WHO IS THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD?

The prestigious Forbes magazine published a list of men with the world’s largest fortunes. One of them has an income that qualifies him as a billionaire. Who is he?

For this year’s publication, and for the first time, billionaire Elon Musk receives the title of the richest man in the world, according to Forbes’ analysis.

How much is Elon Musk’s fortune? The estimate indicates that he has revenues of 219 billion dollars for his fortune that will continue to grow in the coming months.

Last year, this entrepreneur was already on the list but in second place. In this way, he left behind his compatriot Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who has to his name 171 billion approximately.

WHO IS ELON MUSK?

Elon Musk (b. 1971) is an American entrepreneur of South African origin. He is co-founder and CEO of the company Tesla Motors, a pioneer in the manufacturing of electric cars. He is the founder and CEO of SpaceX, the first company to sell a commercial flight to the moon. 

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on June 28, 1971.

ELON MUSK’S CHILDHOOD

Son of a South African father (engineer) and a Canadian mother (Model and nutritionist), Elon Musk has two siblings: Kimbal (1972) and Tosca (1974). 

From an early age, Elon Musk showed his talent for computers and his entrepreneurial spirit. 

At 12, Musk created a video game, Blastar, which soon sold for $500. 

At 16 he thought of setting up an arcade but did not get his parents’ permission. 

EDUCATION

When he finished school, Elon Musk was torn between studying physics and engineering at the University of Waterloo or physics and economics at Queen’s University. He eventually opted for the latter.

In 1989 he moved to Canada in search of better job opportunities. He entered Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where he studied until 1991, having completed his first and second years at the university. He lived in Victoria Hall, on the International Floor at the institution. 

From Queen’s University, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, a top American Ivy League university, where he earned a BA in Physics and Economics in 1995. 

That same year, in 1995, he started a Ph.D. in Physics at Stanford University in California in the field of energy physics, but within just two days dropped out and locked his enrollment. 

At the age of 24, the then doctoral student decided to give up his academic life to dedicate himself to his first company, Zip2 Corporation, which he founded with his younger brother Kimbal.

Despite having completed his degree, during the Satellite 2020 conference in Washington in 2020, Musk criticized formal academic education: “I think its university is for having fun and proving that you’re capable of doing assignments or some essay writers tasks. It’s not a learning space” and cited as an example some big names who dropped out of the colleges they attended such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison.

FIRST COMPANIES

As early as 1995, Elon Musk founded Zip2 Corporation, a company that provided content for online newspapers that reached clients such as the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. When he started the company, the entrepreneur worked every day and slept in the office. 

In 1999, Zip2 was sold to Compaq, a computer manufacturer, for $370 million. Musk, who owned a 7 percent stake in the company, received $22 million at 28.

Soon after, the entrepreneur used the money from the sale of Zip2 and founded X.com, a payment, and financial transfer company. In 2000, X.com merged with Confinity and gave birth to PayPal, the leading online money transfer service. 

In 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion. Musk created three new companies with the proceeds: Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City.

TESLA MOTORS

A pioneer in manufacturing battery-powered cars, the American company Tesla Motors is a company located in Palo Alto, California, United States. Founded by entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2004, Musk became one of its main backers. 

The name, Tesla, is a reference to the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), who registered more than 700 patents and invented the bladeless turbine and the alternating current induction motor. 

The initial challenge for Musk’s company was excellent: Tesla wanted to establish itself with electric cars in a country that traditionally consumes a lot of gasoline.

In 2006 Tesla presented its first car, the Roadster, which had a range of 394 km on a single charge, costing $92,000. Tesla Motors also launched the Model S and the Model X.

In 2008 Tesla almost went bankrupt but was saved by a $456 million loan provided by the US government.

In 2010 the company was able to list its shares on the stock exchange and became the first American automaker to trade after Ford (in 1956).

Gradually, the cost of production came down, and in 2017, Tesla launched the Model 3, which costs, in the cheapest version, $35,000. The Model 3 had a range of 350 km, that is, the distance the car can travel on one battery charge. 

By November of the same year, Tesla had already accumulated a list of almost 500,000 interested in the new electric car. Elon Musk built a huge battery factory in the Nevada desert state to fuel his vehicles to meet all this demand.

THE SPACEX

In 2000, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologie (SpaceX), to make rockets at lower costs and conduct space travel. Musk created a reusable rocket that could take off and return to the platform that launched it.

SpaceX also developed the Dragon Spaceship, which carries supplies to the International Space Station and is also designed to carry up to seven astronauts.

SpaceX took a car and, later, two astronauts into space

On February 6, 2018, SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy “super rocket,” which took the Tesla Roadster, a red, sporty, electric car equipped with an “astronaut dummy” nicknamed Starman, into space as a test payload.

The Tesla Roadster has traveled into Mars orbit and will remain in space for many years. The Falcon Heavy is the first stage of an ambitious plan by Elon Musk to take a man to Mars.

In May 2020, SpaceX launched a manned rocket with two NASA astronauts (Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken) toward the International Space Station. 

The rocket launch was a milestone because it was the first time in nearly a decade that a manned trip was sent into space by Americans. The last mission, in 2011, was via the Space Shuttle program.

On its return to Earth, the Capsule docked off the coast of Florida, bringing the astronauts safely back to Earth. The fact that it is docked is also essential. It had been 45 years since any American capsule had docked on our planet.

The mission was also an industry milestone because it was the first private company to send up a space flight with its rocket. 

OTHER VENTURES

Elon Musk is also co-founder of SolarCity, a solar panel company, is vice president of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence company, and founder and CEO of Neuralink, a medical research company founded in 2016 in California.

Neuralink sets out to create a brain-machine interface to make humans a kind of cyborg powered by artificial intelligence.

Elon Musk wasn’t satisfied with the traditional schools created for his five children Ad Astra (a Latin expression meaning “to the stars”). 

Before creating Ad Astra, Musk’s children attended the Mirman school for gifted children. Dissatisfied with the type of education offered, Musk decided to take his children out of the school and develop the Ad Astra school to provide differentiated instruction, thinking about each child’s abilities, interests, and aptitudes.

Little is known about the educational establishment. One of the little information available is that the school also receives the children of some employees of Musk’s companies. 

PERSONAL LIFE

Elon Musk married in 2000 to Justine Musk (née Justine Wilson), a writer he met in Ontario. The couple’s first child (named Nevada) died at 10 weeks old of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

After Nevada’s death, the couple Elon and Justine underwent in vitro fertilization treatments and had five more children (twins and triplets). Musk’s children with Justine are Kai, Damian, Griffin, Xavier, and Saxon.

After eight years of marriage, Elon and Justine separated. Musk’s next relationship was with Talulah Riley, a British actress twenty years younger than the entrepreneur. 

The two were first married in 2010 and divorced two years later. In July of the following year, they remarried and divorced for good in December 2014. The couple did not have any children.

Since 2018 the businessman has been in a relationship with singer Grimes, who is the mother of Elon’s sixth child (and the singer’s first child). The baby was born on May 5, 2020, and was given the controversial name X Æ A-Xii. The name results from the variable X in mathematics reference artificial intelligence (Æ) and the couple’s favorite aircraft (A-Xii).

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