In January 2021, Elon Musk made headlines when he became the richest man on the planet
with a net worth of $187 billion, we have already told about it in our previous video,
just check it out.
The eccentric billionaire has been compared to the Marvel comic character Tony Stark,
also known as Iron Man, and you can understand why.
Like Tony, Musk is stupendously rich.
He is a tech magnate standing at the frontiers of technological advancement in the world.
And oh, he's quite a social media personality.
Musk does not fit the mold of the quintessential, reserved, conservative, and old billionaire.
He's open, very outspoken, and genuinely interesting.
As the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Musk has made a name for himself as one of the main figures
at the center of futuristic technology.
From carbon emission-free electric cars to space shuttles that will transport humans
to start a colony on Mars, and chips that connect the human brain to computers just
by the power of thinking, Elon Musk is the man who is gradually making science fiction
our reality.
But how did this 50-year-old business magnate conquer the world with his ideas and become
one of the richest men on the planet?
We'll look through the beginnings of Musk's illustrious career, his education, and his
first steps into a brilliant business career.
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Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa on June 28, 1971, to a South African father
and a Canadian mother.
His mother, Maye Musk, worked as a Canadian model and was the oldest woman to star in
a CoverGirl campaign while his father, Errol Musk, was a wealthy South African engineer.
At a young age, Musk became very interested in personal computers and how they worked.
The young Musk would often tell stories to his parents and friends about his dreams and inventions.
Oftentimes, he was caught lost in thought, daydreaming about the things he wanted to
achieve in his life.
Musk's daydreaming episodes were so intense that he was once thought to have suffered
from partial deafness.
By the time Musk turned 10, his love for computers led him to learn programming by himself.
Not long after, at just 12 years of age, Musk wrote and sold his first software.
It was a game which he created called "Blaster".
Growing up in school, Musk was someone you'd describe as a nerd.
He was introverted, bookish, and very smart.
Unfortunately, being a rather small kid with very little social influence in school, Musk
was often the victim of bullying.
But that only lasted till he turned 15 and experienced a growth spurt.
He also decided to pick up karate and wrestling as a means to defend himself against school bullies.
Following his graduation from high school, Musk enrolled at the University of Pretoria.
But he had no plans to continue his education there.
Instead, while at the University of Pretoria, Musk was gathering his documents to travel abroad.
In June 1989, Musk moved to Canada with plans to locate his great-uncle in Montreal.
When his plans did not materialize, he traveled to Saskatchewan to stay with his second cousin.
While in Saskatchewan, Musk began to do odd jobs working at a farm and a lumber mill.
But his time in Saskatchewan wasn't long.
A year after arriving in Canada, Musk started his tertiary education at Queen's University,
Kingston, Ontario.
Musk's relocation to Canada meant that he managed to escape the one-year mandatory service
in the South African military.
Also, during his time in Canada, he obtained Canadian citizenship.
Three years later, Musk left Canada and traveled to the United States where he began to study
business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Musk later finished from UPenn with two bachelor's degrees, one in economics and the other in physics.
During his time at the University of Pennsylvania, Musk held two summer internship positions
in Silicon Valley.
The first was at an energy storage startup called Pinnacle Research Institute.
This was a company that conducted thorough research work on electrolytic ultracapacitors
used for energy storage.
The second summer intern position he took up was at another start-up called Rocket Science Games
based in Palo Alto.
Following his graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, Musk immediately enrolled
at Stanford University, California to begin a Ph.D. in energy physics.
But this was at a time when the internet boom was in effect.
Seeing an opportunity in the internet industry, Musk chose to drop out of his Ph.D. program
just two days after enrolling for graduate studies.
After taking the bold step to drop out of Stanford, Musk set up his first company which
he called Zip2 corporation.
Together with his brother, Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk set up this company in 1995.
The two brothers set up shop at a small rented office in Palo Alto after receiving generous
funds from a group of angel investors.
Zip2 was a company that developed internet city guides for the newspaper publishing industry.
The brilliant guides included maps, directions, and yellow pages.
At the start of the company, the Musk brothers could only afford to rent their office space.
They had no apartment of their own, so the two men slept on their office couch and showered
at the YMCA.
At the office, the brothers could afford only one standard computer.
According to Elon Musk, the website only ran during the day, while he spent the nights
writing code to further develop the site.
But with time, the Musk brothers started to make in-roads with their startup that would
change their fortunes.
They sealed deals with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune to supply city guides.
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The company became so successful that by February 1999, Compaq acquired the company for a staggering $307 million.
The buyout deal earned Musk a cool $22 million.
That same year, Musk co-founded X.com, an email payment, and online financial services
company.
X.com was one of the very first online banks to be federally insured, and with that sort
of security behind them, it drew the confidence of customers who numbered over 200,000 in
the first few months of operations.
Unfortunately for Musk, the company's investors did not consider Musk experienced enough to
serve as CEO, and so, by the end of 1999, Musk was replaced by Bill Harris from Intuit.
Musk would later return as CEO after X.com merged with the online bank, Confinity, whose
money-transfer service was known as PayPal.
But by September 2000, Musk was once again removed as CEO due to some issues he had with
the board over the business model and direction of the company.
With the company under the leadership of the new CEO and co-founder of Confinity bank,
the company focused on their PayPal service, later renaming the entire organization PayPal.
Eventually, PayPal was acquired by eBay for a stunning $1.5 billion in stock.
At the time, Musk was the largest shareholder in the company, and with the new acquisition,
he earned himself another $100 million.
Inspired by a vision to design a growth chamber for plants on Mars, Musk traveled to Moscow
in October of 2001,
to purchase Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles with plans to send greenhouse
payloads into space.
In Moscow, he met two companies, NPO Lavochkin and Kosmotras.
None of them took Musk seriously.
He was considered a novice and out of his depth.
A story goes that Musk was even spat at by one of the chief Russian designers who thought
that Musk was taking them for a joke.
Musk returned to the United States empty-handed, and even after a second visit to Russia in
2002, Musk decided to take on the mission himself.
So, with the $100 million fortune, he had earned till that point, Musk started Space
Exploration Technologies Corp, better known as SpaceX.
Ever since the company has been actively involved in developing new technology for space exploration
missions while working together with NASA on private contracts.
In 2020, SpaceX became the first private company to launch a manned flight into orbit and dock
a crewed spacecraft at the International Space Station.
In 2004, Musk joined Tesla Incorporated as chairman of the board after leading the series
A round of investments that year.
The company specialized in the development of electric vehicles.
Following the financial crisis of 2008, Musk took on the role of CEO of the company.
By March 2020, Tesla Incorporated became the world's best-selling electric car after delivering
over 500,000 units.
It was a year that saw the value of Tesla's stock increase tremendously, adding to Musk's immense fortune.
To put that in perspective, at the start of 2020, Musk had a net worth of $20 billion
and by the end of the year, this had increased by a staggering $100 billion.
Musk also co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology startup focused on linking up the human brain
with artificial intelligence in a bid to enhance human memory and treat diseases like Alzheimer's.
In 2016, Musk started the company The Boring Company with an initial focus on constructing channels.
Musk is also involved in the Hyperloop project with a plan to revolutionalize the transport
system using a new technology that will considerably shorten distances between
major cities in the United States.
Although 75 percent of Musk's wealth comes from Tesla, Musk does not receive a salary from the company.
Instead, in a deal Musk entered with Tesla in 2018, he is only paid compensation from
the company when the company reaches certain market values.
One of such compensations came in May 2020 when he was allowed to purchase some 1.69
million Tesla shares worth approximately $800 million.
Despite his incredible wealth, Musk does not live a particularly opulent lifestyle.
As a signatory to The Giving Pledge initiative, Musk has pledged to sell almost all his physical
possessions and has professed to have "little interest in the material trappings of wealth".
Elon Musk remains a hugely influential figure in the trajectory of future technology in the world.
And based on his track record, it appears he will maintain that degree of influence
for decades to come.
Basically, the success story of Elon Musk is far from being over.
And that’s about it.
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