However, to be the richest man on the planet takes a lot of great risks, effort, patience, hard work, and dedication. The way today’s richest people make their money is different from Elon Musk made his money. His method was different from others and also wasn’t clear to people. He had several ideas which were risky and that made him the richest person of the year at the time of 2021 in the world.
In this article, we will be discussing the life of Elon Musk, how he began his career and how he presently turned to be the richest person on the planet.
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Table of Contents
Who is Elon Musk?
Elon Musk fully known as Elon Reeve Musk is a very wealthy businessman, an entrepreneur, and also a founder and CEO of different organizations such as Product Architect of Tesla, The Boring Company, Neuralink, OpenAI, SpaceX.
However, He was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa and he grew up in South Africa with his parents who were raised in South Africa. His father’s name is Errol Musk, he works as an electromechanical engineer, sailor, pilot, consultant, and property developer and he once owns half of a Zambian emerald mine near lake Tanganyika. His Mother is Maye Musk, a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan, Canada. Elon has a younger brother, Kimbal, and a younger sister, Tosca and he went to Anglican Sunday school during his youth time.
At the age of 10, He had an interest in computing and video games and gained a Commodore VIC-20. At the age of 12, he learned computer programming using a manual and then sold the code of a BASIC-based video game he created called Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine closely $500. Elon attended Bryanston High School and Water House Preparatory School before graduating from Pretoria Boys High School.
Later on, he went to study at the University of Pretoria for 5 months while waiting for a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother. It prevented him from mandatory service in the South African military. In June 1989, Elon arrived in Canada and was living with his cousin in Saskatchewan for a year, doing side jobs at a farm and lumber mill. Around 1990, he went to study at Queen’s Unversity in Kingston, Ontario. After years later, he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in economics and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics in 1995 when moved to the University of Pennsylvania. The first risky business venture of Elon was Penn’s tree-lined campus. Also, an off-campus house was rented by Elon and his friends turned it into a nightclub.
The early career of Elon Musk
During the summer, at energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, in 1994, Elon applied for two internships in Silicon Valley, which explored electrolytic ultracapacitors for energy storage, and at the Palo Alto-based embarked on Rocket Sciences Games.
Around 1995, he was admitted into a Doctor of Philosophy(Ph.D.) program in materials science at Stanford University in California. He decided to try his luck two days after dropping out of Stanford University.
Elon and his brother, Kimbal founded an online business directory company called Zip2. It is a type of web-modified yellow page with maps: a great idea back in the mid-nineties.
Elon and Kimbal enrolled investors and search for assistance to execute the company, which lead to deals with publishers such as the New York Times. Zip2 was sold to Compaq in 1999, a fall of a computer-producing giant, for $307 million.
The sportscar accident that was encountered by Elon Musk
Elon webbed a cool $22 million from the Zip2 sale: Mclaren F1 supercar was bought for $1 million by him and he told CNN when the car arrived at his home ” It’s not consistent with the rest of my behavior.”
One year after, the car was destroyed accidentally when Elon and co-founder of Confinity, Peter Thiel were in the car when he was trying to flaunt the acceleration.
The ventures of Elon musk
Furthermore, Elon Musk discovered another online banking startup called X.com. Elon and Peter combined the companies in March 2000, forming a new business that eventually became PayPal.
In September, Elon became the CEO, and later on, he was fired by the board while he was on vacation replacing him with Peter. This happened due to a misunderstanding over changing the company’s servers. In 2002, PayPal was sold to eBay and from the deal, Elon webbed a large fortune of $180 million.
After the large fortune, Elon was still eager to make more money for himself. In the same year, he discovered SpaceX with the almost ridiculous charge of settling on Mars.
In 2003, an initial investment of more than $6 million into Tesla was dropped by him which was a vision of electric sports cars. The company had an idea to take advantage of new lithium-ion batteries, which were heavy energy and light, to inspire the struggling field.
During that time, Lithium-ion cells were used in small electronic devices, and one of the main ideas of Tesla was scaling them up, which make it create an electric vehicle with greater distance than the last electric cars that were achieved.
For a few years, SpaceX and Tesla were not fluctuating. The former Tesla chief technical officer J.B Straubel said “It was a potential company ending discovery if we couldn’t fix it” and in 2008, Tesla was to face bankruptcy during the Great Recession.
The investment of Elon started to succeed. In 2008, SpaceX made deal with NASA for $1.6 billion. In 2012, Tesla started producing its first mass-market car named the Model S. Presently, Tesla is a goliath, holding about two-thirds of the U.S electric vehicle market and SpaceX is unbeatable in private space exploration.
In 2016, The Boring Company, which digs tunnels, and neurotechnology startup Neuralink which is the latest venture of Elon Musk. The ventures are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The Boring Company’s goal is to inspire introductory structure while NeuraLink is making an effort to produce telepathic interfaces with machines.
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Conclusion
The main reason why Elon Musk is the wealthiest person on the planet, he invested millions of dollars in ventures that were risky and that were not apparent to people. However, Elon Musk became the number one richest billionaire in 2021 through his investments, and as of January 2022, his estimated net worth of around $243 billion.
