Xii. In a podcast with Joe Rogan, Musk revealed the way the name is pronounced: X-Ash-A-Twelve.

Between 2010 and 2015, Musk was married to Talulah Riley.

Elon Musk net worth

A large part of Elon Musk’s net worth comes from the shares he owns in Tesla and SpaceX. On 8 December 2021, he was officially the richest man in the world, with an estimated net worth of $278 billion. Musk is ahead of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and billionaires Bill Gates and Larry Page on the list of the world’s richest people.

Elon Musk quotes

• “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”
• “If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not.”
• “There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.”
• “When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars, people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.”
• “Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”
• “It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.”
• “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
• “Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.”
• “Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell.”
• “We’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.”
• “The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.”
• “People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.”
• “I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.”

Publications and Books of Elon Musk

• 2018. Making life multi-planetary . New Space, 6(1), 2-11.
• 2017. Making humans a multi-planetary species . New Space, 5(2), 46-61.
• 2006. The secret Tesla Motors master plan (just between you and me). blog), August, 2.
• 2001. U.S. Patent No. 6,185,194 . Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
• 1999. U.S. Patent No. 5,944,769 . Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

How to cite this article: Sari, J. (2019). Elon Musk . Retrieved [insert date] from Toolshero: https://www.toolshero.com/toolsheroes/elon-musk/

Published on: 02/07/2019 | Last update: 12/13/2023

Add a link to this page on your website: <a href=”https://www.toolshero.com/toolsheroes/elon-musk/”>Toolshero: Elon Musk</a>

Did you find this article interesting?

Your rating is more than welcome or share this article via Social media!

Average rating 4.8 / 5. Vote count: 51

No votes so far! Be the first to rate this post.

We are sorry that this post was not useful for you!

Let us improve this post!

Tell us how we can improve this post?

Jessie Sari

Jessie Sari is a content writer at ToolsHero. Jessie studies Trade Management in Asia at the Hogeschool van Rotterdam. As part of her education, she focuses on building fundamental skills, including marketing, importing and exporting products and services in Asia, economy, finance, management, consultancy and project management.

Related ARTICLES

Warren Buffett biography, quotes and net worth

Napoleon Hill biography, quotes and books

Dale Carnegie biography and books

Tony Buzan biography and books

Richard Branson biography, quotes and net worth

Henry Ford biography and quotes

Also interesting.

Edward Thorndike biography, quotes and books

Edward De Bono biography, quotes and books

Wolfgang Köhler biography, quotes and books

One response to “elon musk biography, net worth and quotes”.

Great article

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

BOOST YOUR SKILLS

Toolshero supports people worldwide ( 10+ million visitors from 100+ countries ) to empower themselves through an easily accessible and high-quality learning platform for personal and professional development.

By making access to scientific knowledge simple and affordable, self-development becomes attainable for everyone, including you! Join our learning platform and boost your skills with Toolshero.

POPULAR TOPICS

• Change Management
• Marketing Theories
• Problem Solving Theories
• Psychology Theories

ABOUT TOOLSHERO

• Free Toolshero e-book
• Memberships & Pricing

Advertisement

Elon Musk Biography

This is a full biography on Elon Musk.

Elon Musk is an entrepreneur and businessman from South Africa. Some of the companies that he founded include PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors. As of January 2021, Musk is the wealthiest man in the world.

Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. His parents divorced when he was only 10, and to escape from his unstable life he became interested in computers and software. He taught himself how to create his own software and when he was 12 years old he sold his first software - a game he created called Blastar. Musk was also interested in karate and wrestling. When he was 17 years old, he moved to Canada to attend Queen’s University. Another reason he left South Africa was to avoid mandatory service in the South African military. Musk became a Canadian citizen that same year because he felt like it would be easier for him to become an American citizen as a Canadian than as a South African.

Master Entrepreneur

Musk eventually earned a degree in economics and physics in 1992. After this, the Internet Boom occurred, and Musk began building his internet businesses. In 1999 PayPal was created as a way to send and receive money digitally. This made shopping for goods and services much easier than they had been in the past. In 2002, Musk and other investors sold PayPal for more than a billion dollars. In 2004, Musk invested in Tesla, an electric car company, and eventually became its co-founder and CEO. Today, Tesla is well known throughout the world for its innovative technology and is one of the world’s most valuable companies.

Elon in Space

In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX. The mission of the company was to build spacecraft for commercial space travel. In less than six years, NASA presented SpaceX with a contract to transport cargo to and from the International Space Station (ISS). In 2012, Musk and SpaceX launched the Falcon 9 rocket into space and toward the ISS with 1,000 pounds of supplies for the astronauts living there. This made history because this was the first time a private company sent any goods to the ISS.

Since then, SpaceX has been in charge of sending supplies, people, and satellites into space. Commercial spaceflight has been propelled into the future by a billionaire that began his career as a kid playing games on his personal computer.

Related activities

Breaking News

Elon Musk, America’s richest immigrant, is angry about immigration. Can he influence the election?

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal were speaking to a crowd of business leaders in 2013 about creating their first company when the conversation seemed to go off script. Originally from South Africa, Kimbal said the brothers lacked lawful immigration status when they began the business in the U.S.

“In fact, when they did fund us, they realized that we were illegal immigrants,” Kimbal said, according to a recording of the interview from the Milken Institute Global Conference.

“I’d say it was a gray area,” Elon replied with a laugh.

Eleven years later, Elon was back at the Milken Institute last month in Beverly Hills, talking once again about immigration. This time, he described the southern border as a scene out of the zombie apocalypse and said the legal immigration process is long and “Kafkaesque.”

“I’m a big believer in immigration, but to have unvetted immigration at large scale is a recipe for disaster,” Musk said at the conference. “So I’m in favor of greatly expediting legal immigration but having a secure southern border.”

San Diego is now the top border region for migrant arrivals

For first time in 25 years, San Diego is the top spot in the nation for migrant border crossings, surpassing Tucson.

April 25, 2024

Musk, the most financially successful immigrant in the U.S. and the third-richest person in the world, has frequently repeated his view that it is difficult to immigrate to the U.S. legally but “trivial and fast” to enter illegally. What he leaves out: Seeking asylum is a legal right under national and international law, regardless of how a person arrives on U.S. soil.

But as the election year ramps up and Republicans make border security a major theme of their campaigns, Musk’s comments about immigration have grown increasingly extreme. The chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, who purchased the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) in 2022, has sometimes used his giant microphone to elevate racist conspiracies and spread misinformation about immigration law.

Musk’s business manager did not respond to a request for comment, nor did representatives for SpaceX and Tesla. X does not have a department that responds to news media inquiries.

While Musk’s views are clear, what’s murkier is his influence. Some see him as an influential opinion maker with the power to shape policy and sway voters, while others dismiss him as a social media bomb thrower mainly heard within a conservative echo chamber.

“If you haven’t heard it already, I’m sure you’re going to see members of Congress citing Elon Musk and pointing to his tweets, and that’s a scary concept,” said Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragán (D-San Pedro), who leads the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

She says she believes Musk is influential with her Republican colleagues who are “always looking for new anti-immigrant talking points.”

Polling shows immigration is a top issue for voters. For the third month in a row, it was named by respondents to an open-ended April Gallup poll as the most important problem facing the U.S.

Border security could sway some California Democrats — and control of Congress

Since Trump got Republicans to bail on a bipartisan border deal, some Democrats have grown more outspoken in favor of stricter immigration policies and stronger border security.

March 21, 2024

The November election that’s shaping up as a rematch between President Biden and former President Trump will be the first presidential contest since Musk bought X — a site Trump had been banned from for inciting violence before Musk reinstated his account last year.

Musk used the platform to come to Trump’s defense last week after the former president was criminally convicted for falsifying records in a hush money scheme. “Great damage was done today to the public’s faith in the American legal system,” Musk wrote on X , calling Trump’s crime a “trivial matter.”

After meeting with Trump in March, Musk told former CNN anchor Don Lemon that he’s “leaning away” from Biden, but doesn’t plan to endorse Trump yet. He also said he won’t donate to any presidential campaign.

Campaign contribution records show Musk regularly donated to both Republicans and Democrats through 2020. That includes a handful of donations to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said his relationship with Musk dates back to his time as San Francisco mayor but that they’ve never discussed immigration.

“I think people have formed very strong opinions on this topic,” Newsom said. “I don’t know that he’s influencing that debate in a disproportionate way. Not one human being has ever said, ‘Hey, did you see Elon’s thing about immigration?’”

How Musk talks about immigration on X

Last year Musk visited the Eagle Pass, Texas, border , meeting with local politicians and law enforcement to get what he called an “unfiltered” view of the situation.

He also helped spread viral reports falsely claiming the Biden administration had “secretly” flown hundreds of thousands of migrants into the U.S. to reduce border arrivals.

“This administration is both importing voters and creating a national security threat from unvetted illegal immigrants,” Musk wrote March 5 on X . “It is highly probable that the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11.”

But the migrants in question fly commercial under a program created by the Biden administration , exercising the president’s authority to temporarily admit people for humanitarian reasons. The program allows up to 30,000 vetted people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela lawfully relocate to the U.S. each month and obtain work permits if they have a financial sponsor.

Contrary to Musk’s claim that the administration is looking for Democratic voters, those arriving under the program have no pathway to citizenship. The claim gives fuel to extremist ideologies such as great replacement theory , the racist conspiracy that there’s a plot to reduce the population of white people.

Earlier this year, Musk targeted a controversial bill in the California Legislature that would help immigrants with serious or violent felony convictions fight deportation using state funds. Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles) pulled the bill after Republicans slammed it on social media, garnering the attention of Musk, who wrote about it on X : “When is enough enough?”

In February, shortly after a bipartisan group of senators released details of a border security bill that had gone through lengthy negotiations, Musk again echoed great replacement theory, writing on X : “The long-term goal of the so-called ‘Border Security’ bill is enabling illegals to vote! It will do the total opposite of securing the border.”

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) shot back.

“No, it’s not focused on trying to be able to get more illegals to vote,” Lankford said on CNN. “That’s absurd.”

Musk’s immigration journey

There’s a particular irony in Musk attacking the program that allows limited arrivals for humanitarian reasons while simultaneously saying he favors legal immigration, said Ahilan Arulanantham, a lawyer, professor and co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA. The program offers would-be migrants a lawful pathway to reach the U.S. and reduced arrivals at the border from the beneficiary countries.

“That shows a very deep confusion about a fairly basic point about immigration law and the way the policy works,” Arulanantham said. Musk’s lack of criticism of a similar program for Ukrainians illustrates the undercurrent of racism accompanying attacks on the program for Latin American migrants, he added.

Musk amplifying false claims is counterproductive to rational immigration policy, Arulanantham said.

“Every voice adds to the pile, and the louder the voice, the marginally greater the addition to the pile,” Arulanantham said. “He is a very loud voice.”

Elon Musk visits Israel to meet top leaders as accusations of antisemitism on X grow

Elon Musk visited Israel, where he toured a kibbutz that was attacked last month by Hamas militants and met with top leaders.

Nov. 27, 2023

David Kaye, a UC Irvine law professor who studies platform moderation, said Musk’s promotion of misleading or false statements, including those about immigrants, is concerning because he can influence conversations on X in a way no one else can.

“There’s already a pretty robust kind of alarmist approach to immigration, so Musk might only add a little bit of fuel to a pretty big fire,” Kaye said. “But the fact is he’s got a ton of followers. To the extent he promotes disinformation, I think that’s a cause for concern for the United States having fair and fact-driven debates over immigration.”

Musk’s own immigration story is described in the biography “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson. Musk left South Africa in 1989 for Canada, where his mother had relatives, Isaacson wrote. While in college he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and, after graduating, enrolled at Stanford but immediately requested a deferral.

He and his brother Kimbal had invented an interactive network directory service, like a precursor to Google Maps.

Just before pitching the idea to a venture company, Kimbal was stopped by U.S. border officials at the airport on his way back from a trip to Toronto “who looked in his luggage and saw the pitch deck, business cards and other documents for the company. Because he did not have a U.S. work visa, they wouldn’t let him board the plane,” Isaacson writes in the book. So a friend picked him up and drove him into the U.S. after telling another border agent that they were seeing the David Letterman show.

After finalizing the investment, the firm found immigration lawyers to help the Musk brothers get work visas, according to Isaacson.

Once Musk married his first wife, he became eligible for U.S. citizenship, and took the oath in 2002 at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds.

Video: ‘Elon Musk’ biographer explains the book’s complicated motivations

Author Walter Isaacson joined the L.A. Times Book Club to discuss the stories and controversy behind his bestselling “Elon Musk” biography.

Oct. 2, 2023

Musk’s recent commentary on immigration and other political issues appears to be a reversal from his views a decade ago, said Nu Wexler, who has worked in policy communications at tech companies and for congressional Democrats.

Wexler recalled when Musk left Fwd.us , the political action organization spearheaded by Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg in 2013 to advocate for immigration reform. Musk left because Fwd.us backed conservative lawmakers who wanted immigration reform but supported oil drilling and other policies that went against Musk’s environmental priorities.

“I agreed to support Fwd.us because there is a genuine need to reform immigration. However, this should not be done at the expense of other important causes,” Musk told the news site AllThingsD at the time.

When Zuckerberg created Fwd.us, it made smart business sense for tech executives to make the business case for immigration reform, Wexler said. Now, immigration is a more divisive issue and executives on the left are less willing to dive into politics.

“At some point he decided that being the main character was helpful personal branding,” Wexler said of Musk. “I don’t know if he’s going to change minds on immigration, although he might be able to fire up the base.”

Alex Conant, a GOP consultant and partner at the public affairs firm Firehouse Strategies, said Musk’s influence could grow if Trump wins the election. If an immigration bill were to take shape at that point, Musk’s endorsement or rejection could shape the debate, he said.

“That’s the sort of scenario where all the sudden he might have some power,” he said.

There appears to be growing evidence for that possibility. Trump and Musk have discussed a possible advisory role for the billionaire, the Wall Street Journal reported last week . If Trump reclaims the White House, Musk could provide formal input on border security policies.

Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report.

More to Read

Opinion: How anti-immigrant bigotry hugely misunderstands our economy

April 9, 2024

Letters to the Editor: Immigration is our top worry? So much for welcoming the poor, huddled masses

March 3, 2024

Opinion: Is Biden about to close the border in the name of election year politics?

Feb. 29, 2024

Get the L.A. Times Politics newsletter

Deeply reported insights into legislation, politics and policy from Sacramento, Washington and beyond. In your inbox three times per week.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Andrea Castillo covers immigration. Before joining the Los Angeles Times, she covered immigrant, ethnic and LGBTQ+ communities for the Fresno Bee. She got her start at the Oregonian in Portland. A native of Seattle, she’s been making her way down the West Coast since her graduation from Washington State University.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Calmes: Which is it? Biden the mastermind or Biden the bungler?

June 6, 2024

Column: Trump’s pity party maligns America’s real darkest days

Housing & Homelessness

Why California lawmakers are giving up a bid to repeal a nearly 75-year-old anti-public-housing measure

Vice President Kamala Harris met by protesters outside fundraiser in San Francisco

June 5, 2024

• India Today
• Business Today
• Reader’s Digest
• Harper's Bazaar
• Brides Today
• Cosmopolitan
• Aaj Tak Campus
• India Today Hindi

Exclusive: Ex-Tesla employee says people in the company work extra hours but Elon Musk does not force them

Cameron sralla got laid off from tesla recently. in an exclusive interview, he tells us about his experience at the company and how nobody at tesla works extra hours under pressure..

Listen to Story

• Cameron Sralla got laid off from Tesla within two years of joining
• He said he got some great opportunities while working at the company
• He said layoffs are business decisions and he doesn’t take them personally

In April this year, Elon Musk had announced that Tesla would be saying goodbye to 10 percent of its workforce. As a result, many techies across the globe lost their jobs and their lives changed after the much-dreaded “Dear Employee” email. Some ex-Tesla employees also took to social media and shared their side of the story. Among these employees was Cameron Sralla, based out of Austin, US.

Sralla began his journey with Tesla in September 2022 and was initially hired as a factory software support technician. In his LinkedIn post talking about his experience at the company, Sralla said that even though he is disappointed with the layoffs, the company is "selling magic."

We got in touch with Sralla over a telephonic conversation and asked him about his experience at the company, what got him into tech space, and a lot more. During the candid conversation, he said that with Tesla, Elon Musk has built a company that is “different from any other he has worked for.

Moving cities and experience at Tesla

Sralla, who got into the tech space to make a positive impact on the world, moved to a different city in order to join Tesla. Talking about how he took a risk of moving to a different city for the company, he said, “I took a risk to work for Tesla moving to a new city and leaving the good job because I knew it would provide that opportunity, which it did. I am very proud of the work I was able to accomplish while with the company. My work at Tesla was focused on software engineering in the manufacturing setting and I gained an incredible amount of experience in this sector during the time I was there.”

He also said that Tesla is a company that is doing things that “other companies have either chosen not to participate in or didn't participate in until Tesla came along and did it.”

He added, "The company gives an opportunity for people to be involved in a fast-pace company that actually cares about moving forward rather than just protecting their position in the market or something like that."

Speaking of moving forward, Sralla elaborated how he rose through the ranks and within two years, was making decisions that had a direct impact on the company. Tesla, he added, thus rewards competence.

On Elon Musk and insane deadlines

Tesla chief Elon Musk makes a lot of headlines for his management style. Many people have called out Musk for his leadership style. Even in Musk’s biography penned by Walter Isaacson, a former SpaceX employee had said that the tech mogul would sometimes give insane deadlines.

We asked Sralla if he was given any such deadlines due to which he had some sleepless nights. Responding to the same, he said, "Speaking specifically, I didn't receive any marching orders specifically from Elon. My role was more limited to my specific job function, which was with the factory software team."

He then added that he never received any message indicating that "his performance or ability to do his job correctly was based on if he needed to work extra hours or something like that."

On being laid off

So, how did it feel being laid off from a company he respected so much? Speaking about the same, Sralla said, “Disappointment, but (it was not) not wholly unexpected given the layoffs that had just occurred a few weeks earlier. Tesla is a business and has to make business decisions. I do not take that personally. My disappointment lies in that I cannot continue to do the amazing work I got to be a part of.”

Advice for people who have been laid off

Ai’s impact on software engineering.

The entire tech world is talking about the impact of AI on human jobs these days. While some people believe that AI helps people be more productive, others are afraid that it might replace them. Sralla belongs to the former school of thought and thinks that we aren’t losing our jobs anytime soon to AI.

Speaking of AI’s impact on his field and the possibility of it taking human jobs, he said, "Well, there are a lot of big benefits that AI brings in. But there is still the physical world. And technology still needs to interact with the physical world to realise these advantages.

"Language models are useful in many areas and will likely become even more so. However, their impact on fields like manufacturing is not entirely clear yet. There might be a tonne of benefits but there's still a gap. I think that there's room for software engineers to interact with.

"Additionally, software is more than just knowing the right syntax to use in your code. The crucial aspect is understanding what the code is supposed to do, which requires interaction with people. Customers or stakeholders must provide that information. And I haven't seen a good method of bridging in that gap through software yet. I haven't seen anything where a software product is taking away the ability for a software engineer to work with a customer to find a solution to their problem. In my opinion, so far, AI is just a tool that enables software engineers to be more effective at their job." Published By: Divyanshi Sharma Published On: May 27, 2024