Daily News 24 brings you all you need to know about Elon Musk, his biography, net worth, cars, awards and so forth.
Elon Musk Biography
Elon Musk (born June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa) is a South African-born American entrepreneur who cofounded PayPal and SpaceX, a manufacturer of launch vehicles and spacecraft. He was also one of the first significant investors in, and the CEO of, the electric car manufacturer Tesla. In addition, Musk purchased Twitter in 2022.
Elon Musk was born in South Africa to a South African father and a Canadian mother. Musk demonstrated an early aptitude for computers and entrepreneurship. He created a video game at the age of 12 and sold it to a computer magazine. Musk left South Africa in 1988, after obtaining a Canadian passport, because he was unwilling to support apartheid through compulsory military service and sought the greater economic opportunities available in the United States.
Musk attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1992, where he earned bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics in 1997. He enrolled in graduate physics at Stanford University in California, but left after only two days because he believed that the Internet had far greater potential to change society than physics work.
In 1995, he founded Zip2, a company that provided online newspapers with maps and business directories. Zip2 was purchased by computer manufacturer Compaq for $307 million in 1999, and Musk then founded X.com, which later became PayPal, which specialized in online money transfers. PayPal was purchased by eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.
He founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in 2002 to create more affordable rockets. Its first two rockets, the Falcon 1 (launched in 2006) and the larger Falcon 9 (launched in 2010), were designed to be much less expensive than competing rockets.
Tesla
Musk had long been intrigued by the potential of electric vehicles, and in 2004, he became one of the major backers of Tesla Motors (later renamed Tesla), an electric vehicle company founded by entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Tesla introduced its first car, the Roadster, in 2006, which could travel 245 miles (394 kilometers) on a single charge. It was a sports car that could go from 0 to 60 miles (97 km) per hour in less than four seconds, in contrast to most previous electric vehicles, which Musk thought was stodgy and uninteresting.
The company’s initial public offering in 2010 raised approximately $226 million. Tesla introduced the Model S sedan two years later, which was praised by automotive critics for its performance and design.
Musk first expressed interest in acquiring Twitter in 2017. Musk began purchasing Twitter shares in January 2022, reaching a 5% stake in the company in March; by April, he owned a 9.2% stake, making him the largest shareholder. He did not submit the required SEC paperwork within 10 days of his stake reaching 5%, which is a violation of US securities laws.
On April 4, when he did publicly disclose his investment in an SEC 13G filing, Twitter shares experienced the largest intraday price surge since the company’s 2013 IPO. Musk agreed to a deal on April 4 that would appoint him to Twitter’s board of directors whereas preventing him from acquiring more than 14.9% of the company. Musk, on the other hand, made a $43 billion offer to buy Twitter on April 13, launching a takeover bid to buy 100% of Twitter’s stock at $54.20 per share.
In response, Twitter’s board of directors enacted a “poison pill” shareholder rights plan that will make it more difficult for any single investor to own more than 15% of the company without the board’s approval. Musk secured $46.5 billion in funding on April 21, including $12.5 billion in loans against his Tesla stock and $21 billion in equity financing. Musk successfully completed his bid for approximately $44 billion on April 25.
Musk is commonly described as a micromanager, and he has referred to himself as a “nano-manager.” His approach has been described as absolutist by the New York Times. Musk does not create formal business plans; instead, he approaches engineering problems using an iterative design methodology and a failure tolerance.
