Musk invested in DeepMind, an artificial intelligence startup that Google acquired in 2014, and Neurovigil in 2015, a startup that develops brain monitors. Powered and implemented by FactSet. Then in May 2016, Musk donated $250 million in Tesla stock to his foundation, but that money has also been slow to get . How did Elon Musk make his money? The two, who head competing rocket companiesSpaceX for Musk, Blue Origin for Bezoshave also traded banter over their billionaire space race. The Zip2 deal amounted to $307 million; Musk's share of the proceeds was a tidy sum of $22 million. Even today Musks stake grows as he continues to receive quarterly stock awards, in lieu of salary, worth billions of dollars. Yeah, kids starting with lots of money usually have much less motivation than those who have nothing. Worse than that, I had no possibility of employment for about a year because of a restrictive intellectual property agreement with Tesla, he says. However, he stated, between running SpaceX and Tesla, he could not devote time to the Hyperloops development. Put it like this, his tunnelling business is called The Boring Company. Elon Musk cofounded the electronic payment firm PayPal, and in 2002 he founded SpaceX, a company that makes rockets and spacecraft. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, ranked as the world's wealthiest person by both Forbes and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, last year explained that the secret to his wealth is simple: "I own 20% of a. Diane Hendricks Is the Richest Self-Made Woman How Did She Do It? The following month the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Musk for securities fraud, alleging that the tweets were false and misleading. Shortly thereafter Teslas board rejected the SECs proposed settlement, reportedly because Musk had threatened to resign. He had founded a digital financial services business called X.com in 1999, which merged with the company that owned the fledgling payments processing business. By Justin Rowlatt BBC News Elon Musk has just become the richest person in the world, overtaking Amazon. Tesla cofounder Martin Eberhard at a conference in New Delhi in February 2019. Elon Musk hailed the test as an "awesome" success. He isn't worried about looking stupid because his big financial bet hasn't paid off, what he cares about is pursuing important ideas. In September 2022, Twitters shareholders voted to accept Musks offer. Marc Tarpenning cofounded Tesla in 2003 with Martin Eberhard. In 2016, Musk founded Neurlink, a startup focused on developing brain-machine interfaces. Lots 81-82 Street C Musk was also present at Teslas debut in 2006, but he assumed a lower profile that day, mainly arguing for the need to shift cars away from gasoline power as quickly as possible. Tesla CEO Elon Musk continues to. He told me he didn't believe SpaceX or Tesla would ever make money when he set them up - and the truth is nor did anyone else. March 8, 2023 by Karl Clark. By contrast, Musk himself has shown far less restraint. You can move $8 to your S&P fund, $3 each to your money market and bond fund, and be left with $6 in your checking., He went on to expand more philosophically on the new company: In my view, the Internet had gone through a couple of stages and was ready for another stage, he said. His father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, and property developer, who . Elon Musk is an ambitious entrepreneur who reinvested profits from successful ventures. Tesla CEO Elon Musk shares a stage with Antoine ArnaultLVMH CEO Bernard Arnault's eldest sonat VivaTech in Paris on Friday. In an Instagram story Wednesday, Zuckerberg fired back by . When adding in options, Musk's stake is worth $176.3 billion, according to Forbes. (modern). Other projects are primarily speculative. Bret Taylor, the chair of Twitters board of directors, responded by saying that the company was committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk. Twitter sued Musk to force him to buy the company. A single tweet from Elon Musk can move world markets. In addition to swapping positions several times at the top of billionaires list, Musk and Jeff Bezos have invested in competing businesses. And he certainly didnt wind up as the wealthiest person in history. After promising last year that he would ditch almost all his personal possessions, including six mansions, he now owns one house and counts his primary residence to be a 400-square foot rental unit. Mr Musk was delighted with how much the test outing achieved. Heres a timeline of Musks most notable business endeavorsboth successful and notover the past three decades. I agree to Money's. That Mars base is a clue to what Elon Musk believes is the key to success. Tesla's revenue jumped from $12 billion in 2017 to $54 billion in 2021. CEO Elon Musk tweeted this week that . With Elon Musk close to claiming a new role as owner of Twitter after a winning bid to purchase it for $44 billion this week, the billionaire entrepreneur can add the social media app to a long list of business ventures he has led, invested in, and supported over his lengthy career. Tesla CEO Elon Musk continues to stand in the top five of the worlds richest people, just a few billion shy of being number one (that place is currently held by Bernard Arnault). Elon Musk took a dig at wealthy Democratic donors and President Joe Biden's plans to tax the rich in a tweet on Saturday. His mother is Maye Musk (ne Haldeman), a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised in South Africa. Tesla has become the most valuable and (by some measures) the most profitable automaker in the world, But a short while ago it nearly toppled into bankruptcy. But back in 1995 he founded an online local business directory called Zip2, which was bought by Compaq Computer Corp in 1999 for $307 million. Musk told me he regards himself as an engineer rather than an investor, and says what gets him up in the morning is the desire to solve technical problems. PayPal then accepted eBay's offer to buy in July 2002 - against Musk's advice. And the market seems to like what he's doing. People may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Of the five official cofounders, only Straubel, who left Tesla in 2019, is likely to have attained billionaire status from his holdings. While he was studying at Unversity of Pensylvania in 1992, Elon Musk used to make an entire month of his rent in just one night, coding stuff. It soared to the current valuation within a few months of becoming the worlds most valuable carmaker at $205bn. At 12, he taught himself how to program and consequently made a sci-fi inspired video game and sold it to South African tech magazine for $500. In an interview, Eberhard says he retains a relatively small stake in the carmaker, while declining to be specific. After reuniting with his brother Kimbal in Canada, the two determined brothers researched businesspeople that they wanted to meet and took turns making cold calls to ask if they could have lunch. He received $22m for his stake when the company was sold to the computing firm Compaq in 1999. Where did Elon Musk go to school? The unusually frequent shuffling atop the billionaire leaderboard continued last month, when Musk became second richest again, trailing only Bezos. Engineer Wright, who joined Eberhard and Tarpenning a few months after they created Tesla, left in 2004 to start another EV company. Valued at over $1 trillion at one point in 2021, Tesla was founded in 2003 by two other men; Musk entered a Series A funding round with an investment of $6.5 million, and eventually took an increasingly active role in the company. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elon-Musk, The Immigrant Learning Center - Biography of Elon Musk, Elon Musk - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up), Tech billionaires' cage match? Musk's wealth has ebbed and flowed over the past few years. The Sex and the City revival is back for another instalment By Selina Maycock (Google would not launch until 1998.) You've got to have skin in the game to do well, but Elon Musk has taken more risks than most. When his offer was deemed surplus to requirements, Musk called the diver paedo guy. A few years back I spent almost an hour discussing exactly this with him. Published 22 June 23, Molly-Mae Hague has stepped down as the Creative Director of the UK-based fast fashion brand, PrettyLittleThing, after nearly two years. As of March 13, 2023, Musk's wealth increased to $165 billion. He wants to revolutionise the car industry, colonise Mars, build super-fast trains in vacuum tunnels, integrate AI into human brains and upend the solar power and battery industries. Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, to parents who divorced before he was 10. Offers may be subject to change without notice. The self-made billionaire has come a long way from when he made his first millions after selling Zip2 at 27 years old, becoming the richest person in the world towards the end of 2021, surpassing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Weekly quiz: How do Zuck and Musk plan to face off? One reason for offloading stakes in Tesla: a tax bill onstock options that were set to expire in August 2022, with Musk telling Babylon Bee that he "needed to exercise those options no matter what.". Musk was born to a South African father and a Canadian mother. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Not bad for the guy who would eventually become the inspiration for Tony Stark in Iron Man. He purchased the social media service Twitter in 2022. Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. Eberhard wont provide details of his Tesla stake, but he confirms hes not a billionaire. Cofounder Steve Jobs Apple stake was worth an estimated $2 billion at the time of his death in 2011 and Steve Wozniaks wealth is an estimated $100 million, though Ronald Wayne, Apples little-known third cofounder, sold his stake early for $800, Hsu says. But neither of them retained enough Tesla stock to achieve billionaire status, much less Musks current net worth that Forbes estimates at $282 billion as of Nov. 10. Tesla ranks as the worlds most valuable auto company at more than $104 billion. He described Eberhard as literally the worst person Ive ever worked with in a January 2020 interview for the Third Row Tesla podcast, hosted by Musk fans. While he's best known as CEO of electric car companyTeslaand private rocket firm SpaceX, he's also the founder of Neuralink and The Boring Company. Musk claimed that the Hyperloop would cost only $6 billion and that, with the pods departing every two minutes on average, the system could accommodate the six million people who travel that route every year. It was bought by early PC company Compaq in 1999, who had become a leading supplier of PC systems until it was overtaken and bought out by HP in 2002. Tesla will move its headquarters to Texas, Elon Musk says Musk got $0 in pay in 2020, according to a company filing, but he did receive stock options during the year that are now worth $22 billion. But it has also become a heavy-hitter in the space industry with a number of records to its name, including being the first private company to send a craft to the International Space Station and send astronauts to orbit. People somehow have the idea that I was a zillionaire when I started Tesla. Its aim: build tunnels. In addition to being CEO of SpaceX, Musk was also chief designer in building the Falcon rockets, Dragon, and Starship. What will Titan investigators be looking for? How did Elon Musk get so rich during the pandemic? Early in April 2022, Twitters filings with the SEC disclosed that Musk had bought more than 9 percent of the company. Was he born rich? It was Musks seed capitalthe result of an early payday as a cofounder of payments processor PayPalthat turned Eberhard and Tarpennings vision into a reality. Tesla this month became the first carmaker to hit an astonishing $1 trillion valuation, but the CEO who introduced the company to the press 15 years ago didnt become synonymous with the brand. Once, his mother Maye even worked the door at one of the big parties. Musk now owns about 42 percent of the business, per The Wall Street Journal. Musk attended Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, and in 1992 he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he received bachelors degrees in physics and economics in 1997. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. In early 2000, X.com merged with its rival Confinity, and the company was renamed PayPal. Musk did not reply to a request for comment on his net worth and rank among the worlds billionaires at the time of publication. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. The company was founded by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003 before Musk took over as CEO. In 2002, eBay purchased PayPal for $1.5 billion, making Musk, you guessed it, a lot of money! Musks other company is the Boring Company, which constructs tunnels for underground transportation systems with zero emissions. Transcript. For that you could buy Ford, General Motors, BMW, Volkswagen and Fiat Chrysler, and still have enough left over to buy Ferrari. Musk has been open about his interest in developing friendly AI that supports humanity, but he ended up resigning from the board in 2018 due to conflicts with Teslas AI projects. He would run the parties, and as he explained, "I was paying my own way through college and could make an entire month's rent in one night." As part of a settlement, he dropped opposition to Musk, former Tesla Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel and Ian Wright, an early engineer with the company, also being called cofounders, in addition to himself and Tarpenning. But his funding and strategic vision has helped propel Tesla from a niche specialist in electric vehicles to a stock market giant valued at more than $600bn. Musk tweeted that he sold the stake in order to avoid "an emergency sale of Tesla stock" if he loses his bid to cancel his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. / MoneyWatch, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, ranked as the world's wealthiest person by both Forbes and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, last year explained that the secret to his wealth is simple: "I own 20% of a company that became very valuable.". So, his advice is to make sure you are working on what he calls "stuff that's going to matter". It was PayPal that really launched Musks career into the stratosphere. In 2002 he founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) to make more affordable rockets. Why Kenya struck a big deal with the EU on its own. Musk throws down the gauntlet and Zuckerberg accepts challenge, Australian online safety watchdog demands answers from Twitter on how it tackles online hate, Twitter employees sue social media company over bonuses they say weren't paid despite promises, Twitter is the worst major social media platform when it comes to LGBTQ+ safety, says GLAAD, Los Angeles county DA's office quits Twitter due to barrage of 'vicious' homophobic attacks. Shares in Tesla rocketed up more than 720% in 2020, helping to increase Musks net worth by more than $125 billion in a year. Neuroscientists have been skeptical of Neuralinks research and claims. Musk once spoke boldly about an ambitious Hyperloop system, creating tunnels across the country to revolutionize and speed up underground mass transport between cities. England and Wales company registration number 2008885. (Since 2012, Musk has also been a signatory of The Giving Pledge, in which many of the worlds richest people have committed to giving away the majority of their wealth at some point.). It is currently working on further tunnel projects in Las Vegas for underground transport. In addition, Musk acquired Twitter in 2022. Musk went on to start SpaceX in 2002, followed by Tesla in 2003. Elon Musk cofounded six companies, including electric car maker Tesla, rocket producer SpaceX and tunneling startup Boring Company. Were Elon Musk's parent's rich? The valuation is what it is. Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter and SpaceX, has broken his silence about the disappearance of a research submarine visiting the remains of the Titanic. Below are some of the most resourceful ways in which he made money before becoming a famous billionaire. 1 spot on Forbes' real-time ranking of the world's richest as of Tuesday afternoon. SpaceX is contracted to build the lander for the astronauts returning to the Moon by 2025 as part of NASAs Artemis space program. Teslas first effort, a modified Lotus Elise chassis packed with 7,000 tiny lithium-ion cells, was a high-end concept that would soon be followed by a lower-priced family sedan, the chief executive said. I own no Tesla stock now, he tells Forbes. His plans include making Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.. Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. Twitter owner and Tesla (TSLA) CEO Musk recently tweeted that he would be "up for a cage fight" with Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta. Musk next set his sights on a lofty goal: space exploration, and the future colonization Mars. He had just entered his 30s and had almost $200m in the bank. In 2021, the electric car company surpassed $1 trillion in market value, overshadowing the combined value of five of its biggest rivals: Volkswagen, Toyota, Daimler, Ford and General Motors. "You want things in the future to be better," he told me. All rights reserved. Of course I could not imagine a $1 trillion valuation!. Musk has British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. Musk had been interested in computers from an early age, and taught himself programming starting at 9-years-old. The company won further praise for its Model X luxury SUV, which went on the market in 2015. 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