Introduction
Entrepreneur and businessman Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971. He is the owner, CTO, and chairman of Twitter, the creator of the Boring Company and X Corp., co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI, and the chief executive officer and chief engineer of SpaceX. He is also the president of the charitable Musk Foundation. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes' Real Time Billionaires list as of June 2023, Musk is the richest person in the world, primarily due to his ownership stakes in Tesla and SpaceX. Bloomberg estimates Musk's net worth to be around $230 billion, and Forbes estimates his wealth to be $234.9 billion.
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| Elon Musk |
- Name : Elon Reeve Musk
- DOB : 28 June 1971
- Age : 52
- Birth Place : Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa
- Education : University of Pennsylvania (BA, BS)
Musk graduated from Pretoria Boys High School in South Africa
• Founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX
• CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.
• Owner, CTO, and chairman of Twitter
Founder of the Boring Company, X Corp., and X.AI
•Co-founder of Neuralink, OpenAI, Zip2, and X.com (part of PayPal)
- Spouses : Justine Wilson
- ​. ​(m. 2000; div. 2008))
- Talulah RRile
- ​(m. 2010; div. 2012)​
- ​(m. 2013; div. 2016)
- Partner : Grimes (2018–2021)[1]
- Children : 10
- Parents : Errol Musk (father)
- Maye Musk (mother)
- Family : Musk family
Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and briefly attended the University of Pretoria before moving to Canada at age 18, acquiring citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. Two years later, he matriculated at Queen's University and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received bachelor's degrees in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University. After two days, he dropped out and, with his brother Kimbal, co-founded the online city guide software company Zip2. In 1999, Zip2 was acquired by Compaq for $307 million and Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal, which eBay acquired for $1.5 billion in 2002.
Musk started the spaceflight services business SpaceX in 2002 with a $175.8 million investment. He made an early investment in Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.), a maker of electric vehicles, in 2004. In 2008, he took over as CEO and was appointed chairman of the company. He participated in the creation of SolarCity in 2006; Tesla eventually bought SolarCity, which became Tesla Energy. He helped create the nonprofit artificial intelligence research organisation OpenAI in 2015. The next year, he co-founded the tunnel building business The Boring startup as well as the neurotechnology startup Neuralink, which is creating brain-computer interfaces. Additionally, Musk has suggested a hyperloop high-speed rail system. His $44 billion purchase of Twitter was finalised in 2022.
Musk has polarising opinions because of what he has said. He has come under fire for making unfounded claims and circulating false information on COVID-19, among other things. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against Musk in 2018 after Musk falsely claimed in a tweet to have funds secured for a private acquisition of Tesla. As part of a settlement deal with the SEC, Musk resigned as chairman of Tesla and paid a $20 million fine.
Wealth
Musk made $175.8 million when PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002. He was first listed on the Forbes Billionaires List in 2012, with a net worth of $2 billion.
At the start of 2020, Musk had a net worth of $27 billion.By the end of the year his net worth had increased by $150 billion, mostly driven by his ownership of around 20% of Tesla stock. During this period, Musk's net worth was often volatile. For example, it dropped $16.3 billion in September, the largest single-day plunge in Bloomberg Billionaires Index's history.In November of that year, Musk passed Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to become the third-richest person in the world; a week later he passed Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to become the second-richest.
In January 2021, Musk, with a net worth of $185 billion, surpassed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to become the richest person in the world. Bezos reclaimed the top spot the following month.On September 27, 2021, after Tesla stock surged, Forbes announced that Musk had a net worth of over $200 billion, and was the richest person in the world.In November 2021, Musk became the first person to have a net worth of more than $300 billion.
On December 30, 2022, it was reported that Musk had lost $200 billion from his net worth due to declining stock values in Tesla, becoming the first person in history to lose such a large sum of money. In January 2023, Musk was recognized by Guinness World Records for experiencing the "largest loss of personal fortune in history" with regards to his financial losses since November 2021, which Guinness quoted a Forbes estimate of $182 billion.
Sources of wealth
Around 75% of Musk's wealth derived from Tesla stock in November 2020,a proportion that fell to about 37% as of December 2022,after selling nearly $40 billion in company shares since late 2021. Musk does not receive a salary from Tesla; he agreed with the board in 2018 to a compensation plan that ties his personal earnings to Tesla's valuation and revenue. The deal stipulated that Musk only receives the compensation if Tesla reaches certain market values. It was the largest such deal ever done between a CEO and a company board. In the first award, given in May 2020, he was eligible to purchase 1.69 million Tesla shares (about 1% of the company) at below-market prices, which was worth about $800 million.Musk paid $455 million in taxes on $1.52 billion of income between 2014 and 2018. According to ProPublica, Musk paid no federal income taxes in 2018.He claimed his 2021 tax bill was estimated at $12 billion based on his sale of $14 billion worth of Tesla stock.
Musk has repeatedly described himself as "cash poor", and has "professed to have little interest in the material trappings of wealth". In May 2020, he pledged to sell almost all physical possessions.Musk has defended his wealth by saying he is accumulating resources for humanity's outward expansion to space.
