elon musk biography in short

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PayPal and SpaceX

• X (formerly Twitter)

When was Elon Musk born?

Where did elon musk go to school, what did elon musk accomplish.

Elon Musk (born June 28, 1971, Pretoria , South Africa) South African -born American entrepreneur who cofounded the electronic-payment firm PayPal and formed SpaceX , maker of launch vehicles and spacecraft . He was also one of the first significant investors in, as well as chief executive officer of, the electric car manufacturer Tesla. In addition, Musk acquired Twitter (later X) in 2022.

Musk was born to a South African father and a Canadian mother. He displayed an early talent for computers and entrepreneurship. At age 12 he created a video game and sold it to a computer magazine. In 1988, after obtaining a Canadian passport, Musk left South Africa because he was unwilling to support apartheid through compulsory military service and because he sought the greater economic opportunities available in the United States .

Musk attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and in 1992 he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania , Philadelphia, where he received bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics in 1997. He enrolled in graduate school in physics at Stanford University in California , but he left after only two days because he felt that the Internet had much more potential to change society than work in physics. In 1995 he founded Zip2 , a company that provided maps and business directories to online newspapers. In 1999 Zip2 was bought by the computer manufacturer Compaq for $307 million, and Musk then founded an online financial services company, X.com, which later became PayPal, which specialized in transferring money online. The online auction eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

Musk was long convinced that for life to survive, humanity has to become a multiplanet species. However, he was dissatisfied with the great expense of rocket launchers. In 2002 he founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) to make more affordable rockets. Its first two rockets were the Falcon 1 (first launched in 2006) and the larger Falcon 9 (first launched in 2010), which were designed to cost much less than competing rockets. A third rocket, the Falcon Heavy (first launched in 2018), was designed to carry 117,000 pounds (53,000 kg) to orbit, nearly twice as much as its largest competitor, the Boeing Company’s Delta IV Heavy, for one-third the cost. SpaceX has announced the successor to the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy: the Super Heavy–Starship system. The Super Heavy first stage would be capable of lifting 100,000 kg (220,000 pounds) to low Earth orbit . The payload would be the Starship, a spacecraft designed for providing fast transportation between cities on Earth and building bases on the Moon and Mars. SpaceX also developed the Dragon spacecraft, which carries supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). Dragon can carry as many as seven astronauts, and it had a crewed flight carrying astronauts Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken to the ISS in 2020. The first test flights of the Super Heavy–Starship system launched in 2020. In addition to being CEO of SpaceX, Musk was also chief designer in building the Falcon rockets, Dragon, and Starship. SpaceX is contracted to build the lander for the astronauts returning to the Moon by 2025 as part of NASA ’s Artemis space program.

Musk had long been interested in the possibilities of electric cars, and in 2004 he became one of the major funders of Tesla Motors (later renamed Tesla), an electric car company founded by entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning . In 2006 Tesla introduced its first car, the Roadster , which could travel 245 miles (394 km) on a single charge. Unlike most previous electric vehicles, which Musk thought were stodgy and uninteresting, it was a sports car that could go from 0 to 60 miles (97 km) per hour in less than four seconds. In 2010 the company’s initial public offering raised about $226 million. Two years later Tesla introduced the Model S sedan, which was acclaimed by automotive critics for its performance and design. The company won further praise for its Model X luxury SUV, which went on the market in 2015. The Model 3, a less-expensive vehicle, went into production in 2017 and became the best-selling electric car of all time.

Dissatisfied with the projected cost ($68 billion) of a high-speed rail system in California, Musk in 2013 proposed an alternate faster system, the Hyperloop , a pneumatic tube in which a pod carrying 28 passengers would travel the 350 miles (560 km) between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 35 minutes at a top speed of 760 miles (1,220 km) per hour, nearly the speed of sound . Musk claimed that the Hyperloop would cost only $6 billion and that, with the pods departing every two minutes on average, the system could accommodate the six million people who travel that route every year. However, he stated, between running SpaceX and Tesla, he could not devote time to the Hyperloop’s development.

X (formerly Twitter )

Musk joined the social media service Twitter in 2009, and, as @elonmusk, he became one of the most popular accounts on the site, with more than 85 million followers as of 2022. He expressed reservations about Tesla’s being publicly traded, and in August 2018 he made a series of tweets about taking the company private at a value of $420 per share, noting that he had “secured funding.” (The value of $420 was seen as a joking reference to April 20, a day celebrated by devotees of cannabis .) The following month the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Musk for securities fraud, alleging that the tweets were “false and misleading.” Shortly thereafter Tesla’s board rejected the SEC’s proposed settlement, reportedly because Musk had threatened to resign. However, the news sent Tesla stock plummeting, and a harsher deal was ultimately accepted. Its terms included Musk’s stepping down as chairman for three years, though he was allowed to continue as CEO; his tweets were to be preapproved by Tesla lawyers, and fines of $20 million for both Tesla and Musk were levied.

Musk was critical of Twitter’s commitment to principles of free speech , in light of the company’s content-moderation policies. Early in April 2022, Twitter’s filings with the SEC disclosed that Musk had bought more than 9 percent of the company. Shortly thereafter Twitter announced that Musk would join the company’s board, but Musk decided against that and made a bid for the entire company, at a value of $54.20 a share, for $44 billion. Twitter’s board accepted the deal, which would make him sole owner of the company. Musk stated that his plans for the company included “enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.” In July 2022 Musk announced that he was withdrawing his bid, stating that Twitter had not provided sufficient information about bot accounts and claiming that the company was in “material breach of multiple provisions” of the purchase agreement. Bret Taylor, the chair of Twitter’s board of directors, responded by saying that the company was “committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk.” Twitter sued Musk to force him to buy the company. In September 2022 Twitter’s shareholders voted to accept Musk’s offer. Facing a legal battle, Musk ultimately proceeded with the deal, and it was completed in October.

Among Musk’s first acts as Twitter’s owner were to lay off about half the company and to allow users to purchase for $8 a month the blue check-mark verification, which had previously been bestowed by Twitter upon notable figures. In addition, he disbanded Twitter’s content-moderation body and reinstated many banned accounts, most notably that of former U.S. president Donald Trump , which had been suspended after the U.S. Capitol attack on January 6, 2021 . Advertising revenue fell sharply as many companies withdrew their ads from the platform. Musk changed the name of the company from Twitter to X in July 2023. (Tweets became posts with the change.)

Elon Musk Biography

Birthday: June 28 , 1971 ( Cancer )

Born In: Pretoria, South Africa

Elon Musk is one of the greatest and most prolific modern inventors and is responsible for monumental advancements in futuristic technology like renewable energy and space travel. Many of his innovations seem to be right out of a science-fiction movie, but throughout his career he has brought about huge scientific breakthroughs. After making his first fortune from the internet payment service ‘PayPal’, he invested $100 million in his space travel company, ‘SpaceX’ and began building satellites, launch vehicles and other spacecraft both for NASA and for his own company, creating new milestones with his privately funded spacecraft. Many of his revolutionary ideas and inventions focus on space travel, renewable energy, commercial electric cars and other technologies, that look to a future where fossil fuels and other resources may be in shorter supply. His futuristic and visionary ideas have won him both scientific and philanthropic recognition and awards. The pop culture sometimes portrays him as a sort of real life super hero, dedicated to providing worldwide solutions to international problems. Musk looks to the future, hopes for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and continues to plan far-reaching futuristic goals such a human colony on Mars. Scroll down to learn all about this illustrious personality.

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Girlfriend: Grimes (2018)

Also Known As: Elon Reeve Musk

Age: 53 Years , 53 Year Old Males

Spouse/Ex-: Justine Musk (m. 2000–2008), Talulah Riley (m. 2010–2012; m. 2013–2016)

father: Errol Musk

mother: Maye Haldeman

siblings: Kimbal Musk , Tosca Musk

children: Damian Musk, Griffin Musk, Kai Musk, Nevada Alexander Musk (died), Saxon Musk, Xavier Musk

Born Country: South Africa

Quotes By Elon Musk CEOs

Ancestry: German American, South African American, South African Canadian

Personality: INTJ

City: Pretoria, South Africa

Founder/Co-Founder: PayPal, SpaceX, Zip2, X.com, Musk Foundation, Tesla Motors

education: University Of Pennsylvania

You wanted to know

What companies does elon musk own, what is elon musk's role at tesla, what is neuralink and what is elon musk's involvement with it, what is the hyperloop and how is elon musk associated with it, what are some notable achievements of spacex, founded by elon musk.

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Elon Musk was briefly in a relationship with American actress Amber Heard in 2016, but the couple split owing to their conflicting schedules.

Elon Musk started dating Canadian musician Grimes in 2018. In May 2020, Grimes gave birth to their son. In March 2021, Musk stated that he was single. In March 2022, Grimes revealed that they have broken up and she further stated that they welcomed a daughter through surrogacy in December 2021. 

In 2022, Insider, an American financial and business news website published court documents stating that Musk fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, the company's top executive, in November 2021. As of June 2022, Elon Musk has nine children with three different women.

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Introduction

(born 1971). South African-born American entrepreneur Elon Musk cofounded the online money-transfer firm PayPal. In the early 21st century he turned his attention to the manufacture of space vehicles. Musk was also one of the first significant investors in and chief executive officer (CEO) of the electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors. In 2022 he acquired the social media service Twitter .

Early Life and Education

Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, to a South African father and a Canadian mother. He became interested in computers at an early age. When he was 12 years old he created a video game and sold it to a computer magazine. In 1988 Musk left South Africa because he was unwilling to support apartheid through mandatory military service and because he sought the greater economic opportunities available in the United States.

Musk attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and in 1992 he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. There he received bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics. In 1995 he moved to California to attend graduate school in physics at Stanford University. However, he left after only two days, believing that the Internet had much more potential to change society than work in physics.

PayPal and SpaceX

Later in 1995 Musk founded Zip2, a company that provided maps and business directories to online newspapers. In 1999 the computer manufacturer Compaq bought Zip2 for millions of dollars. Musk then founded an online financial services company, X.com, which later became PayPal. The online auction eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for more than $1 billion.

Long interested in space exploration , Musk in 2002 founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) to make more affordable and fully reusable rockets. Its first two rockets were the Falcon 1 (first launched in 2006) and the larger Falcon 9 (first launched in 2010). They were designed to cost much less than competing rockets. A third rocket, the Falcon Heavy, was first launched in 2018. It was designed to carry nearly twice as much to orbit as its largest competitor for one-third the cost. The successor to the Falcon rockets was the Super Heavy–Starship system. The rocket was designed to lift the heavier Starship spacecraft into orbit. The first test flights of the system were launched in 2020. SpaceX also developed the Dragon spacecraft, which carry supplies and astronauts to the International Space Station . In addition to being CEO of SpaceX, Musk was also chief designer of the rockets and spacecraft.

Tesla and Hyperloop

In 2004 Musk became one of the major funders and chairman of Tesla Motors (later renamed Tesla), an electric car company. In 2006 Tesla introduced its first car, the Roadster, which could travel 245 miles (394 kilometers) on a single charge. Unlike most previous electric vehicles, it was a sports car that could go from 0 to 60 miles (97 kilometers) per hour in less than four seconds. In 2008 Musk took over as chief executive officer. Four years later Tesla introduced a sedan, which was acclaimed by automotive critics for its performance and design. The company won further praise for its luxury sports utility vehicle (SUV), which went on the market in 2015. The Model 3, a less-expensive vehicle, went into production in 2017.

In 2013 Musk proposed a high-speed rail system for California called the Hyperloop. It would use podlike vehicles to carry people through a system of tubes. The Hyperloop would complete the 350-mile (560-kilometer) trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 35 minutes at a top speed of 760 miles (1,220 kilometers) per hour, nearly the speed of sound. In 2016 Musk founded a tunnel-digging company called the Boring Company. It investigated ways to lower the cost and speed up the process of digging tunnels to accommodate the Hyperloop.

Musk joined the social media service Twitter in 2009. He became one of the most popular accounts on the site, gaining millions of followers. In 2018 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk for fraud after he sent misleading tweets claiming that he had secured funding to take Tesla private. He was ultimately forced to step down as Tesla’s chairman for three years, though he was allowed to continue as CEO. In addition, both Musk and Tesla received millions of dollars in fines.

Musk was critical of Twitter’s policies regarding free speech on the site. In April 2022 it was revealed that he bought more than 9 percent of the company. Soon after, Twitter announced that he would join the company’s board. However, Musk decided against that and instead made a bid to buy the entire company for $44 billion. Twitter’s board accepted the deal, which would make Musk sole owner of the company. Musk said he planned to add new features and to eliminate bot, or fake, accounts. Bot accounts are automatically generated and can spread misinformation and enable fraud. In July Musk announced that he was withdrawing his bid. He claimed that Twitter had not provided sufficient information about the site’s bot accounts. Twitter sued Musk to force him to buy the company. In September Twitter’s shareholders voted to accept Musk’s offer. Musk ultimately proceeded with the deal, which was completed in October.

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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.

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Early Life and Education

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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. However, as of June 22, 2024, Bezos has regained the title of richest man on Earth, making Musk the second richest man.

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 and business, 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 which died shortly after birth, 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's degree in physics and a second bachelor's degree 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 Corporation for $307 million in cash and $34 million worth of stock options. 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 rechargeable solar batteries and other solar power equipment. The Powerwall is a battery developed for home backup power. Tesla also produces commercial energy infrastructure including grid management programs.

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 Twitter in March 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 October 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 September 7, 2018, Musk smoked cannabis during a filmed interview for The Joe Rogan Experience 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 (five living, one died after birth) 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 $207 billion as of June 24, 2024, making him the second 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 Zip2, 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.

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

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

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CNBC. " Elon Musk Lived on $1 a Day When He Moved to Canada as a Teen and More Surprising Facts About His Youth ."

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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 .”

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TED. “ The Mind Behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity... .” Click "Read Transcript."

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

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U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “ 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).

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

SpaceX. “ Updates .”

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U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “ Twitter, Inc., Schedule 13G, March 14, 2022 .” Page 3.

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 .”

CNBC. " Twitter Board Adopts ‘Poison Pill’ After Musk’s $43 Billion Bid To Buy Company ."

Reuters. " Explainer: How Elon Musk Funded the $44 Billion Twitter Deal ."

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

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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 ."

American Autism Association. " Elon Musk Shared Aspergers Diagnosis on SNL ."

YouTube. “ Elon Musk Monologue—SNL .”

CNBC. " Elon Musk Smokes Weed, Sips Whiskey on Joe Rogan’s Podcast ."

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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 .”

Reuters. " Musk Says U.S. SEC ‘Bastards’ Forced Settlement Over Tesla Tweets ."

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 .”

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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.

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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.

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5 Things You May Not Know About Elon Musk

He developed and sold a video game at age 12

The budding CEO got his start in the technology industry after seeing a computer in a store for the first time at age 10. He learned to program and developed the code for a shooting-spaceship game called Blastar, which he sold to a computer magazine for $500. Naturally, the boy with grand ambitions didn't stop there, and he devised plans with his younger brother, Kimbal, to open an arcade near their school. However, those plans were nixed when their parents refused to provide their legal consent for a permit, and the brothers wound up selling chocolates to classmates instead.

He spent just two days at Stanford University

Musk enrolled at Stanford in 1995 for graduate studies in applied physics, but by that point, he was consumed with the game-changing capabilities of the internet. When applying for academic deferment, Musk said he would return in six months if his endeavors didn't pan out; the department chairman replied that he didn't expect to see the young computer whiz again, a prediction that proved 100 percent accurate. Musk went on to found Zip2, which established an online presence for brick-and-mortar organizations, and by the time Compaq swooped in to buy the company four years later, there was little need to resume his formal education.

He inspired the creation of a solar power company

In 2004, Musk was driving with his cousin Lyndon Rive to Burning Man, the annual late-summer festival held in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. A successful software entrepreneur in his own right, Rive confessed a desire to embark on a more meaningful enterprise. Musk suggested he consider the possibilities of solar power, and over the course of the drive and subsequent hedonism in the desert, the idea blossomed. Rive and his brother Peter created SolarCity, which grew into the country’s largest solar provider with their cousin on board as chairman. Something about Burning Man clearly fires up Musk’s imagination; he claims to have conceived the idea of a vertical takeoff and landing electric plane at the festival, calling it a "very creative place."

He is the real-life model for 'Iron Man's' Tony Stark

When Iron Man writer and director Jon Favreau was exploring ways to humanize the character of Tony Stark, the charismatic, super-smart protagonist of the comic book and movie series, actor Robert Downey Jr. suggested he get in touch with Musk. Favreau wound up shooting parts of Iron Man 2 at the SpaceX factory, and Musk later found a way to replicate his fictional counterpart’s methods of designing rocket parts on a computer screen by waving his hands across a sensor.

He owns a James Bond car

Musk owns the Lotus Esprit from the 1977 James Bond flick The Spy Who Loved Me , which (spoiler alert!) turns into a submarine after Bond and his beautiful female companion zoom off a pier to escape the enemy. Known as "Wet Nellie," the stunt car languished for years in a storage unit before being sold to an anonymous buyer at a London auction in 2013. After the buyer was revealed to be Musk, he released a statement in which he expressed disappointment that the car did not actually turn into a real submarine, adding, "What I'm going to do is upgrade it with a Tesla electric powertrain and try to make it transform for real."

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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 .

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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.

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

Short Biography of Elon Musk

• Categories: Biography Elon Musk

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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.

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If you’re short elon musk’s companies, you might want to read ashlee vance’s biography.

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In a phone call with prominent investor Richard Strong about fourteen months ago, he asked me my thoughts on Elon Musk. While I didn’t have deep or detailed opinions on the entrepreneur, I’d written a few opinion pieces over the years making a case that Musk had achieved on a breathtaking level and that the subsidies that have distracted too many wise people for too long had blinded them to his genius. Love or hate the $7,500 federal tax credit that only applies to the first 300,000 or so automobiles sold by electric vehicle makers, no reasonable person would ascribe Tesla’s valuation to purchases made by people way too rich to care about $7,500.

Strong didn’t disagree, only for him to tell me his own Musk story. He’d been short Tesla shares only to come across Ashlee Vance’s 2015 biography of the iconoclastic billionaire (A redundancy? Yes is the answer here), Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future . He soon closed his short position.

Up front, some will wonder about the review of a book that’s seven years old, but sometimes what’s interesting isn’t read right away. Better yet, Musk was “only” worth $10 billion then, so it arguably makes for a more informative, accessible (to Musk in particular) biography than would be possible now. And since Musk’s reputation hadn’t yet caught up with his immense wealth (Vance actually reports of Musk asking who the top PR person was in the U.S. given the relentlessly bad press he was enduring as the book was being written), a seven-year-old biography could also potentially be more honest than anything written today.

Readers can decide. Vance interviewed hundreds of people for the book, including Musk himself. The view here is that it’s a fascinating read, and happily one free of Vance’s political leanings one way or the other.

Vance began his project in 2012 at a point when it was no longer realistic for the media to ignore Musk. Though his success had been longstanding considering the formation and lucrative sales of Zip2 ($300 million) and Paypal ($1.5 billion), there was a perception perhaps that Musk’s achievements were in the rearview mirror. Maybe with good reason. It’s rare for even the immensely talented to keep hitting home runs. Also, it’s well known that most Silicon Valley start-ups fail, and logically so: these are individuals working feverishly to create an all new future. Except that the people are the market, and the people don’t always take well to change.

Considering Tesla, Vance reports that its doors were opened by single “exit” and very rich entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, only for the duo to meet immense skepticism among VCs about the fanciful notion of an electric car. As one friend exclaimed upon hearing of their new company at a Woodside pub, “You have to be kidding me.”

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All of which speaks to what entrepreneurs truly are, but also to why most of what they introduce or try to introduce belly flops: entrepreneurs believe deeply in something that’s viewed as impossible, ridiculous, or both by the wise, and most certainly by the established commercial order. Eberhard and Tarpenning’s company was met with near universal VC skepticism other than from the VC who’d made out big with their initial venture (loyalty more than anything led to a small capital commitment), only for the two to win an audience with Musk.

Vance is clear that Musk from the very early days of his “miserable childhood” in South Africa had been interested in the idea of electric cars. Upon his initial move to Canada for college, Musk actually told the daughter of a prominent executive at the Bank of Nova Scotia about his vision for a different way of powering automobiles. Yes, he was a bit eccentric in actions and thought.

Needless to say, Musk quickly relayed to Eberhard and Tarpenning that he was in for Tesla, followed by him becoming its biggest shareholder and Chairman. With Tesla, “a couple of guys” with no background in carmaking (more on this in a bit), but who “really liked cars” had a vision for reinventing the automobile industry. Vance points out that the last successful U.S. car start-up had been Chysler….in 1925. Perhaps more pertinent, the industry was globally crowded with the crowd very much focused on winning U.S. market share. Tesla? Electric cars? Is it any wonder that investors were much more than skeptical?

Of course, with Tesla we’re getting way ahead of ourselves. Elon Musk before Elon Musk is interesting, as Vance’s book reveals. While it’s well known that Musk grew up in South Africa, it’s less well known that at least on his mother’s side, his origins begin in North America. Joshua Norman Haldeman (Musk’s grandfather) actually had a thriving chiropractic business in Canada, which on its own speaks to Musk’s contrarian ways. Figure that chiropractors have long rejected the conventional wisdom of doctors, and have done so in the face of immense ridicule.

In Haldeman’s case he left behind his booming business for South Africa. The father of Maye (Musk’s mother) wasn’t just contrarian in profession. Opposite the view that kids needed to be raised, Haldeman had the arguably B.F. Skinner-ian view that kids would “intuit their way toward proper behavior,” such that there was no yelling in the Haldeman household. Haldeman also had an airplane that he flew around the country. Vance indicates that Musk himself believes he came upon his plainly different ways care of his grandfather. Basically, Elon isn’t the first Musk. How interesting it would have been for someone like Haldeman to have been born later, at a time when knowledge had taken such great leaps. It’s no reach to say the achiever in Haldeman would have likely accomplished many great things.

So while Musk himself grew up economically privileged (including routine global travel) with a mother who was a prominent model (of the magazine cover kind) and a father (Musk’s parents sadly divorced when he was young) who was a successful engineer (Vance reports that Errol Musk directed $28,000 to Elon and brother Kimbal Musk’s first start-up, Zip2), it would be Musk who would get to bring his inherited iconoclasm to the wide world. But first he needed to get back to the North America that his hereditary twin had exited. It was what Musk always wanted.

Vance writes that “from his earliest of days,” Musk “plotted an escape from his surroundings and dreamed of a place that would allow his personality and dreams to flourish.” Which meant he had to get to the United States. About it, Vance writes that Musk “saw America in its most clichéd form, as the land of opportunity and the most likely stage for making the realization of his dreams possible.” Yes!

Though commerce was advanced enough in Pretoria that Musk acquired his first computer in 1980 (a Commodore VIC-20 the manual for which he devoured), brother Kimbal relayed to Vance that “South Africa was like a prison for someone like Elon.” The previous truth is something for readers to think a lot about. No doubt Musk is the rarest of rare, but it’s the rarest of rare who relentlessly improve the present by re-creating it. The rare elevate us all. The simple truth is that we would likely have never heard of Elon Musk if he’d spent all of his days in South Africa in much the same way that we would never have heard of Andrew Carnegie if he’d stayed in Scotland, or Steve Jobs if his ancestors had stayed in Syria. It raises an obvious question: what is the unseen in terms of non-innovation taking place thanks to ever more sizable barriers to immigration in the U.S.? One argument conservatives have long made against abortion is that the latter could be killing off a future creator of a cancer cure, a great artist, or a sporting genius. Ok, but by the same token what breathtaking advances are we essentially firebombing through rules against foreign entry into the U.S. now? The sad thing is that we’ll never know, while also knowing with certainty based on history that we’re most certainly limiting progress.

In Musk’s case, he made his way to Canada and ultimately Queen’s University in 1989, and eventually switched to Penn. While in Canada, a stint as an intern at the Bank of Nova Scotia proved useful exposure to Musk of the industry’s stodgy ways; “stodgy” no doubt blood in the water for someone like Musk bent on transforming how things are done. In particular, Musk made a call to an institutional desk at Goldman Sachs during his time at Bank of Nova Scotia, only to ask how much distressed South American debt inventory the investment banking giant had access to. Vance reports that the answer was of the “billions” kind, at which point Musk raced to tell his superiors of a once-in-a-lifetime arbitrage opportunity. From his calculations, South American government debt was trading at .25 cents on the dollar at a time when the U.S. Treasury had agreed to insure the debt to the tune of .50 cents. Remember “Brady Bonds” named after Bush-era (George H.W.) Treasury secretary Nicholas?

Needless to say, the executives at the Bank didn’t see what Musk saw. Which was and is the point. The people staffing banks, and in particular highly regulated Canadian banks, were not unique or innovative in thought. Which means that Musk learned a great deal in the presence of individuals who could teach him very little. The lack of knowledge paradoxically gained proved an information gusher for Musk. As Vance puts it, Musk “had an inkling that the bankers were doing finance all wrong and that he could run the business better than anyone else.” This insight eventually led to X.com, and the latter’s difficult but legendary merger with PayPal. As readers know, PayPal’s stature in Silicon Valley lore grows by the day given all the talent Musk and Peter Thiel brought to one company. Vance tells how Musk was eventually relieved of control of the merged payments systems innovator, and he even wonders what might have happened if Musk had remained in control; as in could Musk have led the combination of X.com and PayPal to even greater heights. About it, books about PayPal are new to the bookstores now , which means the story is still being written. Vance’s was as mentioned published in 2015, and it’s a reminder yet again that disruption of any industry rarely comes from within the industry.

The above truth speaks as a loud and consistent rebuke of the small minds who populate antitrust, and for that matter the similarly small minds who spend their days worrying about “IP theft” from China, here, or anywhere else. About the antitrust crowd, as a rule they’re looking at competition within a specific industry. Except that the combination that led to PayPal and its still prominent payments systems emerged from well outside the banking industry . Despite the previous truth, readers might ask themselves a simple question: would the DOJ sit back passively if J.P. Morgan sought acquisition of Wells Fargo and Citi? The question answers itself.

Considering IP theft, we’re in many ways talking about something parallel. No one in the automobile industry cared one bit about what a bunch of car enthusiasts at Tesla were doing with EVs. Which was and is the point. What would they steal? What would the banks have taken from Musk and Thiel? The reality is that if they’d deemed their payments visions realistic, they would have long before put both X.com and PayPal out of business. Except that they didn’t. That they didn’t tells a bigger story than the one about Musk et al. It exposes as very foolish all the time spent on the “market power” presently enjoyed by Big Tech, plus it reveals as ferociously stupid all the conservative nailbiting about IP theft from “China” during the Trump years. Referencing the title of one of your reviewer’s books, They’re Both Wrong .

It cannot be stressed enough that what’s innovative is only revealed as such long after it’s actually innovative. In Vance’s words, while Tesla opened its doors in 2003, few in Silicon Valley or Detroit took it seriously. It wasn’t until 2012 and the rollout of Tesla’s Model S that Tesla “slapped Detroit sober.” Notable there is that having finally woken the powers-that-be up, Musk wasn’t locking down his factories to maintain a hold on his secrets. His factories were open given his view that the bigger the market for electric vehicles and players in the EV industry, the better the market for Tesla. Amen.

As always with Musk, we get ahead of ourselves. Retreating somewhat, upon completing two degrees at Penn, Musk headed west. He’d been accepted to Stanford, but the internet bug had already caught him. This led to a now primitive, but then well-ahead-of-its-time online information and mapping company, Zip2. Elon and Kimbal started it, and the stories are very much what one would expect. Days without sleep, loud fights between the brothers, management errors, and all the rest.

The good news is that as mentioned, Musk’s first leap into start-up world attracted a $300 million exit care of Compaq. Musk made $22 million on Zip2, while Kimbal pocketed $15 million. This is notable for many reasons, but the most important one is that Musk’s gains weren’t wholly banked for safety, or spent. He directed $12 million into X.com, which was rare. Having proven his abilities, Musk was better positioned to go to VCs for X.com’s financing while placing his Zip2 gains in safer ideas. Instead, he put it to work with an eye on exposing a need not so far met by banks.

The same pattern emerged with his eventual PayPal exit. Rather than sit on his $300 million gains, or spend wildly, Vance reports that Musk once again chose to back his expansive visions with his own money: $100 million in SpaceX, $70 million in Tesla, and $10 million in Solar City. In Vance’s words, Musk is driven to build “something that has the potential to be much grander than anything [Howard] Hughes or [Steve] Jobs produced.” Vance’s bigger or smaller point was that Musk putting so much of his own wealth into his new ideas was kind of rare. Except that as the author notes, Musk’s “ready willingness to tackle impossible things” arguably makes it essential that he put his money where his vision is.

More important for the Elizabeth Warren’s of the world, Musk is pursuing an all-new future without much rest; for himself, or his employees. Having nearly died from a rare form of malaria after a vacation with first wife Justine, he views vacations in a negative light. They can be dangerous. The guess here is that he can’t get enough of what doesn’t feel like work to him. Whatever the answer, Musk is a rejection of the idiot left-wing, occasional Hollywood-driven vision of the rich idling away in their mansions. In Justine’s words, “Elon would come home at eleven and work some more. People didn’t always get the sacrifice he made in order to be where he was.” To read Vance’s book is to see that in many, or most ways, Justine was actually downplaying the sacrifices made by Musk. How will readers know that? The answer is that Musk very nearly lost his whole fortune from Zip2 and PayPal on the companies (Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City) that followed.

Figure that the initial Tesla cars weren’t very reliable. In Musk’s blunt, f-word laden words, “about a third of the cars didn’t flat-out fucking work.” This was a problem because while Tesla had, in the words of Vance, “produced the fastest, most beautiful electric car the world had ever seen,” the need to fill customer orders “would end up almost bankrupting the company.” Despite the existence of Tesla and SpaceX (it turns out rocket launches into space are a bit challenging to engineer….) very much hanging in the balance, an occasional employee would express a desire for more family and free time. To which Musk would reply that everyone “will get to see their families a lot when we go bankrupt.”

And then 2008 happened. Time of course smooths the rougher edges of the past (which perhaps explains the odd nostalgia that paralyses the thinking of so many), but in the year mentioned it was true that even established corporate names (Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs), not to mention legacy automakers (think GM and Chrysler) saw their corporate lives flash in front of them. All four were bailed out. Please keep this in mind with Tesla and SpaceX top of mind. With capital tight to non-existent for established players, imagine the position Musk was in as both companies were slowly running out of money. Please think about all this in consideration of noted Silicon Valley blog Valleywag having listed Tesla’s Roadster as its #1 fail of 2007. Yet Musk was supposed to find cash for his commercial babies?

Needless to say, the financing environment was bleak. It got to the point that the parents of Talulah Riley, Musk’s second wife, had “offered to remortgage their house” to aid his desperate cash situation. Eventually a few lucky breaks, including a NASA contract for SpaceX, saved both companies. And for faux “purists” who will say “taxpayer dollars” saved Musk, try to be serious. Love or hate the space program (there’s a good argument for hate), Vance indicates that SpaceX “can undercut its U.S. competitors – Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbital Sciences – on price by a ridiculous margin.”

After which, it’s time for these same faux purists (they know who they are) who opined endlessly about Musk being a “crony capitalist” to hang their heads in shame. And also to publicly admit how wrong they were. Looking back, seemingly the biggest source of ammunition for Musk’s oh-so-pure critics was the $7,500/car federal tax credit. There was also a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy that was plainly made available in various forms to all manner of companies doing what the powers-that-be there liked. About both handouts, get rid of them. Of course. At the same time, to pretend as some did that the latter was source of Tesla’s viability was thoroughly idiotic. For one, all one needed to do was to look at the eventual skyrocketing valuation of Tesla to see the $7,500 tax credit was irrelevant. That’s the case because equity markets are a look into the future, which means even at $10, $20 and $50 billion valuations, it was obvious that investors had looked well beyond the company’s ability to sell 300,000 cars. As for the loan, it was paid back with interest.

Of course, to focus on the tax credit and the loan was and is to miss the point. For one, though Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City were and are alleged beneficiaries of government meddling in the economy, what government gives it also takes away. Vance writes that the “incumbents” in autos, space exploration and solar used their “connections in Washington to make life as miserable as possible on all three of Musk’s companies.” It’s a reminder that wrong as the subsidies were that Musk’s companies received, the immigrant from South Africa was hardly unique on the matter. He had visions for changing a variety of industries only to arrive to a business environment that Washington had long before planted its flag in. Better yet, Solar City actually became a multi-billion dollar company at a time when clean tech companies were proving major duds for their investors. Read up on John Doerr and Vinod Khosla if you’re doubtful.

At which point it’s crucial just to talk about the quality of Musk’s businesses. Solar City as mentioned soared into the multi-billion category alongside all manner of failures in the sector, SpaceX proved capable of undercutting its competitors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin by “ridiculous margins,” and then there’s Tesla. Neither tax credits nor loans can be used to explain the endless challenges that Musk and his engineers overcame on the way to making a car that is a remarkable feat of engineering. The Tesla Model S in 2012 had the highest safety rating in history, it was faster and handled better than its competitors, it had more storage space than the competition did, plus it was the first unanimous Motor Trend Car of the Year victor that anyone within the magazine could remember.

And then there are the ways that Tesla autos are repaired. While owners of traditional cars take them in for routine maintenance (a big source of revenue for dealerships) and for anything that requires fixing, Teslas are literally “computers” on wheels. A dodgy door handle or windshield wiper is fixed remotely by engineers working on computers. As opposed to 2022 Tesla models, these computers on wheels are constantly enhanced via computer in the way that Apple iPhones receive routine updates.

Lastly, the early buyers of Teslas also rate prominent mention too when it comes to further exposing the foolishness of Musk’s tax-credit focused critics. The early adapters were celebrities, CEOs, technology billionaires, etc. To think for even a second that a $7,500 credit would prove meaningful to these people brings new meaning to absurd. People who hand over $100,000 for a car that hasn’t yet been made aren’t thinking about the tax credit they’ll eventually get.

The simple truth is that Musk nearly lost everything. To then act as though he risked everything on a subsidy of any kind is truly ridiculous. Libertarians did themselves and the ideology’s reputation no favors with their potshots back in the day. To be fair, however, it wasn’t just them. In particular, there’s more that people don’t get beyond the droolings about Musk and “cronyism.”

Which brings us back to Sen. Elizabeth Warren. She’s been very critical of Musk the taxpayer, despite the billions he’s handed over to Treasury, including an estimated $10 billion+ in 2021 alone. This is important, as it speaks to another unseen. What could Musk have done with those billions? As Vance’s bio makes clear, he routinely plows his own funds into existing and new ventures. Assuming Treasury properly taxed capital gains at zero, what innovative ideas would Musk have hatched, or what innovative ideas now hatched could he have directed more money at? The question staggers the mind. The U.S. is so abundantly prosperous, but our plenty is arguably small relative to what it could be absent the long fingers of the political class. No one wins when the innovative (Musk) or even idle rich have their wealth taken from them. The latter is a tax on all of us. On the other hand, when wealth is not taxed, there’s the potential for the matching of remarkable minds with crucial capital. Warren deserves the criticism, not individuals like Musk working to create an all new, and much better future.

In closing, I have my own Elon Musk story. Working at a libertarian think tank in 2003, I read about Musk in USA Today . It was about his efforts to bring market discipline to space exploration via SpaceX. The Cato Institute had recently published a book by Ed Hudgins about the importance of markets as a way of enhancing space exploration. I sent Musk a copy and asked for a meeting. His office (presumably Mary Beth Brown) responded that he’d read the book, and would take a meeting with me. At the meeting, I told him we had a conference on free markets and space coming up, only for Musk to ask if he could speak at the event. My Cato colleague said the speakers’ slots were full….Hopefully readers get where this is going.

The great Elon Musk has been underestimated for the longest time, including by those most likely to share his view of the world. If you’re a doubter, read Ashlee Vance’s excellent book. If you’re an investor who is short Musk, read this book. You’re likely to “cover.”

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• 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.

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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.

July 2, 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

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Elon Musk has reportedly fathered 12 children. Why are people so bothered?

Elon Musk has fathered a 12th child − and people online have passionate reactions about the news.

Musk had a third child with  Neuralink  executive  Shivon Zilis , with whom he already  has twins, earlier this year, according to  Bloomberg , which first reported the news Friday. Musk also confirmed the child with Page Six while denying the birth was a secret.

Along with the twins and new addition he shares with Zilis, Musk also has three children with Grimes and six with his ex-wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson. Musk and Wilson's first-born child died at 10 weeks old.

Some on social media were none too happy to hear about the birth of Musk's latest child. "Why does he act like life is a Sims breeding challenge," one Reddit user wrote. "How can anyone be an active parent in the lives of 12 children?" wrote another.

But is this criticism necessary or even justified? Here's what experts have said to keep in mind before passing judgement on a parent.

Why do people care so much about Elon Musk's, other celebrities' families?

Musk isn't the only public figure whose nontraditional family life has sparked headlines. Nick Cannon famously had multiple babies with different women in a short period of time, which he said was "no accident." Clint Eastwood is also thought to have had eight known children with six different women, his daughter told  The Sunday Times in 2011.

In his statement to Page Six , Musk denied keeping his new child a secret. "As for ‘secretly fathered,’ that is also false,” he said. “All our friends and family know. Failure to issue a press release, which would be bizarre, does not mean ‘secret.'” Walter Isaacson wrote in his biography "Elon Musk" that the CEO is concerned with population decline and sees childbearing as the solution.

The public's fixation on the families of people like Musk, Cannon and others is unsurprising to  Donna Rockwell , a clinical psychologist and CEO and founder of  "Already Famous."  Any time a famous person behaves in a way that deviates from the norm, like having many children from different households, "we as the public hang onto every detail" and treat it as gossip, she previously told USA TODAY.

"The public loves to express their opinions, because it makes them feel like part of the story," she added. "When we see behavior outside the norm in the lives of celebrities, we shake our heads, pass judgments."

Should people be concerned about Nick Cannon's, Elon Musk's kids?

Musk and Cannon both keep their personal lives and routines as parents relatively private. Still, this hasn't stopped people from hurling criticism at both men, assuming a father of that many children couldn't possibly be fully present in each of their lives.

It's true being involved in your kids' lives is crucial: Studies have shown a child's emotional well-being is influenced by a secure relationship with their parents, as well as by the quality of that relationship. Barbara La Pointe,  a relationship coach who primarily works with families dealing with divorce and separation , previously told USA TODAY not being fully present in your children's lives may "unconsciously create a legacy of generational trauma."

While raising children in separate households can have additional challenges, experts encourage people not to pass judgement, especially on those they don't even know. When previously asked about his emotional involvement as a father, Cannon  has insisted  "if I'm not physically in the same city with my kids, I'm talking to them before they go to school via FaceTime and stuff. And then when I am, I'm driving my kids to school, making sure I pick them up."

As Rockwell reminds, the reality of celebrity culture is that we only catch a glimpse of celebrities' personal lives. Without knowing the intimate details, we as outsiders will never truly know how worrisome – or how functional – Cannon's, Musk's or anybody else's family actually is.

Contributing: Jenna Ryu and Kinsey Crowley, USA TODAY

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Biography of Elon Musk: All About Elon Musk and What You Can Learn From His Life History Paperback – March 23, 2021

Best selling elon musk biography book.

Have you heard about Elon Musk, a multi-billionaire?

Elon Musk is a South African-born, Canadian/American entrepreneur, business magnate, industrial designer, and engineer. He founded X.com in 1999, which later became PayPal. He is also the founder, CEO, CTO, and chief designer of SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla Motors in 2003.

Elon Musk is also the founder of The Boring Company, the co-founder of Neuralink, co-founder, and the initial co-chairman of OpenAI.

He made his first million in his late 20s when Compaq Computers purchased his start-up company Zip2. He is a hard worker, and he works as many as 80 to 120 hours per week.

In recent days, Elon Musk has had success in his business and has created a lifestyle everyone would want to emanate.

BIOGRAPHY OF ELON MUSK is a must-read book for everyone who wants to be successful.

In this book, you'll discover

• The early life of Elon Musk
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• Book 1 of 1 Best Biography Books
• Print length 35 pages
• Language English
• Publication date March 23, 2021
• Dimensions 6 x 0.08 x 9 inches
• ISBN-13 979-8727223765
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Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B091F8RKXW
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Independently published (March 23, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 35 pages
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8727223765
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.24 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.08 x 9 inches
• #5,802 in Journalist Biographies
• #20,285 in Author Biographies

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Michael David is a creative soul that has had careers in Technology and Finance. He has traveled the South Pacific earlier in life, and has been an athlete competing for country in triathlon short course. He is active not only in writing, but in visual art and music as well. His artistic endeavors include ventures into singer / song writing with live performances at cafes and bistros. His visual art can be found applied to apparel under the michael david art brand available in online stores.

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Gwynne Shotwell: The brilliant (non-Musk) mind behind SpaceX

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Gwynne Shotwell had the unenviable task of selling a rocket that kept crashing.

The year was 2007. Shotwell, then vice president of business development for a fledgling company called SpaceX, was pitching satellite communications firm Iridium on why the veteran player should sign a deal with a company that hadn’t successfully launched any rocket, much less the larger and more complex one it was offering up.

She was so confident her company would deliver that she was willing to negotiate a deal with terms very favorable to Iridium, and less favorable to SpaceX, should anything go wrong.

Discover the changemakers who are shaping every cultural corner of Los Angeles. This week we bring you The Disruptors. They include Mattel’s miracle maker, a modern Babe Ruth, a vendor avenger and more. All are agitators looking to rewrite the rules of influence and governance. Come back each Sunday for another installment.

“She was not trying to just sell us something,” said Suzi McBride, Iridium’s chief operations officer. “She believed in it, and she was gonna make it happen and ensure that it was there.”

Billionaire Elon Musk may be the visionary behind SpaceX’s multi-planetary ambitions, but Shotwell, 60, is the steady hand behind the company’s earthly success.

As president and chief operating officer, Shotwell runs the Hawthorne company’s day-to-day operations and manages finances, customer negotiations, human resources and relationships with government entities — in short, all of the people-focused parts of a business that help it thrive.

She’s a rarity at a Musk company — an executive, the second-in-command, no less, who has lasted for more than two decades. More than that, she has Musk’s ear and his trust.

The partnership between the mercurial technologist with the brash personality and penchant for making headlines and the engineer-turned-businessperson who cares little about the public spotlight has driven SpaceX to the highest echelons of the aerospace industry.

The company commands lucrative contracts with the U.S. military , NASA, commercial firms and the European Space Agency . At the same time, it is building a massive Mars rocket and venturing into the broadband internet market with its Starlink satellite network .

In all, the privately-held SpaceX is currently valued at about $210 billion.

“I see Gwynne sometimes like the orchestrator inside the circus ring, who’s spinning the plates and just keeping all of the various different elements in equilibrium,” said Martin Halliwell, former chief technology officer of satellite firm SES who negotiated six contracts personally with Shotwell and now considers her a friend. “Without her, it may have been successful, who knows? We’ll never know. But I think it would have been a lot more abrasive.”

Reared in a Chicago suburb, Shotwell, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was popular and well-rounded, excelling in academics while also playing varsity basketball and cheerleading.

‘I see Gwynne sometimes like the orchestrator inside the circus ring, who’s spinning the plates and just keeping all of the various different elements in equilibrium.’

— Martin Halliwell, former chief technology officer of satellite firm SES

Her mother jump-started her interest in engineering after taking Shotwell to a Society of Women Engineers conference. The panel discussion featured different types of engineers, but Shotwell was immediately drawn to the words of a mechanical engineer, as well as her “beautiful suit [and] fabulous shoes,” according to a 2014 Orange County Register article .

“I thought, ‘OK, engineers can be cool too. I’ll just be a mechanical engineer,’” Shotwell told the alumni magazine of Northwestern University , her alma mater, in 2012 about that fateful encounter. “I never wavered from that decision.”

After graduation, Shotwell went to work at Chrysler and was identified early on as management material. But she balked at being placed in a leadership training program, preferring instead to work on engineering problems. She made the jump to the aerospace industry, worked in thermal analysis for Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo and then transitioned into business development at a small South Bay company called Microcosm.

There, she formed a successful partnership with Hans Koenigsmann , the company’s chief scientist, and together, they set out to sell studies to government and commercial customers.

“We were kind of like a tag team — I was the German, slightly grumpy scientist, and she was the bubbly American businessperson,” said Koenigsmann. “I think we were complementary.”

It was Koenigsmann who would help get Shotwell to SpaceX, suggesting she meet Musk when she dropped him off at the startup’s office after one of their regular lunches. Musk had invested $100 million of his PayPal fortune into the company , a move that gave Koenigsmann confidence that the yet-unproven SpaceX had at least a bit of a runway.

“The job is certainly safe for three to five years,” Koenigsmann remembers telling Shotwell as his main argument for why he had joined SpaceX and why she should join the company as its vice president of business development. “We will have a hard time spending $100 million in three years.”

While Shotwell was impressed with Musk’s ideas for bringing rocket-part manufacturing in-house, the timing of the offer wasn’t ideal, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography, “Elon Musk.” At the time, she had two young children, was going through a divorce and wasn’t sure she wanted to take a chance on a startup. Eventually, she was sold on SpaceX’s potential to revolutionize the space industry.

“I’ve been a f— idiot,” she told Musk in 2002, according to Isaacson’s book. “I’ll take the job.”

Gwynne Shotwell ‘was the one that was keeping us all of the right mindset and moving forward together.’

— Tim Buzza, former SpaceX vice president

Her immediate tasks were selling customers on SpaceX’s first rocket, Falcon 1, and securing the appropriate permissions to launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base (now Vandenberg Space Force Base) near Lompoc and test rocket engines in McGregor, Texas.

“While we were all working hard on engineering … she was opening up all the doors that were viewed by commercial companies as being some of the most difficult doors to open,” said Tim Buzza , a former SpaceX vice president and the company’s fifth employee, who stayed at the company for almost 12 years.

“All these things, just having a commercial company get onto Vandenberg Air Force Base for our first go-round there ... was really important,” he said. “It gave us some credibility even though we hadn’t done anything yet.”

As Shotwell was piecing together the company’s business strategy, she was also already serving as the glue between Musk and the rest of the team. She helped structure the organization of the company, down to what individual leaders were doing.

“She was the one that was keeping us all of the right mindset and moving forward together,” Buzza said.

That would become important as Falcon 1 rocket development began to sputter. In March 2006, the small rocket lifted off for the first time and cleared the launch pad at the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands before falling back to Earth and crashing into a reef . The rocket was carrying a satellite built by cadets from the U.S. Air Force Academy.

A second and then third launch attempt ended in similar fashion. All the while, Shotwell was trying to sell customers on SpaceX’s launch capabilities. In discussions with potential customers, Shotwell would highlight the positives: After all, the rocket had cleared the launch pad.

Speaking to reporters after the first launch attempt, Shotwell described the failure as a “setback,” but pledged “we’re in this for the long haul,” according to space news website space.com .

“When these failures were happening, we would just as quickly as we could just ... find the problem, fix the problem and get to another flight, but she was always having to deal with all the other stuff, which is the customers, the press, dealing with financial stuff,” Buzza said. “All of that — that’s probably equally or more difficult than fixing the rocket.”

In 2008, the Falcon 1 rocket finally launched and reached orbit. Armed with that success, Musk and Shotwell went to meet with NASA officials to make their case for a contract to resupply the space station, according to Isaacson’s book.

It was then that Musk asked Shotwell to become president of the company, saying that NASA was concerned he had too much on his plate between SpaceX and his electric car firm, Tesla, and that he needed a partner, according to the book.

SpaceX would go on to win a $1.6-billion contract from NASA to transport cargo to the space station — a contract that saved the company from ruin — followed by contracts to ferry astronauts . In March, the company took a step toward its goal of returning people to the moon — and someday carrying them to Mars — with a largely successful test flight of its massive Starship rocket.

The partnership between SpaceX and NASA wasn’t always easy. The space agency was used to engineering rockets and spacecraft itself, or at least being in charge of the process, and SpaceX often had its own way of doing things.

“This is where her leadership became really obvious — she stepped into some pretty difficult discussions to help the teams see each other’s point of view and then to move forward,” said Michael Suffredini, NASA program manager for the space station from 2005 to 2015, and now chief executive of spaceflight company Axiom Space. “So Gwynne not only led her team, but she really helped evolve NASA’s thinking in these kinds of engineering challenges associated with human spaceflight. And that’s no small feat.”

After an uncrewed SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded on a Florida launchpad in 2016 , destroying a customer’s satellite, Shotwell allowed satellite customer SES to embed a U.S. employee in SpaceX’s failure review team to give the company a firsthand look at the problem and the solution. The savvy business strategy worked .

“I don’t know any other organization that would have allowed that,” said Halliwell, the former SES executive. “It was through that relationship, which I think was quite extraordinary, that we managed to get the confidence to continue to use SpaceX.”

Her time at SpaceX, however, hasn’t been without controversy.

The Wall Street Journal reported this month that Shotwell allegedly retaliated against one of her employees after wrongly accusing the employee of having an affair with her husband. Shotwell did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment on the allegation. In the article, which focused on Musk’s behavior toward some female SpaceX workers, employees also criticized Shotwell for defending Musk and not taking harassment allegations seriously.

In a statement to the Journal, Shotwell said SpaceX fully investigates all allegations of harassment and takes appropriate action. She also told the Journal that Musk was “one of the best humans I know.”

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Samantha Masunaga is a business reporter for the Los Angeles Times. She’s worked at the paper since 2014.

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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk Picks 'Terminus' For Mars' First Starship-Enabled City, After Just 4 Test Flights

Years after touting the idea of making life multi-planetary by enabling humans to land on Mars, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is now contemplating names for the first city on Mars. His vote is on “Terminus.”

What Happened: “This has my vote,” Musk wrote on Monday in response to an X user who pitched “Terminus” as a good name for the first city on Mars.

Musk has often talked about making life multi-planetary by building a self-sustaining city on Mars and taking humans there. SpaceX’s ambitious launch vehicle Starship is expected to aid this dream.

Once the rocket makes it to Mars, multiple ships will move a lot of materials to the planet to help build a self-sustaining city , Musk previously said. These materials would include infrastructure for power generation, mining, propellant production, construction, and more as Mars is a rather "fixer-upper" planet, he added.

The billionaire, in 2020, even said that he wants to transport a million people to Mars by 2050.

Why It Matters: The Starship, however, is still in its development and testing phase. the vehicle has had 4 test flights since 2023.

While the spacecraft failed to reach space in the first flight, it reached space and exploded in the second test flight. During the third flight test, the spacecraft broke apart when re-entering Earth’s atmosphere from space.

However, the  fourth flight test  in June was a success, with the company checking all its test flight goals including reentry through Earth’s atmosphere and a soft splashdown of the spacecraft in the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX is expected to have at least six flights of the Starship this year, as per Musk’s latest estimate from March. For the next test flight, the company is expected to attempt landing the vehicle’s booster back at Starbase instead of splashing it down in the Gulf of Mexico, in what would be a significant demonstration of the vehicle’s reusability.

SpaceX's Falcon rocket is about 80% reusable, and the company is currently looking to ensure full reusability for its Starship rocket. Reuse of rockets, the company believes, is integral to bringing down the costs of spaceflight as the most cost is taken up in building the launch vehicle.

NASA is currently relying on the success of Starship to  land humans back on the moon . The last crewed lunar mission occurred in 1972 with Apollo 17. Since then, no crew has traveled beyond low-Earth orbit.

Check out more of Benzinga’s Future Of Mobility coverage by  following this link .

Read More: Elon Musk Reacts To Footballer Isaiah Simmons’ White Tesla Cybertruck Parked Up In Manhattan: ‘Nice’

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Elon Musk just added Melinda French Gates to his list of billionaires' ex-wives who 'might be the downfall of Western civilization'

• Melinda French Gates endorsed President Joe Biden on Thursday, and Elon Musk isn't happy about it.
• "Might be the downfall of Western civilization," the mercurial billionaire said in response.
• In March, Musk criticized another billionaire's ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, for her charity work.

Melinda French Gates has given her first presidential endorsement, and Elon Musk isn't too happy about it.

"Might be the downfall of western civilization," Musk said in response to an X post by the Babylon Bee staffer Ashley St. Clair about French Gates' endorsement of President Joe Biden.

French Gates endorsed Biden in an X post published Thursday.

"I've never endorsed a presidential candidate before," she wrote. "But this year's election stands to be so enormously consequential for women and families that, this time, I can't stay quiet."

Might be the downfall of western civilization — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 20, 2024

In March, Musk similarly criticized Jeff Bezos' ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, for her charitable giving .

"'Super rich ex-wives who hate their former spouse' should filed be listed among 'Reasons that Western Civilization died,'" Musk said in a now deleted X post on March 6.

And it sure looks like endorsing Biden has earned French Gates a spot on Musk's list of bad billionaire exes.

"Many super villain arcs being pursued under the guise of philanthropy," St. Clair said in a follow-up post.

"Yeah," Musk replied.

Related stories

For what it's worth, Musk isn't a fan of French Gates' ex-husband, Bill Gates , either.

Musk's biography says the Tesla CEO was furious that the Microsoft founder had shorted his company's stock .

"How can someone say they are passionate about fighting climate change and then do something that reduced the overall investment in the company doing the most? It's pure hypocrisy," Musk told his biographer, Walter Isaacson.

To be sure, Musk's contempt for Gates' former spouse may also stem from his own distaste for Biden.

Musk has repeatedly criticized Biden after Tesla was excluded from the president's 2021 electric-vehicle summit .

"Biden held this EV summit, didn't invite Tesla. Invited GM, Ford, Chrysler, and UAW. An EV summit at the White House," Musk told the journalist Kara Swisher in September 2021. "Didn't mention Tesla once, and praised GM and Ford for leading the EV revolution."

The mercurial billionaire has also criticized Biden's handling of the southern-border crisis and accused the Democratic Party of being " controlled by unions ."

In November, Musk told the journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times DealBook Summit that he was unlikely to vote for Biden . Musk has, however, stopped short of endorsing former President Donald Trump .

That said, Musk does seem to have grown increasingly closer to Trump.

Last week, Musk said in a Tesla shareholder meeting that he received random phone calls from Trump . The former president, Musk said, was "very nice" on the phone.

"I have had some conversations with him, and he does call me out of the blue for no reason," Musk said. "I don't know why, but he does."

Representatives for Musk and French Gates did not respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours.

Correction: June 21, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misnamed a New York Times journalist. His name is Andrew Ross Sorkin, not Aaron Ross Sorkin.

Watch: How Elon Musk makes and spends his billions

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How Much Do You Know About the American Revolution?

By J. D. Biersdorfer July 1, 2024

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Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s installment tests your knowledge of the American Revolution and popular books written about it. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do some further reading.

Who is traditionally considered the first casualty of the American Revolution — and is also the subject of Mitch Kachun’s 2017 book titled “First Martyr of Liberty”?

John Laurens

Patrick Henry

Nathan Hale

Crispus Attucks

Esther Forbes was awarded the 1943 Pulitzer Prize in history for “Paul Revere and the World He Lived In,” as well as the 1944 Newbery Medal for which classic young-adult novel — and one that also happens to feature Paul Revere as a character?

“My Brother Sam Is Dead”

“Johnny Tremain”

“Sophia’s War”

“The Fighting Ground”

Walter Isaacson has written books about several men who were pioneers of science and technology in their time, including Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein. Which founding father with an interest in science also got an Isaacson biography?

James Monroe

Thomas Jefferson

Benjamin Franklin

George Washington

Which state was not part of the original 13 colonies, but was home to British loyalists, Native Americans, women and other groups that had their freedom impacted, as described in “Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution,” Kathleen DuVal’s 2015 book?

New Hampshire

Thomas Jefferson described him as “truly the man of the Revolution” and he was the subject “The Revolutionary,” Stacy Schiff’s 2022 biography. Who was this person?

Alexander Hamilton

Samuel Adams

James Madison