The world now knows that Elon Musk, South African born American entrepreneur, had jumped to the second position among the world’s richest, overtaking Bill Gates. Elon Musk advanced up the ranks, mainly driven by Tesla share price, whose market value is almost 500 billion dollars.
His Tesla shares are valued four times more than his stake in Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX). Reports said that that he jumped to the second place after his net worth stood at 127.9 billion dollars.
www.indianf.com look at the life of the second richest person, Elon Musk
Beginning
Musk ventured into business, starting from Zip 2. This was founded in 1995 along with his brother. They first ran the business from a rented office in Palo Alto. As Musk remembers, it was a hard time in the beginning and they got a breakthrough after obtaining contracts with The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune.
X.com and Paypal
Musk co-founded X.com in 1999. It was online financial services and an email payment company. He had a share of 10 million dollars that he got through his sale of Zip 2. After a year, X.com merged with Confinity that was a money transfer service. The company focused on Pay Pal service and was renamed PayPal in 2001. Online auction company e-Bay bought Paypal in 2002. Before the sale, Musk was the company’s largest shareholder.
SpaceX
Musk believed that humanity should become multiplanet species for survival. But he was not satisfied with the expense of rocket launchers. This prompted him to develop the Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in 2002. The SpaceX launched the first rocket Falcon in 2006, followed by a larger Falcon in 2010. These rockets were much less in cost than others. He also launched third rocket – the Falcon heavy in 2018. They also developed Dragon that could carry as many as seven astronauts. SpaceX became the first private space agency to launch first manned flight when it launched Demo 2 on May 30, 2020.
TESLA
It was in 2004 that Musk became associated with Tesla. He became one of the largest funders of the electric car manufacturers. Martin Eberhard and Mare Tarpenning found the company. He became CEO and product architect of the company in 2008 and holds these position till now.
Life and family
He was born on June 28 1971, in Pretoria South Africa. His mother Maye Musk was a model and dietitian. She was born in Saskatchewan in Canada and was raised in South Africa. Musk’s father was Errol Musk, who was an electromagnetic engineer in South African. His father was a pilot, sailor, consultant and even a property developer.
When their parents divorced in 1980, Musk lived mostly with his father. However, later he had said that those were terrible days and he ought not have lived with his father.
In his younger days, Musk always thought to reach America, which according to him was a place of happenings. He knew that it was easier to move to America from Canada as such obtained a Canadian passport through his mother, who was Canadian born.
In Canada, Musk attended Queen’s University in 1989. Later he graduated in with a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from the Wharton School and a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from the College of Arts
Though he had taken a PhD programme in 1995 in energy physics/materials at the Stanford University, he left that in the middle to launch an internet start-up.
