Elon Musk’s net worth is currently $237.9 billion as the current CEO of Tesla and Space X. However, how he earned his billions has become an enigma for some people.
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His college education and first start-up company launched his career in technology.
The Tesla CEO was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971; his mother, Maye, was a dietician and Model. His father, Errol, was an engineer, and the couple was reportedly wealthy. During his childhood, Elon Musk was great at computers and designed a video game when he was 12. He left South Africa at 17 to avoid serving in the military during Apartheid and moved to Canada, where he briefly studied at Queens University in Ontario.
Musk’s career started after he earned two bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania and launched Zip2 with his brother, Kimbal, two days after enrolling in a graduate physics program at Stamford University. The brothers sold Zip2, one of the first online navigation services, for $307 million in 1999, and Musk used a portion of its profits to create X.com, an online payment system that the company later sold to eBay. Musk made $180 million from the sale in 2009.
Some people seem to think I tweet to affect share price. This is false. A brief rise in $TSLA stock obviously does no good for Tesla or me.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 16, 2015
Musk became a funder in Tesla Motors in 2004 and became the company’s CEO several years later. Two years prior, he founded SpaceX, where he had a vision that humans would be able to colonize Mars in the future; both firms had their financial struggles. Still, SpaceX prospered in 2008 after Musk landed a $1.6 billion deal with NASA, and Tesla’s first car, Model S, became mass-produced in 2012.
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Tesla joins S&P 500, which propelled its profit margin in the market
Tesla shares increased by 740% in December 2020 after it joined the S&P 500 and made history as the largest company to be added. Tesla’s share price tripled in value to more than $1 trillion in 2021, and the company was worth $730 billion in 2021.
Musk owned between 17 and 21 percent of Tesla shares and became the wealthiest person in January of that year.
The infamous Twitter bid and why he decided to let the buyout go
Earlier this year, Elon Musk announced that he bought a 9.1 percent stake in Twitter and the social media platform subsequently agreed to sell the company to Musk for $44 billion.
“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” Musk said in the proposal. “However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”
However, Musk said he was no longer acquiring the platform after claiming Twitter reportedly refused to provide information regarding spam accounts.
Twitter has filed a lawsuit against him and claims he cannot simply back out of the bid.
“From the outset, defendants’ information requests were designed to try to tank the deal. Musk’s increasingly outlandish requests reflect not a genuine examination of Twitter’s processes but a litigation-driven campaign to try to create a record of noncooperation on Twitter’s part.