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Elon Reeve Musk is a South African born businessman, designer, and engineer with an estimated net worth of $163.9 billion as of March 2021. The businessman is responsible for the creation of Paypal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors, and is considered a "modern-day Tony Stark" because of his innovative creations and ideas. When he sold his start-up business, Zip2, in his late twenties, he became a multimillionaire, and his wealth has since risen to billions.
Musk, who was born to a model-dietician mother and a millionaire father, and demonstrated his creativity at a young age when he taught himself to program and sold his first program, a game called Blastar when he was 12 years old. Musk moved to Canada at the age of 17 in 1989 to attend Queen's University and escape 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 left Canada in 1992 to attend the University of Pennsylvania to study business and physics. He earned an undergraduate degree in economics before moving on to earn a second bachelor's degree in physics. Musk dropped out of Stanford after just two days of attempting to complete his PhD in order to be a part of the internet revolution, founding Zip2 Corporation in 1995. Musk became a resident of the United States in 2002.
Musk and his brother, Kimbal Musk, founded their first company, Zip2 Corporation, in 1995. Zip2 was purchased for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options by a subsidiary of Compaq Computer Corporation in 1999. Musk and his brother founded X.com, an online financial services/payments business, with the proceeds from the sale of Zip2. The next year, X.com was acquired, resulting in the formation of PayPal as we know it today. When PayPal was purchased by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock in October 2002, Musk made his first billion. Musk owned 11% of PayPal stock prior to the transaction.
Musk founded his third company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, in 2002 with the aim of developing commercial spacecraft. By 2008, SpaceX had formed itself, and NASA had given it the contract to transport cargo to the International Space Station. Musk and SpaceX made history on May 22, 2012, when they sent an unmanned capsule into space aboard their Falcon 9 rocket. Musk's rocket venture, SpaceX, has a total value of $46 billion dollars.
Tesla Motors, founded in 2003, is committed to manufacturing affordable, mass-market electric vehicles, as well as battery products and solar roofs. Musk is the co-founder, CEO, and product architect. Musk is in charge of the company's product development, engineering, and design. Musk's net worth increased by $140 billion in 2020, taking it to $167 billion, thanks to the electric automaker's stock exploding by over 734 % since the start of the year. Musk owns around 241 million shares of Tesla, or 25% of the company.
Furthermore, his net worth has recently risen and fallen in lockstep with the price of Bitcoin. Last month, Tesla announced that it had added $1.5 billion in cryptocurrency to its balance sheet. Musk's fortune plummeted by $15 billion two weeks later after he remarked on Twitter that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies' prices "do seem big."
Musk married Justine Wilson, a Canadian author whom he met while attending Queen's University. They were married in 2000 and divorced in 2008. They have a total of five children and Musk has two other kids from separate relationships. He married Talulah Riley, an English actress, in 2012, but the couple divorced in 2016. Musk has an undeniable influence on this generation, having been named to Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2010, 2013, and 2018. On Jan. 26, 2021, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he was the richest person in the world surpassing Jeff Bezos. Musk is getting into minimalism in 2021, starting with getting rid of a whole lot of California real estate. He sold three houses in May 2020 after turning them into a Bel-Air cul-de-sac for $62 million and is looking to sell more of his properties.
Sources: Forbes, Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Biography, CNBC, Bloomberg
This article was updated on March 24th, 2021 by Vanessa Shumbanhete
Earnings & Financial Data
Date | Category | Description | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
2021 | Misc. | lost $27 billion as shares of the automaker tumbled in the selloff of tech stocks. | $27,000,000,000 |
2020 | Sale of Asset | selling spree, four homes — three of them tucked into a Bel-Air cul-de-sac — for a combined $62 million. | $62,000,000 |
2020 | Salary | $346 million of stock awards as part of a performance-based compensation package. | $346,000,000 |
2020 | Earnings | Tesla stock exploding by over 650% | $140,000,000,000 |
2019 | Misc. | SpaceX raised $1.33 billion from three rounds of funding | $1,330,000,000 |
2019 | Earning Turned Donation | The Boring Company received its first outside funding. raised $120 million | $120,000,000 |
2013 | Salary | Annual salary from Tesla | $1,000 |
2013 | Asset | Value of his 32% stake in Tesla | $5,760,000,000 |
2013 | Earnings | Earnings from winning the Heinlein Prize for Advances in Space Commercialization award | $500,000 |
2012 | Asset | Value of his stock-based salary from his work on the Model X sport-utility vehicle | $4,300,000 |
2012 | Asset | Value of his Bel Air mansion | $17,000,000 |
2012 | Salary | Bonuses earned from Tesla Motors as CEO | $36,709 |
2012 | Salary | Salary from Tesla Motors as CEO | $33,280 |
2009 | Contract | Minimum contract amount by SpaceX with Nasa for its Falcon 1 rocket to be the first privately funded liquid-fuelled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit (maximum of $3.1 billion) | $1,600,000,000 |
2002 | Sale of Asset | Earnings from the sale of PayPal to eBay | $165,000,000 |
1998 | Sale of Asset | Earnings from the sale of Zip2 to Compaq | $22,000,000 |