Elon Musk

Elon Musk 

World Famous People - Elon Reeve Musk (/ˈiːlɒn/; EE-lon; born 28 June 1971) in Pretoria, South Africa. Elon Musk is an entrepreneur and investor. He is the founder, chairman, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO, product architect, and former chairman of Tesla, Inc.; owner, executive chairman, and CTO of X Corp.; founder of the Boring Company and xAI; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and president of the Musk Foundation. He is one of the world's richest people, with an estimated net worth of US$190 billion in March 2024, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and $195 billion according to Forbes, primarily from his stake in Tesla and SpaceX. Elon Musk is a South African-born American businessman and entrepreneur who founded X.com in 1999 (which later became PayPal), SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla Motors in 2003. 

Musk became a multimillionaire in his late 20s when he sold his startup company . company, Zip2, to the Compaq Computer division. Musk made headlines in May 2012, when SpaceX launched a rocket that would send the first commercial vehicle to the International Space Station. He strengthened his portfolio by purchasing SolarCity in 2016 and cemented his position as an industry leader by taking on an advisory role in the early days of President Donald Trump's administration. January 2021, Musk reportedly surpassed Jeff Bezos as the richest person in the world. 

When Elon Musk was a child, he was so lost in his daydreams about inventions that his parents and doctors ordered tests to check his hearing. When his parents divorced, when Elon Musk was 10 years old, he became interested in computers. He taught himself how to program, and when he was 12 he sold his first piece of software, a game he called Blastar. 

In elementary school, Musk was short, introverted, and nerdy. He was bullied until he was 15 and went through a growth spurt and learned how to defend himself with karate and wrestling. Musk's mother, Maye Musk, is a Canadian model and the oldest woman to star in a Covergirl campaign. When Musk was growing up, he worked five jobs at once to support his family. Musk's father, Errol Musk, is a wealthy engineer in South Africa. 

Musk spent his childhood with his brother Kimbal and sister Tosca in South Africa. His parents divorced when he was 10 years old. At the age of 17, in 1989, Musk moved to Canada to attend Queen's University and avoid being drafted into the South African military. Musk obtained Canadian citizenship that year, in part because he felt it would be easier to obtain American citizenship that way. 

In 1992, Musk left Canada to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics and went on to earn a second bachelor's degree in physics. After leaving Penn, Musk headed to Stanford University in California to pursue a PhD in energy physics. 

However, his move came right at the time of the Internet boom, and he dropped out of Stanford after just two days to become part of Stanford, then launch his first company, Zip2 Corporation in 1995. Musk became a US citizen in 2002. Elon Musk's Company Zip2 Musk launched his first company, Zip2 Corporation, in 1995 with his brother, Kimbal Musk. As an online city guide, Zip2 soon provided content for The New York Times and Chicago Tribune's new websites. In 1999, a division of Compaq Computer Corporation purchased Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options. PayPal In 1999, Elon and Kimbal Musk used money from the sale of their Zip2 to found X.com, an online financial services/payments company. 

The acquisition of X.com the following year led to the creation of PayPal as it is known today. In October 2002, Musk earned his first billion when PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock. Before the sale, Musk owned 11 percent of PayPal shares. SpaceX Musk founded his third company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, in 2002 with the goal of building spacecraft for commercial space travel. By 2008, SpaceX was well established, and NASA awarded the company a contract to handle cargo transportation for the International Space Station—with plans for future astronaut transportation—as a move to replace NASA's own space shuttle missions.