Elon Musk’s Biography
When was Elon Musk born?
Elon Reeve Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, one of South Africa’s three capital cities. His father was an engineer, and his mother a model and nutritionist. He is the oldest of three children,his brother, Kimbal Musk, & His sister, Tosca Musk.
After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk lived primarily with his father. He would later dub the man “a terrible human being… almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done. “I had a terrible upbringing.” I had a lot of adversity growing up.
Musk’s intellectual aptitude did him few favors as a child. He found few friends in the tough-minded Afrikaner culture he encountered in school. Musk attended the private, English-speaking Waterkloof House Preparatory School
He started a year early & later graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. The years were lonely and brutal, from his descriptions. “They got my best friend to lure me out of hiding so they could beat me up. And that hurt,” Musk said.
At age 12 he created a video game & sold it to a computer magazine. In 1988, after obtaining a Canadian passport, Musk left South Africa because he was unwilling to support apartheid through compulsory military service.
Musk enrolled in Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. It was there that he met Justine Wilson, an aspiring writer. They would marry and have five sons together, twins and triplets, before divorcing in 2008. In 1992 he transferred to university of pennysylvania, Philadelphia, where he received bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics in 1997. He enrolled in graduate school in physics at Stanford University in California, but he left after only two days because he felt that the internet had much more potential to change society than work in physics.
PayPal and SpaceX
In 1995 he founded Zip2, a company that provided maps and business directories to online newspapers. In 1999 Zip2 was bought by the computer manufacturer Compaq for $307 million, and Musk then founded an online financial services company, X.com, which later became PayPal, which specialized in transferring money online. The online auction ebay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion. In 2002 he founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) to make more affordable rockets.
Its first two rockets were the Falcon 1 (first launched in 2006) and the larger Falcon 9 (first launched in 2010), which were designed to cost much less than competing rockets. A third rocket, the Falcon heavy (first launched in 2018)
He contributed funding of Tesla about $70 million. Then, in 2004, Musk joined engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning to help run Tesla Motors, where Musk was integral in designing the Tesla Roadster, an electric car.
Although After Eberhard was ousted from the firm in 2007, following a series of disagreements, Musk seized management control as CEO and product architect. Under his watch, Tesla has become one of the world’s most popular and coveted car brands.
Musk joined Twitter in 2009 as @elonmusk, he became one of the most popular accounts on the site, with more than 85M followers as of 2022. He expressed reservations about Tesla’s being publicly traded, in August 2018 he made a series of tweets about taking the company private.
However, the news sent Tesla stock plummeting, and a harsher deal was ultimately accepted. Its terms included Musk’s stepping down as chairman for three years, though he was allowed to continue as CEO; his tweets were to be preapproved by Tesla lawyers, fines of $20 million for both Tesla and Musk were levied . Musk was critical to principles of free speech, in light of the company’s content-moderation policies. Early in April 2022, Twitter’s filings with the SEC disclosed that Musk had bought more than 9% of the company.
Shortly thereafter Twitter announced that Musk would join the company’s board, but Musk decided against that and made a bid for the entire company, at a value of $54.20 a share, for $44 billion. Twitter’s board accepted the deal, which would make him sole owner of the company.
Love Life
Elon Musk has had two wives but is currently unmarried. Since 2018, he has been in a relationship with the Canadian singer/songwriter Claire Elise Boucher, professionally known as Grimes, with whom he has a son. He is the richest man on earth.
Elon Musk’s Companies
Elon Musk is the CEO of four firms, including Tesla and SpaceX, and he relies on a team of executives to carry out his vision across his empire.
Should the acquisition of Twitter be completed, the leadership selections he’s made at his other firms will provide the best indications of how he’ll handle the social media giant.
PLEASE TAKE NOTE
This article is about a person involved in a current acquisition. Information may change rapidly as the event progresses, and initial news reports may be unreliable.
