Elon Musk is a South African-American industrial engineer, entrepreneur, who co-founded Paypal and founded the aerospace transportation services company SpaceX. He is also an early investor in Tesla, an electric car company, of which he is now CEO. With a fortune of over $200 billion, Elon Musk is comfortably seated at 1st place in the list of the top 10 billionaires in the world.
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Elon Musk: a genius in a not obvious childhood
Born in 1971, Elon Musk showed an early talent for computers and video games.
After their parents divorced in 1979, 9-year-old Elon and his younger brother, Kimbal, decided to live with their father. It was only after the move that her notoriously troubled relationship with her father began to emerge. “It was not a good idea”, Musk said in an interview with Rolling Stone about moving in with his father.
In 1983, at the age of 12, Elon Musk sold a simple game called “Blastar” to a computer magazine for $500. Musk described it as “a trivial game…but better than Flappy Bird.” Still, Musk’s school days weren’t easy – he was once hospitalized after being beaten up by bullies. The thugs threw Musk down a flight of stairs and beat him unconscious.
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What studies did Elon Musk do?
After graduating from high school, Elon moved to Canada with his mother, Maye, sister, Tosca, and brother, Kimbal, and spent two years studying at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
But he completed his education at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned degrees in physics and economics.
After graduating, Elon Musk went to Stanford University to do his doctorate – but he barely started the program when he quit. He postponed admission after just two days in California, deciding to test his luck in the dot-com boom that had just begun. He never returned to finish his studies at Stanford.
Elon Musk’s businesses:
The entrepreneurial adventure of Elon Musk is genius even if it often sows pitfalls and unforeseen events.
Zip2: Elon Musk’s first company
Along with his brother, Kimbal, Elon Musk launched Zip2. A group of Silicon Valley investors helped fund the company, which provided city tour guides to newspapers such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.
During Zip2’s startup, Elon Musk literally lived in his office and showered at a local YMCA. That hard work paid off when Compaq bought out Zip2 for $341 million in cash and stock, which netted Musk $22 million: a more than successful exit for the multi-billionaire.
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Visionary Elon Musk launches Paypal and SpaceX
Musk has created several successful companies since leaving Stanford University in 1997. That year, he started his first company – Zip2. This company, which provided maps and business directories to online newspapers, was acquired by Compaq in 1999. He then created X.com, which eventually merged with PayPal, which went public in 2001, and in 2002 eBay bought the company for $1.5 billion.
In 2002, Elon Musk created SpaceX and since then the aerospace company has reached several milestones over the years. SpaceX became the first company to successfully relaunch and land on the first stage of an orbital rocket in late 2017. In 2020, SpaceX made history on May 30, having carried astronauts into space. of NASA Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken aboard his Crew Dragon spacecraft using a Falcon 9 rocket.
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NeuraLink: Elon Musk’s craziest company
In the near futurethe more concrete but ambitious goal of Neuralink is to develop a system that allows people with paralysis or brain disorders to control smartphone applications or restore their motor function.
Using hundreds of flexible fiber-like neural implants, the company aims to place electrodes in the brain using a surgical robot resembling a sewing machine, which will achieve transfer rates of data much higher than what is currently possible. In addition, the flexibility of polymeric yarns would facilitate the use of soft and ever-changing tissues compared to more rigid interfaces.
So far the system has been tested on rats and monkeys, but Elon Musk and his team say they hope to start implanting human volunteers by the end of 2022.
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Tesla: Elon Musk’s winning investment
In 2004, Elon Musk has invested heavily in You’re herean electric car company, because he believed that electric vehicles were the future of mobility. Two years after introducing its first car, Tesla launched the Model S sedan in 2008, which was praised by car critics for its performance and design.. The company finally made him a billionaire at the age of 40 in 2012. Elon Musk, as CEO of Tesla, was embroiled in several controversies that sent shares plummeting.
In 2018, Musk got into trouble after his tweet falsely claimed he had secured funding and was considering taking Tesla private at $420 a share. This resulted in him and Tesla paying a $20 million fine and Musk agreeing to step down as chairman of Tesla’s board of directors. However, despite the controversies, Tesla shares continued to grow, adding to his wealth.
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Elon Musk: What about twitter?
In April 2022, Elon Musk bought a 9.2% stake in Twitter, the social media platform where he has over 80 million followers. The purchase appears to make Mr. Musk Twitter’s largest shareholder, ahead of the 8.8% stake held by mutual fund firm Vanguard and eclipsing the 2.3% stake of Jack Dorsey, the former chief executive. from Twitter.
Musk’s investment in Twitter, which he has accumulated for at least the past month, was worth about $2.89 billion based on the company’s closing stock price on Friday. But by the end of the day on Monday, after news of his takeover sent Twitter’s stock price soaring more than 27%, he was worth around $3.7 billion. The shares are only a fraction of Mr. Musk’s net worth, which is said to be more than $270 billion.
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However, Elon Musk announced last July that he was terminating the operation because the microblogging site violated several provisions of the merger agreement. Today, Twitter’s board plans to sue Musk to enforce several provisions of the merger agreement.
Twitter Chairman Bret Taylor said on Twitter that the microblogging site is considering legal action against Musk for pulling out of the $44 billion deal. For now, the trial initially scheduled for October, should be postponed to February 2023.
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