Elon Reeve Musk (born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate, industrial designer, and engineer.
Musk was born to a Canadian mother and South African father and raised in Pretoria, South Africa. He briefly attended the University of Pretoria before moving to Canada aged 17 to attend Queen’s University. He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania two years later, where he received dual bachelor’s degrees in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but decided instead to pursue a business career, co-founding web software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. The start-up was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. Musk co-founded online bank X.com that same year which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form the company PayPal and was subsequently bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX as an aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company with the goal of reducing space transportation costs and enabling the colonisation of Mars. In 2004 he joined electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors as chairman and became its CEO in 2008. In 2006 he helped create SolarCity, a solar energy services provider now owned by Tesla.
On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion USD.
Here are ten fun facts about Elon Musk:
1, Musk almost sold Tesla to Google back in 2013 for $6 billion.
2. He owns a Lotus Esprit which he bought for almost $1 million. The car feature in the James Bond movie “The Spy Who Loved Me.”
3. Musk had a cameo part in Iron Man 2 and played himself in The Big Bang Theory. He also has parts, as himself, in The Simpsons, South Park and Rick and Morty.
4. He named his son after a character from Marvel Comics. “One of my sons is named Xavier, after Professor X!” he confirmed in a 2017 tweet.
5. He has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. He described growing up with the syndrome: “I think everyone’s experience is going to be somewhat different, but I guess for me, the social cues were not intuitive. I was just very bookish and I didn’t understand these.”
6. His mother is a model. At 74 she is the oldest Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover model.
7. He actually joined Twitter in June 2009 before purchasing it in 2022 for $44 billion.
8. He takes no salary from Tesla, all of his wealth is based on stocks and his ownership of companies.
9. When he was 12 years old, he created a video game called “Blastar”. He sold it to a computer magazine in 1984 for $500.
10. Musk has seven children — five with his ex-wife, Justine, and two with the musician Grimes. He also had a son, Nevada, who died of SIDS in 2002.
