Know, who is Elon Musk?
Elon Musk is a South African-born American entrepreneur and businessman with a citizenship of 3 countries South Africa, United States of America and Canada. He co-founded PayPal and formed SpaceX, he was also one of the first significant investors as well as CEO of Tesla. He is in the second position on Forbes billionaire list 2021 with a net worth of $166.9 Billion.
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Early Life of Elon Musk
Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. Though world knows him as a successful entrepreneur, his childhood was not easy. His parents got divorced and he spent his childhood as a nerd who was smart and thus was bullied by his fellow mates. In Ashlee Vance’s book Musk said that gangs of boys at would sometimes hunt him down, going so far as to push him down a flight of stairs in one instance and send him to the hospital. “I was almost beaten to death,” He was bullied until he was 15 and went through a growth spurt and learned how to defend himself with karate and wrestling. His family and doctor once thought he was deaf and ordered a test to check his hearing but later they realized that this is his way of daydreaming about his inventions. His mother Maye Musk recalled in Vance’s book “He goes into his brain and then you just see he is in another world. He still does that. Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something.”
Education
Musk started school a year early, attending the private Waterkloof House Preparatory School and later graduating from Pretoria Boys High School South Africa. At age 17 in 1989, Musk moved to Canada to avoid serving in the South African military and later obtained Canadian citizenship through his mother. After emigrating to Canada, Musk enrolled in Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. After two years at Queen’s University, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. Musk graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Physics, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the Wharton School. Musk was 24 years old when he moved to California to pursue a Ph.D. in applied physics at Stanford University though he left the Ph.D. program after just two days.
Elon Musk’s Family
Elon’s father Errol Musk worked as an engineer and his mother Maye Musk is a model and nutritionist. Elon is the oldest of three children. His brother Kimbal Musk is currently a venture capitalist and environmentalist, he also sits on the boards of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX. His sister Tosca Musk is an award-winning producer and director and Co-founder of the streaming service Passionflix.
Elon Musk’s Relationships
Elon’s longest public relationship is with his ex-wife Justine Wilson. The two met while attending Queen’s University in Ontario. They were married in 2000 but went through a tragedy after their first son, Nevada Alexander Musk, passed from SIDs. The couple went on to have a set of twins, Griffin and Xavier Musk and triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian Musk. Though the couple ultimately divorced in 2008. Two years later in 2010, he and Tallulah Riley were married, though they divorced in 2012. However, they once again married in 2013 and were together until Elon filed for divorce in 2016. In 2013, after his first divorce from Tallulah Riley, the businessman was reportedly romancing actress Cameron Diaz though things seemingly fizzled out before they really got started. Between 2016 to 2017 Elon Musk and actress Amber Heard were spotted together various times. They reportedly tried to rekindle things in early 2018, but called it quits by February of that year. Currently Elon Musk and musician Claire Elise Boucher, better known as Grimes are dating each other. They kept their relationship quiet, but all bets were off when they attended the 2018 Met Gala together. On May 4, 2020 they gave birth to a baby and named their new born X Æ A-Xii where X is an unknown variable, Æ is pronounced as Ash which Grimes described as her elven spelling of love or Artificial intelligence and A-Xii refers to Archangel-12.
Businesses of Elon Musk
Easter Egg
In an interview Kimbal Musk revealed that Elon with his siblings travelled around the wealthy parts of the South African capital selling homemade chocolate Easter eggs. The production cost was 50 cents and they charged $10 per easter egg.
Blastar
Elon Musk’s first ever creation was “Blastar” a science fiction inspired space game. He built it in 1984 at the age of 12 and got $500 after a South African trade publication ‘PC and Office Technology magazine’ published its source code.
Video Arcade
At the age of 16, Elon with his brother Kimbal tried of opening an arcade but their plans were foiled when the city told them they were too young to get a real estate permit without an adult to sign off.
Zip2
Zip2 was the first enterprise founded by Elon Musk in the year 1995 with his brother Kimbal, and Greg Kouri. It provided a searchable business directory that could be described as an Internet version of the yellow pages telephone directory with maps included. Musk described the company’s mission by saying that everyone ought to be able to find the closest pizza parlour and to be able to figure out how to get there. In 1996 Davidow Ventures invested around $3 Million in exchange for majority ownership. In addition, Musk was replaced as CEO by a more experienced businessman, Richard Sorkin, but remained executive vice president and chief technology officer. Later because of Musk’s pressure as he disagreed with Sorkin’s business policies, Sorkin was replaced by Derek Proudian. Later In 1999 Compaq Computer Corp. purchased Zip2 for $307 million, and Zip2 became a unit of the search engine AltaVista.
X.com now PayPal
In 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company. X.com merged with Confinity, which at the time operated a little-known money transfer service called PayPal. Confinity was co-founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. The entire company was rebranded as PayPal in 2001, a year after Musk left the company over disagreements with other executive members. But PayPal later went public and got scooped up by eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002
SpaceX
SpaceX is a designer, manufacturer and launcher of the world’s most advance rockets and spacecraft. It all started in 2001 when Musk began his project “Mars Oasis” which made the possibility of colonizing Mars real, the idea really ignited in the public imagination. The Mars bound rocket which Musk needed cost $65 million which was way over budget and so he decided to build one himself. The idea of building rockets in-house is what led to the creation of SpaceX in 2002. Falcon 1 was the first rocket built by SpaceX which after 3 failed attempts succeeded in 2008. The real reason behind SpaceX’s success is their cost-effective projects. NASA calculated how much it would cost them to do the same project and SpaceX had been able to do it for 5 times cheaper. Till now SpaceX have successfully launched many satellites, and there have been plans made to take Maezawa Yusaku, a Japenese businessman, as well as some artists to Moon in 2023. Elon Musk even plans on launching people to inhabit Mars around 2025.
Tesla
Tesla is an electric vehicle manufacturer with its mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy through increasingly affordable electric vehicles in addition to renewable energy generation and storage. There are currently over 275,000 Model S, Model X and Model 3 vehicles on the road worldwide. Tesla was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003 and Elon Musk joined Tesla in 2004, after investing $6.3 million in Tesla stocks and was appointed to the position of Chairman of its Board of Directors. In October 2008, Musk took over as CEO of the company and co-founders Eberhard and Tarpenning left Tesla entirely. As of April 2021, it is the world’s best-selling electric car, with more than 500,000 units delivered. A fifth vehicle, the Model Y crossover, was launched in 2020. The Cybertruck, an all-electric pickup truck, was unveiled in 2019. Under Musk, Tesla has also constructed multiple lithium-ion battery and electric vehicle subassembly factories, such as Gigafactory 1 in Nevada and Gigafactory 3 in China.
Hyperloop
Hyperloop is a concept developed by Space X and Tesla founder Elon Musk for ultra-fast inter-city travel in 2013. Using travel pods inside metallic tubes, he calls it as a “fifth mode” of transport in addition to cars, planes, boats, and trains. The Hyperloop is a high-speed commuter and freight transport system that could reach speeds of around 750 mph (1,210 kph). Musk’s initial design was to take people from downtown Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes – a distance of around 380 miles (610 km). The total estimated cost of the project is $6 billion. It works by propelling specially designed pressurized pods or capsules using electromagnetic force inside a near-vacuum tube to reduce air friction and drag.
OpenAI
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others, who collectively pledged US $1 billion in December 2015. Musk resigned from the company’s board in February 2018 but remains one of its top donors. OpenAI seeks to build a machine with human intelligence while prioritizing transparency and safety. In June 2020, the lab released its first commercial product. The tool, dubbed “the API,” allows businesses to directly access OpenAI’s powerful general-purpose text generation AI, which has been trained on trillions of words from the internet. The lab had initially been wary of publishing the full version of the text generation AI, as it could be misused.
Neuralink
Neuralink Corporation was started by Elon Musk and his 8 partners Ben Rapoport, Dongjin Seo, Max Hodak, Paul Merolla, Philip Sabes, Tim Gardner, Tim Hanson and Vanessa Tolosa in July 2016 and is developing an implantable brain-machine interface. The company has hired several high-profile neuroscientists from various universities and is developing a device which consists of a tiny probe containing more than 3,000 electrodes attached to flexible threads thinner than a human hair, which can monitor the activity of 1,000 brain neurons. On April 9, 2021 Neuralink claimed to have demonstrated a monkey playing the game “Pong” using the Neuralink implant.
The Boring Company
In December 2016, Musk founded The Boring Company after growing frustrated with traffic in Los Angeles and the limitations of two-dimensional transportation networks. The start-up aims to create subterranean tunnels that allow pedestrians, freight, utilities, or autonomous electric vehicles to circumvent traffic on surface roads to more directly get from A to B. It currently has active construction or is planning future projects, in both the Los Angeles and Baltimore–Washington areas. They have also been selected to build a downtown-to-airport loop by a government program for high-speed transport in Chicago.
Conclusion
Elon Musk is a man of his words, he clearly defines the meaning of an entrepreneur “a person who identifies the real problem and solves it by his innovative and creative ideas.” He cares for both humanity as well as environment. In October 2019 he pledged to donate $1 million to the #TeamTrees campaign, which aims to plant 20 million trees around the world by 2020. He even changed his Twitter name to Treelon for the occasion. In short Musk will keep making people’s life more comfortable and thrilling by his new ideas and efforts.