elon musk short biography

Elon Musk: The Complete Biography of an Extraordinary Innovator

• by history tools
• March 26, 2024

Elon Musk is one of the most famous entrepreneurs and business leaders of the 21st century. As the co-founder of PayPal, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, and driving force behind many other companies, Musk has had an outsized influence on technology, space exploration, and solving some of humanity‘s biggest challenges.

Let‘s take a closer look at Musk’s remarkable life story, complex persona, monumental successes and occasional setbacks, and what makes him such a polarizing character.

Childhood and Early Life in South Africa

Musk was born on June 28, 1971 in Pretoria, one of South Africa’s wealthiest and most segregated cities during apartheid. His mother Maye was a famous dietitian and model who grew up in Canada, while his father Errol was a wealthy white South African electromechanical engineer.

As a child, Musk was an avid reader and self-taught computer programmer. At age 12 he created and sold a video game called Blastar to a computer magazine for $500. But his relationship with his father was difficult – his parents divorced when he was 9 years old. Musk chose to live mostly with his father, which he would later regret considering they became estranged.

Discovering His Calling

After spending two years in the South African military, Musk moved to Canada at age 19. He studied at Queen‘s University in Ontario for two years, avoiding mandatory service in the South African military, before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania.

At Penn, Musk pursued a Bachelor’s degree in Physics as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Economics. Most notably, he rekindled an early passion by taking extra classes at the Stanford School of Engineering. It was a harbinger of innovations to come.

Founding Zip2 and PayPal

In 1995 Musk dropped out of Stanford’s PhD program to found his first startup Zip2 Corporation with his brother Kimbal. Zip2 provided online city guides to newspapers like the New York Times and Chicago Tribune.

Compaq bought Zip2 in 1999 for $307 million, earning Musk $22 million. He soon co-founded X.com, one of the first online banks providing services like checking accounts and money transfers.

X.com merged with its rival Confinity in 2000 to become PayPal, with Musk serving as the new CEO. Despite internal struggles at the new company, PayPal went on to revolutionize online payments. In 2002 eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk received $175 million.

“If something‘s important enough you should try, even if the probable outcome is failure.”

Making History with SpaceX

Flush with cash from the PayPal sale, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in 2002 with an audacious long-term goal: make humanity multi-planetary by establishing a human colony on Mars.

SpaceX develops rockets, spacecraft and satellites aimed at revolutionizing space transportation to eventually make it affordable for private citizens to travel into orbit and to other planets. It almost went bankrupt in 2008, but Musk kept it afloat with personal funds.

In 2012 SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial spaceship to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. And in 2020 SpaceX sent astronauts to the ISS for the first time, effectively resurrecting American manned spaceflight.

Tesla Accelerates Ahead with Musk at the Helm

Also in 2004 Musk made the series A investment round in Tesla Motors and joined Tesla’s board of directors as chairman. Founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003, Tesla aimed to prove electric cars could be better than gasoline-powered cars.

The original Roadster sports car impressed critics, but by 2007 Tesla was also on the verge of bankruptcy. Musk invested heavily in Tesla and took over leadership of the company, serving as CEO and product architect.

Under his guidance, Tesla went public in 2010 to raise funds and the Model S sedan was named Motor Trend‘s 2013 Car of the Year. By 2023 Tesla had become the world‘s most valuable automaker, dominating the rapidly growing EV market.

Expanding His Entrepreneurial Portfolio

In addition to SpaceX and Tesla, Musk has founded or co-founded a number of new companies over the last two decades. These include:

• The Boring Company (2016) – Develops tunnels aimed at eliminating street traffic to reduce transportation time
• Neuralink (2016) – Develops implantable brain-machine interfaces to connect human brains with computers
• OpenAI (2015) – Non-profit AI research company working to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits humanity
• Starlink (2019) – SpaceX project to provide global satellite Internet access coverage

Not all of these companies have proven successful so far. But Musk continues to think big while attracting top talent to bring innovative new technologies to reality.

Taking Over Twitter for $44 Billion

In January 2022, Musk started acquiring shares of social media company Twitter. By March he had accumulated a 9.2% stake to become Twitter‘s largest shareholder. This set in motion a tumultuous year that eventually led to his purchase of Twitter for $44 billion on October 27, 2022.

Shortly after acquiring Twitter, Musk laid off roughly half the company‘s 7,500 employees and radically changed the platform‘s operations. Many users have quit the platform over concerns about misinformation as Musk grants "amnesty" to suspended accounts. The long-term implications of his takeover remain uncertain.

“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

Marriages, Relationships and Family

In 2000, Musk married Canadian author Justine Wilson. Their first son died unexpectedly from SIDS at 10 weeks old. They share custody of 5 sons – a set of twins and a set of triplets – born through IVF. Musk and Wilson separated in 2008.

From 2010 to 2012, Musk was married to English actress Talulah Riley. After divorcing, they remarried in 2013 before finalizing their divorce again in 2016. Musk also had an on-and-off relationship with musician Grimes which began in 2018. They had 2 children – a son born in 2020 and daughter born in 2021 via surrogate.

In 2022 it was revealed that Musk secretly had twins in 2021 with Shivon Zilis, a top executive at his company Neuralink. He now has 10 children from 3 relationships. But his 18-year-old transgender daughter has disowned him, changing her name in opposition to Musk‘s "public transphobia."

Losing and Regaining Title of World‘s Richest Person

Thanks mostly to his shares in Tesla Motors, Musk experienced an astronomical rise in his personal net worth. He became the richest person in the world for the first time in January 2021 when he surpassed Jeff Bezos.

But his net worth dropped in 2022 and early 2023 as Tesla‘s share price declined. On January 6, 2023 Musk lost the title of world‘s richest person to Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH.

What‘s more, with an estimated $183 billion loss between November 2021 and January 2023, Musk holds the record for the largest loss of personal fortune in history according to Guinness World Records. Despite these setbacks, Musk’s supporters are betting he’ll reclaim the top spot someday.

What Makes Musk Such a Polarizing Figure

Musk has earned both ardent fans and vocal critics. So what makes him such a polarizing public figure?

Reasons supporters are drawn to Musk include:

• Daring vision for future innovations
• Willingness to take risks
• Commitment to tackling climate change with sustainable energy
• Power to make things happen that others consider impossible
• Relatable sense of humor on social media

However some people are strongly critical of Musk for:

• Poor treatment of employees by demanding unrealistic hours and goals
• Controversial public stances on issues like pandemic lockdowns
• Spreading misinformation and making questionable promises on Twitter
• Brash communication style and vindictiveness towards naysayers
• Concerns about concentration of power held by billionaires

But there‘s no questioning the outsized impact Musk already made on multiple industries. Even his detractors admit they‘re curious to see what he’ll achieve next.

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Early Life and Education

Notable accomplishments, personal eccentricities, the bottom line.

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Who Is Elon Musk?

Nathan Laine / Bloomberg / Getty Images

Elon Musk, born in Pretoria, South Africa, is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time. Musk has achieved global fame as the chief executive officer (CEO) of electric automobile maker Tesla ( TSLA ) and the private space company SpaceX. Musk was an early investor in several tech companies, and in October 2022, he completed a deal to take X (formerly Twitter) private.

His success and personal style have given rise to comparisons to other colorful tycoons from U.S. history, including Steve Jobs , Howard Hughes, and Henry Ford . He was named the richest person in the world in 2021, surpassing Amazon ( AMZN ) founder Jeff Bezos. Musk is the richest person in the world as of Feb. 15, 2024.

Let’s look briefly at the life of the man who has scaled the pinnacle of the business world.

Key Takeaways

• Elon Musk is the charismatic CEO of electric car maker Tesla and rocket manufacturer SpaceX.
• Following a contested process, Musk completed a deal to buy the company behind X in October 2022, becoming the owner of the social media company.
• Born and raised in South Africa, Musk spent time in Canada before moving to the United States.
• Educated at the University of Pennsylvania in physics, Musk started getting his feet wet as a serial tech entrepreneur with early successes like Zip2 and X.com, which merged with a company that became PayPal.
• Musk has behaved eccentrically from time to time.

Bailey Mariner / Investopedia

Elon Reeve Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, the oldest of three children. His father was a South African engineer, and his mother was a Canadian model and nutritionist. After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk lived primarily with his father. He would later dub his father “a terrible human being...almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.”

“I had a terrible upbringing. I had a lot of adversity growing up. One thing I worry about with my kids is they don’t face enough adversity,” Musk would later say.

Bullied as a Child

Musk attended the private, English-speaking Waterkloof House Preparatory School—he started a year early—and later graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. A self-described bookworm, he made few friends in those places.

“They got my best (expletive) friend to lure me out of hiding so they could beat me up. And that (expletive) hurt,” Musk said. “For some reason, they decided that I was it, and they were going to go after me nonstop. That’s what made growing up difficult. For a number of years, there was no respite. You get chased around by gangs at school who tried to beat the (expletive) out of me, and then I’d come home, and it would just be awful there as well.”

Early Accomplishments

Technology became an escape for Musk. At 10, he became acquainted with programming using a Commodore VIC-20, an early and relatively inexpensive home computer. Before long, Musk had become proficient enough to create Blastar—a video game in the style of Space Invaders. He sold the BASIC code for the game to a PC magazine for $500.

In one telling incident from his childhood, Musk and his brother planned to open a video game arcade near their school. Their parents nixed the plan.

Musk’s College Years

At 17, Musk moved to Canada. He would later obtain Canadian citizenship through his mother.

After emigrating to Canada, Musk enrolled at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. It was there that he met Justine Wilson, an aspiring writer. They would marry and have six sons together, a first son, twins, and then triplets, before divorcing in 2008.

Entering the U.S.

After two years at Queen’s University, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. He took on two majors, but his time there wasn’t all work and no play. With a fellow student, he bought a 10-bedroom fraternity house, which they used as an ad hoc nightclub.

Musk graduated with a bachelor of science degree in physics, in addition to a bachelor of arts in economics from the  Wharton School . The two majors foreshadowed Musk’s career, but it was physics that left the deepest impression.

“(Physics is) a good framework for thinking,” he would say later. “Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.”

Musk was 24 years old when he moved to California to pursue a Ph.D. in applied physics at Stanford University. But, with the Internet exploding and Silicon Valley booming, Musk had entrepreneurial visions dancing in his head. He left the Ph.D. program after just two days.

In 1995, with $15,000 and his younger brother Kimbal at his side, Musk started Zip2, a web software company that would help newspapers develop online city guides.

In 1999, Zip2 was acquired by Compaq Computer Corp. for $341 million. Musk used his Zip2 buyout money to create X.com, a fintech venture before that term was in wide circulation.

X.com merged with a money transfer firm called Confinity, and the resulting company came to be known as PayPal. Peter Thiel ousted Musk as PayPal CEO before eBay ( EBAY ) bought the payments company for $1.5 billion, but Musk still profited from the buyout via his 11.7% PayPal stake.

“My proceeds from PayPal after tax were about $180 million,” Musk said in a 2018 interview. “$100 (million) of that went into SpaceX, $70 (million) into Tesla, and $10 (million) into SolarCity. And I literally had to borrow money for rent.”

In 2017, Musk purchased the X.com domain name back from PayPal, citing its sentimental value.

Musk became involved with the electric cars venture as an early investor in 2004, ultimately contributing about $6.3 million, to begin with, and joined the team, including engineer Martin Eberhard, to help run a company then known as Tesla Motors. Following a series of disagreements, Eberhard was ousted in 2007, and an interim CEO was hired until Musk assumed control as CEO and product architect. Under his watch, Tesla has become the world’s most valuable automaker.

In addition to producing electric vehicles, Tesla maintains a robust presence in the solar energy space, thanks to its acquisition of SolarCity. The company currently produces two rechargeable solar batteries. The smaller Powerwall was developed for home backup power and off-the-grid use, while the larger Powerpack is intended for commercial or electric utility grid use.

Musk used most of the proceeds from his PayPal stake to found Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the rocket's developer commonly known as SpaceX. By his own account, Musk spent $100 million to found SpaceX in 2002 .

Under Musk’s leadership, SpaceX landed several high-profile contracts with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Air Force to design space launch rockets. Musk has publicized plans to send an astronaut to Mars by 2025 in a collaborative effort with NASA.

The company was founded in March 2006 as Twitter by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. Originally a private company, it went public in November 2013. It raised $1.8 billion through its initial public offering (IPO) .

Musk joined the site in June 2009. A frequent poster on the messaging network, Musk disclosed a 9.2% stake in X in April 2022. The company responded by offering Musk a seat on the board, which he accepted before declining days later. Musk then sent a bear hug letter to the board proposing to buy the company at $54.20 per share.

The company’s board adopted a poison pill provision to discourage Musk from accumulating an even larger stake, but they ultimately accepted Musk’s offer after he disclosed $46.5 billion in committed financing for the deal in a securities filing.

In July 2022, Musk attempted to cancel the deal , arguing that X had failed to provide certain information regarding fake accounts. The company sued Musk to require him to complete the deal.

After months of legal wrangling, the billionaire’s plan to buy the social media platform came to fruition, and Musk took control of the company on Oct. 28, 2022. The company was renamed X the following year.

During his May 8, 2021, appearance on the TV show Saturday Night Live , Musk revealed that he has Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. “I’m actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger’s to host SNL . Or at least the first to admit it,” he said. How does the neurodevelopment condition manifest itself? “I don’t always have a lot of intonation or variation in how I speak, which I’m told makes for great comedy,” Musk explained.

On Sept. 7, 2018, Musk smoked cannabis during a filmed interview for a podcast.

Just a month earlier, Musk posted an infamous tweet claiming he was considering taking Tesla private and had secured the needed funding. Musk subsequently settled a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) complaint alleging he knowingly misled investors with the tweet by paying a $20 million fine along with the same penalty for Tesla and agreeing to let Tesla’s lawyers approve tweets with material corporate information before posting.

In March 2022, Musk filed a court motion to overturn the consent decree stemming from that case. In April 2022 during a live TED Talk, Musk called the SEC regulators on the case “bastards.”

Is Elon Musk Married?

Elon Musk has been divorced three times—twice from his second wife, Talulah Riley. From 2018 to 2022, he was in a relationship with Canadian singer/songwriter Claire Elise Boucher, professionally known as Grimes, with whom he had a son in 2020, a daughter in 2022, and a third child revealed in 2023. They remain best friends. He also has six boys from his first marriage to Justine Musk. He also shares twins with Shivon Zilis. Musk has a total of 11 children.

How Rich Is Elon Musk?

Elon Musk’s net worth was estimated at $205 billion as of Feb. 15, 2024, making him the wealthiest person on the planet.

Was Elon Musk Born Rich?

No, Elon Musk was born into a middle-class family. In 1995, when he founded X.com, he reportedly had more than $100,000 in student debt and struggled to pay rent.

What Does Elon Musk Do at Tesla?

Elon Musk is officially listed as the co-founder and chief executive officer of Tesla on the company’s website. In a 2021 securities filing, the company disclosed an additional Musk title as “Technoking of Tesla.”

What Companies Does Elon Musk Own?

Elon Musk is a large stakeholder in several companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Co., Neuralink, and X Corp.

Musk’s early interests in philosophy, science fiction, and fantasy novels are reflected in his idealism and concern with human progress—and in his business career. He works in fields he has identified as crucial to humanity’s future, notably the transition to renewable energy sources, space exploration, and the Internet.

Musk has defied critics, disrupted industries, and made the most money anyone ever has from PayPal, Tesla Motors, SolarCity, and SpaceX—game changers all, despite the inevitable missteps.

The New York Times. “ Elon Musk Has Become the World’s Richest Person, as Tesla’s Stock Rallies .”

Bloomberg. “ Bloomberg Billionaires Index .”

Rolling Stone. “ Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow .”

Bloomberg. “ Bloomberg Billionaires Index: Elon Musk .”

The Washington Post. “ The 22 Most Memorable Quotes from the New Elon Musk Book, Ranked .”

Gizmodo. “ Elon Musk: The Tech Maverick Making Tony Stark Look Dull .”

Anna Crowley Redding, via Google Books. “ Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World .” Feiwel & Friends, 2019.

Esquire. “ Elon Musk: Triumph of His Will .”

Marie Claire. “ ‘I Was a Starter Wife’: Inside America’s Messiest Divorce .”

CNBC. “ Elon Musk Ran a Nightclub Out of His College Frat House to Make Money for Rent .”

Inc. “ Elon Musk Just Said MBAs Are Overrated, and He’s Dead Right .”

TED. “ Elon Musk: The Mind Behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity... ,” read transcript, 19:19 (Video).

Fortune. “ Why Elon Musk Dropped Out of Stanford After Only Two Days .”

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CNBC. “ Elon Musk Tried to Pitch the Head of the Yellow Pages Before the Internet Boom: ‘He Threw the Book at Me’ .”

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PayPal, via U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “ Form S-1 ,” Page 9.

PayPal, via U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “ Form 10-K for the Fiscal Year Ended Dec. 31, 2001 ,” Pages 75–78.

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “ Exhibit 99.1: eBay to Acquire PayPal .”

YouTube. “ Elon Musk Interview [I Made 180 Million Dollars but Still Had to Borrow Money for Rent] ,” 1:58–2:14 (Video).

X. “ Elon Musk, July 10, 2017, 9:10 PM .”

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YouTube. “ Elon Musk Monologue—SNL .” (Video)

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Vanity Fair. “ Elon Musk Splits with Actress Talulah Riley for the Second (or Third?) Time .”

TODAY. " Who Are Elon Musk's Children? "

X. “ Grimes, March 10, 2022, 11:32 AM .”

Vanity Fair. “‘ Infamy Is Kind of Fun’: Grimes on Music, Mars, and Her Secret New Baby with Elon Musk .”

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Eight things we learned from the Elon Musk biography

Widespread access to world’s richest man allowed biographer Walter Isaacson to detail a number of illuminating anecdotes

A new biography of Elon Musk was published on Tuesday and contains colourful details of the life of the world’s richest man.

Musk afforded widespread access to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, the author of the bestselling biography of the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and the book contains a series of illuminating anecdotes about Musk. Here are eight things we learned from the book.

1. Musk’s difficult relationship with his father

Musk, 52, was born and raised in South Africa and endured a fraught relationship with his father, Errol, an engineer. Isaacson writes that Errol “bedevils Elon”.

Musk’s brother, Kimbal, says the worst memory of his life was watching Errol berate Musk after he was hospitalised after a fight at school (the book says Musk was still getting corrective surgery for the injuries decades later). “My father just lost it,” says Kimbal.

Musk and Kimbal, who are estranged from their father, describe Errol as a “volatile fabulist”. Interviewed by Isaacson, Errol admits he encouraged a “physical and emotional toughness” in his sons.

Grimes, the artist who is mother to three of his 10 children, says PTSD from Musk’s childhood shaped an aversion to contentment: “I just don’t think he knows how to savor success and smell the flowers.” Musk tells Isaacson he agrees: “Adversity shaped me. My pain threshold became very high.”

2. Elon Musk has an issue with the ‘woke mind virus’

Shortly before taking over Twitter, or X as it is now called, Musk told Isaacson that the “woke mind virus” – a derogatory term for progressive politics and culture – would prevent extraplanetary settlement (one of Musk’s fixations).

“Unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary,” said Musk.

3. Musk gave Twitter executives short shrift

Musk fired Twitter’s executive team as soon as he completed the takeover of Twitter in October last year and it had been coming. When Musk bought a significant stake in Twitter months before, he agreed to meet the CEO, Parag Agrawal. After the meeting, Musk said: “What Twitter needs is a fire-breathing dragon and Parag is not that.”

They soon fell out. Agrawal texted Musk to say his tweet asking if Twitter was “dying” was not helpful. Musk, on a break in Hawaii, replied: “What did you get done this week?” He added: “I’m not joining the board. This is a waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private.”

This was during discussions about Musk joining the board. Agrawal’s reply underlined the power imbalance, and Twitter’s fear of Musk. He texted: “Can we talk?” Musk soon lodged an official bid for Twitter, which he tried unsuccessfully to wriggle out of, but the die was cast for Agrawal and his colleagues.

4. Sam Bankman-Fried tried to get in on the Twitter takeover

The founder and CEO of the fallen cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, offered via his banker to put $5bn (£4.1bn) into the Twitter takeover, the book claims. Bankman-Fried also wanted to discuss putting Twitter on a blockchain – the technological underpinning for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.

A subsequent call between Musk and Bankman-Fried in May 2022 went badly, Isaacson wrote. “My bullshit detector went off like red alert on a Geiger counter,” Musk is quoted as saying.

Bankman-Fried’s offer to invest or to roll over $100m of Twitter stock that he claimed he had invested, came to nothing.

5. Musk tried to recruit Rudy Giuliani as an adviser

In his early tycoon career, Musk pondered recruiting the then mayor of New York as a political fixer to help him turn his PayPal business into a bank in 2001. Musk sought a meeting with Giuliani, then coming to the end of his tenure in office, because he wanted to turn PayPal – an online payments company – into a “social network that would disrupt the whole banking industry”.

In 2001, Musk and an investor, Michael Moritz, went to New York to see if they could hire Giuliani to guide them through the process of turning PayPal into a bank. It didn’t go well.

“It was like walking into a mob scene,” Moritz says in the book. Giuliani “was surrounded by goonish confidantes. He didn’t have any idea whatsoever about Silicon Valley, but he and his henchmen were eager to line their pockets”.

“‘This guy occupies a different planet,’ Musk told Moritz.”

6. Musk is concerned about a dwindling human population

One of Musk’s reasons for founding a new artificial intelligence company , xAI, is addressing the threat of population collapse. In one face-to-face conversation with Isaacson, the multi-billionaire said human intelligence was in danger of being surmounted by digital intelligence.

“The amount of human intelligence, he noted, was levelling off because people were not having enough children. Meanwhile, the amount of computer intelligence was going up exponentially, like Moore’s law on steroids. At some point, biological brainpower would be dwarfed by digital brainpower.”

This conversation was conducted at the Austin, Texas house of Shivon Zilis, an executive at Musk’s Neuralink business who is the mother of two of his children. Zilis told Isaacson she agreed to have children with Musk via IVF after listening to his arguments about having children as a “kind of social duty”. She said: “He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to.”

7. Musk is very concerned about AI

Musk tells Isaacson that human consciousness is under threat from the prospect of super-intelligent, and uncontrollable, AI systems.

He says: “What can be done to make AI safe? I keep wrestling with that. What actions can we take to minimize AI danger and assure that human consciousness survives?”

8. Musk’s complicated role in the Ukraine conflict

Musk’s satellite communications unit, Starlink, has a key role in Ukraine’s defence against the Russian invasion. When a Russian cyber-attack crippled Ukraine’s satellite comms network an hour before the invasion, Musk stepped in following an appeal for help from Ukrainian officials and the country’s deputy prime minister.

However, the book alleges that Musk told his engineers to “turn off” Starlink coverage that would have facilitated an attack by drone submarines on Russia’s navy at the Sevastopol base in Crimea.

However, Isaacson has subsequently clarified this excerpt after Musk used his X platform to state that there was no Starlink coverage in that area and he refused a Ukrainian request to activate it. Musk posted: “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson is published by Simon & Schuster. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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Elon Musk biography

Elon Reeve Musk was born on the 28th of June of 1972 in Pretoria, South Africa. He is known for being one of the founders of Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, OpenAl, and Hyperloop, among other companies. The entrepreneur and inventor appears in the list of the richest in the world, occupying the position number 56, in 2017, with 17.4 billion dollars. Forbes magazine, for the December 2016 publication, named him the 21st person with the most power in the world. His greatest goal, according to Musk, is to change humanity drastically; for this purpose, he works in SolarCity, SpaceX, and Tesla. One of his interests is the abandonment of petroleum fuels in order to reduce global warming. Perhaps Elon’s most ambitious project, so far, is the establishment of a human colony on Mars, with nearly a million people.

He spent his childhood in South Africa with his parents, an engineer from South Africa and a nutritionist from Canada. At age 10, with his first computer, a Commodore VIC-20, he began to learn to programme on his own. Two years later he sold his first videogame called Blastar for about $ 200. At that time he went through difficult times; his schoolmates subjected him to bullying because of his uncommon interests for them. Elon spent his money on science fiction books, comics, and video games.

In the period between 12 and 15 years of age, he entered into an existential crisis influenced by the readings of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. The situation went to the extreme of taking him to the hospital because of beatings by his companions. In his home things were not better, the relationship with his father was quite complicated. He suffered the emotional violence of a father unable to understand him. Compulsory military service bothered him. For these reasons, at age 17, after graduating from high school in Pretoria, he decided to leave South Africa and take refuge with his mother in Canada.

What Musk wanted most was to reach the United States. He found in that country a way to make possible everything he imagined. Elon’s father conditioned his support: he would not pay for a university outside of South Africa. In 1989, while in Canada, he found a chance to study thanks to his maternal relatives, who came from North America. By 1992, Elon counted on a scholarship in the University of Pennsylvania. The young entrepreneur began his studies in Business Administration, in parallel he began his career in Physics. He was fortunate to have the support of one of his teachers, who turned out to be the executive director of Los Gatos, a company located in the southern part of San Francisco Bay, California. The experience gained on ultracapacitors in that company, and then in Pinnacle Research, along with the inspiration it had for inventors such as Nikola Tesla, made him define the fields in which he would focus on the future: renewable energy, the Internet and outer space.

The beginning on the Internet began with Zip2, in 1995, along with his brother Kimbal Musk and a friend named Greg Curry. The company was dedicated to the development and maintenance of web pages dedicated to the media. The idea was a success, managing around 200 sites on the Internet in the year of 1999. For that year the company was sold to Compaq for 300 million dollars; money that would help him found X.com. The next plan was to systematize payments and money management through the Internet, offering security and speed. The ease offered by X.com and security made the project a very profitable idea, as well as merging, in 2000, with Confinity; company that provided a similar service, but only between Palm Pilot devices. In 2001 X.com decided to change its name to Paypal.inc a well-known company that provides the service to make online payments internationally.

With the growing success, problems soon appeared. Different companies tried to close Paypal, including eBay, which ended up buying it in October 2002, for 1.5 billion dollars. The sale of Paypal gave way to the creation, by its former members, of companies such as LinkedIn and YouTube. The next Musk project was called Tesla Motors, the company that created the first functional electric car. The main investment in Tesla was solar energy. The idea was born in 2003 in the company AC Propulsion, which had a prototype electric car. Musk wanted to help design a sports car with the same base of AC Propulsion.

In 2004, along with Matt Tappenhig and Martin Eberhard, Tesla Motors was created, with the intention of mass producing the model T-Zero of AC Propulsion. Musk invested nearly 98% of the capital. The start of the company was hard; the budget for the first models exceeded what was expected, but they managed to sell enough to continue developing models. For 2012, 2100 Tesla Roadster was sold in different countries. In 2015 the Tesla Model X was launched, designed to cover all types of terrain.

Another of Musk’s three projects involves SpaceX. Thinking of establishing a colony on Mars, he began, in 2002, to investigate how to send a rocket to Mars. His initial idea was to obtain reusable rockets to carry out the two trips for reconnaissance missions. For that year, Space Exploration Technologies was founded, focused on launching rockets and reducing fuel costs and materials for launch with increases in viability. In 2008, an agreement was made between NASA for twelve rocket flights. Currently, SpaceX is responsible for the development of Falcon rockets, which use liquid fuel.

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Nipsey Hussle

Nipsey Hussle Biography

Ermias Asghedom (August 15, 1985 – March 31, 2019), better known as Nipsey Hussle, was an American rapper, businessman, and community activist, who rose to fame in 2018 with his debut album Victory Lab . Nipsey began his career towards the mid-2000s releasing several successful mixtapes such as Slauson Boy Volume 1, Bullets Ain’t Got No Name series and The Marathon. His fame came to him, along with his first Grammy nomination, with his debut album in 2018. He had previously created his label All Money In No Money Out (2010).

Following his death, he received two posthumous Grammys for the songs Racks in the Middle and Higher. He was known for his social work on behalf of the Crenshaw community.

Early years

He was born in Los Angeles, United States, on August 15, 1985 . Son of Angelique Smith and Eritrean immigrant Dawit Asghedom, he grew up in Crenshaw, a neighborhood located south of Los Angeles, with his siblings Samiel and Samantha. He attended Hamilton High School but dropped out before graduating. Since he was little he looked for a way to help around the home, so over time, he began to work selling different products on the street.

After leaving school he became involved in the world of gangs, however, he turned away from it when he realized that it was not what he expected for his future. Decided then to dedicate himself to music, he sold everything that linked him to the gangs and worked for a time to buy his own production tools. After finishing his studies, he began to write and produce his own mixtapes, which he sold from a car. After finding inspiration from a trip he took to Eritrea with his father and spending time in prison, Nipsey turned fully to his career and business. He always looked for ways to start and help the community in which he grew up: giving jobs, helping students, renovating public spaces, etc …

Community activist

Nipsey was admired for his work at Crenshaw because instead of moving or investing in hedge funds, he preferred to help the community by boosting the local economy.

In late 2005, Nipsey Hussle released his first mixtape, Slauson Boy Volume 1, independently, to great local success. By then he already had a fan base at the regional level, so it took him a while to sign a contract with the Epic Records and Cinematic Music Group labels. Later, the first volumes of the Bullets Ain’t Got No Name series appeared, with which he expanded his popularity. Burner on My Lap, Ridin Slow, Aint No Black Superman, Hussle in the House and It’s Hard out Here , were some of the songs included in the series.

By 2009, Nipsey would make a name for himself collaborating with Drake on Killer and with Snoop Dog on Upside Down. He also released Bullets Ain’t Got No Name vol.3 and in 2010, he left Epic and opened his own label All Money In No Money Out. Under this label, he would soon release The Marathon, a mixtape in which hits such as Love ?, Mr. Untouchable, Young Rich and Famous and Late Nights and Early Mornings appeared. He also created The Marathon Clothing at that time, a sports and casual clothing brand that was based in his neighborhood. He then released the mixtape The Marathon Continues (2011), participated in the We Are the World 25 for Haiti campaign, and was featured in the popular XXL Magazine Annual Freshman Top Ten.

In 2013 came Crenshaw , a mixtape that would become famous because Jay-Z himself bought 100 copies for $ 100 each.

Victory Lap

After many delays, Nipsey would release his long-awaited debut album Victory Lap , on February 16, 2018, to great success. It was praised by critics and received a Grammy nomination for best rap album of the year. It was such a success that many singles entered the Billboard and Itunes charts. However, Nipsey did not enjoy much fame.

Hussle was assassinated on March 31, 2019, outside his store in South Los Angeles. He was shot multiple times by a man he had previously clashed with, he was arrested and charged with murder on April 2 of the same year. After his death, many personalities expressed the pain caused by the news. It is worth mentioning that the Mayor of Los Angeles himself gave his condolences to the family, recognizing Hussle’s social work in Crenshaw.

He was the partner of actress Lauren London and was the father of two children.

Sales strategies and greatest hits

Hussle was known for his sales strategies, since, he used to upload his singles in free download and then sell some limited editions for a cost of 100 to 1000 dollars . It promoted the sale of his work with campaigns such as Proud2Pay and Mailbox Money, in which he gave special incentives (autographed photos, dedication calls, tickets to his studio, and special events) to buyers. His revolutionary ideas promised him a fruitful career.

Some of his greatest hits

• Rose Clique
• Forever On My Fly Shit
• Thas Wat Hoes Do Proud of That (with Rick Ross)
• Face the world
• Bless, 1 of 1
• Where Yo Money At
• Fuck Donald Trump
• Young Rich and Famous

Jimmy Hoffa

Jimmy Hoffa Biography

James Riddle Hoffa (February 14, 1913 – July 30, 1975), better known as Jimmy Hoffa, was an American union activist. A reference to the working class of the 20th century, Hoffa began his union activity at the age of 18 within the trucker union. With time, he was gaining importance and enemies. He mixed with the mob and was the leader of the most important union organization in the U.S.A ., the International Brotherhood of Truckers. His actions took a toll on him and in 1967 he was arrested for bribery. In 1975, he disappeared after having dinner at a Detroit restaurant. To date, it is unknown what happened or where his body is. His disappearance was portrayed in Scorsese’s The Irishman .

He was born in Brazil, Indiana, on February 14, 1913. James was the son of John Hoffa and Viola Riddle. His father passed away when he was 7 years old, of Irish descent and working as a miner. When the dad died, the family moved to Detroit, where Hoffa lived the rest of his life. He studied until he was 14 years old and began working as a teenager, to help the family. At the age of 18, he began to participate in the union demonstrations of the truck driver’s union, and over time he gained recognition. However, Hoffa had never driven a truck.

Jimmy Hoffa, the truckers, and the mob

Despite his clear inexperience, Hoffa managed to earn the respect of all road workers thanks to his charisma and effective acting. He was thus elected president of the famous International Brotherhood of Truckers or “Teamsters” in 1957. From then on he would be known for his aggressive methods and connections with the Cosa Nostra (Italian mafia). It is known that Jimmy used the mob to gain notoriety and destroy his competitors, while the union served as a front to clean up dirty money from the mob.

As time went by, his relationship with Cosa Nostra became increasingly evident, becoming the target of various investigations (fraud, conspiracy, evasion, extortion, laundering…). Behind them was the prosecutor Robert Kennedy, who later became a solicitor, his sole objective being the capture of Hoffa. Although he managed to leave the courts unscathed on several occasions – thanks to his intimidation and bribery strategies – he was finally locked up in 1967.

Hoffa had faced justice several times, so the confinement did not scare him, he planned to continue running the union and all its businesses from jail, leaving someone manageable in command. But this did not turn out as he expected, his puppet rebelled and the mafia took advantage of his confinement to expand their business with more facilities. It was clear that everyone was better off without Hoffa at the helm.

The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa

In 1971 his sentence was commuted and Hoffa returned to work, he tried to regain his place and strength, but had little luck, because the mafia was clear that the business was better without him. The day he arrived, on July 30, 1975, he was summoned by Anthony Provenzano and Anthony Giacalone, two gangster bosses who were tired of his instance. They summoned him to a restaurant in Detroit, but never showed up, Hoffa waited for more than an hour and then got into a car, disappearing ever since. Nobody saw him again.

Jimmy was powerful, but he had made many enemies and was in the crosshairs of the mob, making his disappearance one of the most famous of the 20th century. His body was never found and in 1982 he was presumed dead. Although over time many took credit for his disappearance (and his death) from him, little is known for sure.

One of the possible culprits is perhaps Frank Sheeran, the Irishman , Hoffa’s henchman, who, pressured by the gangsters, would have killed the union leader. According to Sheeran’s version, that day he would have taken Hoffa to a house, where he shot him three times, and then moved his body to a still uncertain place.

His body and his disappearance became one of the best-known mysteries of the time . To date, the fate of his body is unknown. Many say it is buried, others that it was dismembered and thrown into a river, and others that it was compacted. There were many complaints about the discovery of his body, but all false.

His legacy was continued by his son, the current head of the International Brotherhood of Truckers, James P. Hoffa.

He was married to Josephine Poszywak and was the father of James P. Hoffa and Barbara Ann Crancer.

On July 30, 1982, he was declared legally dead.

Scorsese’s The Irishman

Scorsese’s The Irishman premiered on Netflix in 2019. The film follows Hoffa’s hitman and right-hand man, Frank Sheeran, as he thus narrates his story and participation in the disappearance of Hoffa. In the film, Hoffa is played by Al Pacino , while Sheeran and the prosecutor Kennedy are played by Robert De Niro and Jack Huston.

Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker biography

Peter Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) writer, consultant, entrepreneur, and journalist. He was born in Vienna, Austria. He is considered the father of the Management to which he devoted more than 60 years of his professional life. His parents of Jewish origin and then converted to Christianity moved to a small town called Kaasgrabeen. Drucker grew up in an environment in which new ideas and social positions created by intellectuals, senior government officials and scientists were emerging. He studied at the Döbling Gymnasium and in 1927, Drucker moved to the German city of Hamburg, where he worked as an apprentice in a cotton company.

Then he began to train in the world of journalism, writing for the Der Österreichische Volkswirt. Then he got a job in Frankfurt, his job was to write for the Daily Frankfurter General-Anzeiger. Meanwhile, he completed a doctorate in International Law. Drucker began to integrate his two facets and for that, he was a recognized journalist. Drucker worked in this place until the fall of the Weimar Republic. After this period he decided to move to London, where he worked in a bank and was also a student of John Maynard Keynes .

Although he was a disciple of Keynes, he assured, decades later, that Keynesianism failed as an economic thesis where it was applied. Because of the ravages of Nazism and persecution of Jews, he emigrated to the United States, where he served as a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, from 1939 to 1949 and simultaneously was a writer. His first job as a consultant was in 1940. He then returned to teaching at Bennington College in Vermont. Thanks to his popularity he received a position to teach in the faculty of Business Administration of the University of New York.

He was an active contributor for a long period of time to magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and was a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. The quality and recognition of his writings assured him important contracts both as a writer and as a consultant with large companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Quickly and surprisingly his fortune grew. Drucker served as honorary president of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management.

In 1971, he obtained the Clarke Chair of Social Sciences and Administration at the Graduate School of Management at the University of Claremont. Now, at present Drucker is considered the most successful of the exponents in matters of administration, his ideas and terminologies have influenced the corporate world since the 40s. Drucker was the first social scientist to use the expression “post-modernity” something that caught the attention of this man is that he does not like receiving compliments. He was simple, visionary, satirical and vital.

Within his studies, he says that his greatest interest is people. His work as a consultant began in the General Motors Multinational Companies, from that moment begins to raise the theory of Management, Management trends, the knowledge society. Thanks to this theory he has published several books, these are consulted often and are fundamental for the career of business administrator. In his works, he deals with the scientific, human, economic, historical, artistic and philosophical stage.

He was founder and director of a business school that bears his name. For Drucker, it was beneficial that many of his ideas have been reformed because of the innovative way of thinking and analyzing business issues. Although approaches such as the knowledge society are the basis of the current company and the future is still maintained. He has published more than thirty books, which include studies of Management, studies of socio-economic policies and essays. Some are Best Sellers. The first book was The end of economic man (1939), The future of industrial man (1942), The concept of Corporation (1946). Later he published The Effective Executive (1985). He focused on personal effectiveness and changes in the direction of the 21st century. In 2002 the society of the future was published.

His first book caused much controversy because he talked about the reasons why fascism initiated and analyzed the failures of established institutions. He urged the need for a new social and economic order. Although he had finished the book in 1933, he had to wait because no editor wanted to accept such horrible visions. Now, Drucker has dealt with such controversial issues as individual freedom, industrial society, big business, the power of managers, automation, monopoly, and totalitarianism.

We must indicate that his analysis of the Administration, is a valuable guide for the leaders of companies that need to study their own performance, diagnose its failures and improve its productivity, as well as that of your company. Several companies have taken their approaches and put them into practice, such as Sears Roebuck & Co., General Motors, Ford, IBM, Chrysler, and American Telephone & Telegraph.

The consultant assured that there are some differences between the figure of the manager and that of the leader. For him, true leaders recognize their shortcomings as mortal beings, but they systematically concentrate on the essentials and work tirelessly to acquire the decisive competences of management. Actually, the contributions of this character in the world of administration and in the economic and social world have been significant. Drucker died on November 11, 2005, leaving a great legacy.

Jeff Bezos biography

Jeff Bezos (January 12, 1964). His birth name is Jeffrey Preston Bezos. Businessman and founder and CEO of Amazon. He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States. His mother, Jacklyn Gise, had him as a teenager and his biological father, Ted Jorgensen, left them as soon as he heard the news. Years later his mother married Miguel Bezos a Cuban. Now, Miguel adopted Jeffrey and he received his last name. The family moved to Houston, Texas. Jeffrey Bezos studied at River Oaks Elementary, he was always a very smart and witty little boy.

They moved to Miami, where he studied at Miami Palmetto Senior High School. And upon graduating he entered Princeton University to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, his thesis was cum laude. In 1996, he started working in a fiber optic company, FITEL, where he was responsible for the development of computer systems, his performance was so good that he became vice president. After moving to New York with the idea of ​​entering the world of finance, in Bankers Trust, he also held the position of vice president in 1990. In the following four years, Bezos worked with another Wall Street company: D.E. Shaw and Co.

Bezos realized that the purchase/sale of products and services on the internet or other electronic means would be a great field to explore and exploit. For this reason, he founded the electronic commerce company Amazon in 1995. Its service was something new for the netizens, which produced an increase in the visits quickly. Only in the first month of operation had books been sold in all corners of the United States. Months later it reached 2,000 daily visitors, a figure that would multiply abysmally in the next year. In 1997, the success made Amazon become one of the most important companies online.

Bezos had managed to conquer the internet business. Encouraged by the reception of consumers, he undertook the diversification of products, including CD and DVD media and electronic devices. As demand increased, this ingenious man included new products to his virtual store. The growth and its popularity were such that today it distributes from food to home, clothes and shoes, video games and music, to toilet paper and diapers. Amazon has experimented with the lucrative benefit of advertising since it gives the possibility to companies to advertise their products and mark them as featured products.

Bezos established independent Amazon websites for United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Austria, France, China, Italy, Spain, Japan, the Netherlands, Brazil, India and Mexico, the variety of products can be several in each country. Currently, the services are enjoyed by companies such as Target Corporation, Marks & Spencer, the NBA, Sears Canada, Timex or Bombay Company. The AOL online sales service also supports. In 2007, Bezos shook the world with the creation and launch of Amazon’s alter ego: Amazon Kindle, a device specially designed for the visualization of electronic books. Amazon Kindle was launched for the first time in North America and is currently available in 45 countries.

In 2011, The Economist awarded Bezos and Gregg Zehr an Innovation Award for the Amazon Kindle. The following year, Bezos was named Entrepreneur of the Year by Fortune. It is part of the Bilderberg Group. Bezos has given several conferences in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and participated in the conference in Watford, Hertfordshire, England. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Business Council in 2011 and 2012. In 2018, he appeared on the Forbes list, where a net wealth of 106 billion dollars was estimated. He has also received other awards as the best CEO in the world by Harvard Business Review. Jeff Bezos has also been on Fortune’s list of the 50 best leaders in the world. In September 2016, he was awarded the Heinlein Prize for advances in Space Marketing. He donated the prize money to the international student organization Students for the Exploration and Development of Space by Bezos.

Since 2017, he has seen an increase in Amazon shares. They went up more than 130%, which made him have a profit of more than 100 billion dollars, after this, he returned to be the richest person in the world. He was named Person of the Year in Time magazine and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science and Technology degree at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. Really, the awards and awards have been impressive. Much of this is because Bezos, started in the field of journalism, looking beyond its commercial horizons; beyond the web. Bezos entered the world of media, acquiring the traditional newspaper The Washington Post for the sum of 250 thousand dollars.

Henry Gantt

Henry Gantt Biography

Henry Laurence Gantt (May 20, 1861 – November 23, 1919) industrial engineer . He was born in Calvert County, Maryland, United States. During his childhood and youth, he and his family lived devastating moments, especially in the economic part. His parents owned crops in Calvert but remained in ruins after the devastation caused during the Civil War. After that political and social event, they did not overlap economically so they had to live various hardships.

In spite of this, his parents did everything possible so that the young Gantt finished his school training at McDonogh School in 1878 and went to Johns Hopkins University to study industrial engineering. His performance was very good, when he graduated he started working as a teacher and draftsman, Gantt had a great skill for drawing since he was a kid. Then he studied mechanical engineering at the same university. In 1887, he was hired in Frederick W. Taylor to carry out an application of the principles of the Scientific Administration with his work in Midvale Steel and Bethlehem Steel, he carried out this work until 1893. In his career as a consultant, he invented the Gantt diagram.

Later, he designed some systems to measure the efficiency and productivity of workers, such as task bonds and the payment system and other methods that facilitate this process. This diagram became very popular for its simplicity, performance, and quality at that time, as well as at this time, pointed out the various tasks to be performed in a horizontal timeline, it has been used as a tool in operations that require strict temporal planning. However, Henry Gantt’s studies focused on the analysis of the performance of work methods, which depends on his judgment of the willingness to use the correct methods and skills.

Gantt was very concerned about leaving his knowledge embodied in paper, therefore, in 1908 presented before the American Society of Mechanical Engineers the text: Training of workers in habits of diligence and collaboration, in which he exposed the need to change the employer’s tactics; it is not a way of acting in the place, in the techniques, in the work, in the information, in the habits, in the possibilities, in the efficiency and in the efficiency of his work. As a complement to this, it is a bonus system that has been added to work and work done in a standardized time standard.

With these measures we tried to raise, not only the quantity, but above all the quality of work, following Taylor’s theory, the so-called common prosperity theory: what he says is that the worker has a kind of personal satisfaction to do the job well, this generates a feeling of pride that will make you try harder. For his part, the employer will notice an increase in productivity and the sum of a reduction in labor disputes. This is exposed with mastery in work, wages, and benefits (1913).

In the field of administration, his most known contribution is the graph of the bars such as the chart or the Gantt chart, which is composed in a diagram in which the horizontal axis represents the units of time, and in the vertical is recorded the different functions, which are represented by horizontal bars. With the help of this engineer, companies and the discipline of business administration is very broad, some of them are: the Gantt diagram, the development of the concept of industrial efficiency, the implementation of the system of Bonds of Tasks, with this adopted the premium to the workers. And he also implemented the Daily Balance Chart.

It was also very emphatic to ensure that companies have a social responsibility, in their opinion, companies have obligations for the welfare of society. His support for the scientific organization of work is also highlighted. When he worked for Frederick W. Taylor, with whom he collaborated in the application of his own doctrine to improve productivity, and in the second stage of the Industrial Revolution .

After 14 years of being at Taylor’s side, he made the decision to separate from this because his interest was the humanization of industrial practices and the dehumanized theories of Frederick Taylor . Unfortunately, in his last years of life, Gantt did not have the opportunity to finish several of his projects because his health was undermined. Finally, Henry Gantt died on November 23, 1919, in the town of Pine Island in New York .

His importance lies in the fact that it is the founder of scientific administration , an activity developed in the United States that later spread throughout the world with the idea of ​​achieving humanization, rationalization, and performance.

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Elon Musk co-founded and leads Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company.

As the co-founder and CEO of Tesla, Elon leads all product design, engineering and global manufacturing of the company's electric vehicles, battery products and solar energy products.

Since the company’s inception in 2003, Tesla’s mission has been to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. The first Tesla product, the Roadster sports car, debuted in 2008, followed by the Model S sedan, which was introduced in 2012, and the Model X SUV, which launched in 2015. Model S received Consumer Reports’ Best Overall Car and has been named the Ultimate Car of the Year by Motor Trend, while Model X was the first SUV ever to earn 5-star safety ratings in every category and sub-category in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s tests. In 2017, Tesla began deliveries of Model 3 , a mass-market electric vehicle with more than 320 miles of range, and unveiled Tesla Semi , which is designed to save owners at least $200,000 over a million miles based on fuel costs alone. In 2019, Tesla unveiled Cybertruck , which will have better utility than a traditional truck and more performance than a sports car, as well as the Model Y compact SUV, which began customer deliveries in early 2020.

Tesla also produces three energy storage products, the Powerwall home battery, the Powerpack commercial-scale battery, and Megapack , which is designed for utility-scale installations. In 2016, Tesla became the world’s first vertically-integrated sustainable energy company with the acquisition of SolarCity, the leading provider of solar power systems in the United States, and in 2017 released Solar Roof – a beautiful and affordable energy generation product.

As lead designer at SpaceX , Elon oversees the development of rockets and spacecraft for missions to Earth orbit and ultimately to other planets. In 2008, the SpaceX Falcon 1 was the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to reach orbit, and SpaceX made further history in 2017 by re-flying both a Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft for the first time. Soon after, Falcon Heavy , the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two, completed its first flight in 2018. In 2019, SpaceX’s crew-capable version of the Dragon spacecraft completed its first demonstration mission, and the company will fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time in 2020. Building on these achievements, SpaceX is developing Starship – a fully reusable transportation system that will carry crew and cargo to the Moon, Mars and beyond ­– and Starlink , which will deliver high speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable. By pioneering reusable rockets, SpaceX is pursuing the long-term goal of making humans a multi-planet species by creating a self-sustaining city on Mars.

Elon is also CEO of Neuralink , which is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computers.

He also launched The Boring Company , which combines fast, affordable tunneling technology with an all-electric public transportation system in order to alleviate soul-crushing urban congestion and enable high-speed, long-distance travel. The Boring Company built a 1.15 mile R&D tunnel in Hawthorne, and is currently constructing Vegas Loop, a public transportation system at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Previously, Elon co-founded and sold PayPal, the world's leading Internet payment system, and Zip2, one of the first internet maps and directions services.

5 Things You May Not Know About Elon Musk

He developed and sold a video game at age 12

The budding CEO got his start in the technology industry after seeing a computer in a store for the first time at age 10. He learned to program and developed the code for a shooting-spaceship game called Blastar, which he sold to a computer magazine for $500. Naturally, the boy with grand ambitions didn't stop there, and he devised plans with his younger brother, Kimbal, to open an arcade near their school. However, those plans were nixed when their parents refused to provide their legal consent for a permit, and the brothers wound up selling chocolates to classmates instead.

He spent just two days at Stanford University

Musk enrolled at Stanford in 1995 for graduate studies in applied physics, but by that point, he was consumed with the game-changing capabilities of the internet. When applying for academic deferment, Musk said he would return in six months if his endeavors didn't pan out; the department chairman replied that he didn't expect to see the young computer whiz again, a prediction that proved 100 percent accurate. Musk went on to found Zip2, which established an online presence for brick-and-mortar organizations, and by the time Compaq swooped in to buy the company four years later, there was little need to resume his formal education.

He inspired the creation of a solar power company

In 2004, Musk was driving with his cousin Lyndon Rive to Burning Man, the annual late-summer festival held in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. A successful software entrepreneur in his own right, Rive confessed a desire to embark on a more meaningful enterprise. Musk suggested he consider the possibilities of solar power, and over the course of the drive and subsequent hedonism in the desert, the idea blossomed. Rive and his brother Peter created SolarCity, which grew into the country’s largest solar provider with their cousin on board as chairman. Something about Burning Man clearly fires up Musk’s imagination; he claims to have conceived the idea of a vertical takeoff and landing electric plane at the festival, calling it a "very creative place."

He is the real-life model for 'Iron Man's' Tony Stark

When Iron Man writer and director Jon Favreau was exploring ways to humanize the character of Tony Stark, the charismatic, super-smart protagonist of the comic book and movie series, actor Robert Downey Jr. suggested he get in touch with Musk. Favreau wound up shooting parts of Iron Man 2 at the SpaceX factory, and Musk later found a way to replicate his fictional counterpart’s methods of designing rocket parts on a computer screen by waving his hands across a sensor.

He owns a James Bond car

Musk owns the Lotus Esprit from the 1977 James Bond flick The Spy Who Loved Me , which (spoiler alert!) turns into a submarine after Bond and his beautiful female companion zoom off a pier to escape the enemy. Known as "Wet Nellie," the stunt car languished for years in a storage unit before being sold to an anonymous buyer at a London auction in 2013. After the buyer was revealed to be Musk, he released a statement in which he expressed disappointment that the car did not actually turn into a real submarine, adding, "What I'm going to do is upgrade it with a Tesla electric powertrain and try to make it transform for real."

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Books of The Times

‘Elon Musk,’ a Biography by Ashlee Vance, Paints a Driven Portrait

By Dwight Garner

• May 12, 2015

“We’ve become a nation of indoor cats,” Dave Eggers wrote in “A Hologram for the King” (2012), his existential novel about an American doing IT work in the Saudi Arabian desert. “A nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers.”

Ashlee Vance, in his new biography of the celebrity industrialist Elon Musk, delivers a similar notion of the deflating American soul. An early Facebook engineer tells Mr. Vance, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” The author quotes the venture capitalist Peter Thiel: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

If Silicon Valley was holding out for a hero after Steve Jobs’s death, a disrupter in chief, it has found a brawny one in Mr. Musk. This South African-born entrepreneur, inventor and engineer is the animating force behind companies (Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity) that have made startling advances in non-indoor-cat arenas: electric cars, space exploration and solar energy. He is all of 43.

Mr. Musk is about as close as we have, circa 2015, to early industrial titans like Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Along with his swagger, he totes surprise, style and wit. Tesla’s Model S sedan was not only Motor Trend’s car of the year in 2013 — the first non-internal-combustion engine vehicle to win that award — but it also has a sound system that, in a homage to the film “Spinal Tap,” you can turn up to 11.

“Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” isn’t the first biography we’ve had of Mr. Musk, nor will it be the last. But it is easily the richest to date. It’s also the first one Mr. Musk has cooperated with, though he had no control, the author says, over its contents. Mr. Vance is a technology writer for Bloomberg Businessweek . He won over Mr. Musk, who initially declined to be interviewed, impressing him with his diligence after he had interviewed some 200 people.

The result is a book that is smart, light on its feet and possesses a crunchy thoroughness. Mr. Vance can occasionally veer toward hagiography and the diction of news releases. After noting that Mr. Musk’s grand vision is to colonize Mars, for example, Mr. Vance writes:

“He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He’s less a C.E.O. chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to ... well ... save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.” As the Beast from “X-Men” likes to remark, Oh my stars and garters.

Mostly, though, Mr. Vance curbs his enthusiasm and delivers a well-calibrated portrait of Mr. Musk, so that we comprehend both his friends and his enemies. It’s a book with many ancillary pleasures. Mr. Vance brings us up to date on the states of green energy and space launches. He also veers away from his subject just often enough, offering profiles of the frequently brilliant people who work alongside Mr. Musk.

Bits from this biography have already made Internet gossip ripples. According to Mr. Vance, Mr. Musk berated a male employee who missed a Tesla event to be present for the birth of his child. (Mr. Musk has denied this .) Either way, he does not come off like Alan Alda. He has been married three times — twice to the same woman — and, while thinking about fitting a new relationship into his schedule, he asks: “How much time does a woman want a week? Maybe 10 hours?”

Other eye-popping details, not all of them previously reported, are flecked atop this book like sea salt. His five children don’t merely have nannies but have had a nanny manager. He worries that Google is building a fleet of robots that may accidentally destroy mankind. He rents castles and sumo wrestlers for his parties. At one of them, a knife thrower aimed at a balloon between the blindfolded Mr. Musk’s legs.

The best thing Mr. Vance does in this book, though, is tell Mr. Musk’s story simply and well. It’s the story of an intelligent man, for sure. But more so it is the story of a determined one. Mr. Musk’s work ethic has always been intense. One observer says about him early on, “We all worked 20 hour days, and he worked 23 hours.”

Mr. Musk was born in 1971 and grew up in Pretoria. His father was an engineer; his mother, whose family had roots in the United States and Canada, was a model and dietitian. There are indications his father was brutal, and that Mr. Musk is a tortured soul trying to make up for a wrecked childhood. But no one will speak specifically about any such events.

He attended college in Canada before graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and moving to the West Coast. His first start-up, a company that provided maps and business directories, was bought by Compaq Computer and made Mr. Musk $22 million. His interest in online banking led to his part in the creation of PayPal. When it was sold to eBay, he walked away with roughly $250 million, the author says, enough to bankroll his interests in space and green technology.

Mr. Musk got started in space exploration by first learning all he could about it, sometimes reading Soviet-era rocket manuals. There were many failures, and several near-bankruptcies, along the way to making SpaceX what it is today, notably one of only two private companies to have docked with the International Space Station.

Mr. Vance tells the stories of both SpaceX and Tesla with intricacy and insight, often stuffing the technological details, for those who are interested, into long footnotes. We come less close to Mr. Musk himself. Though the author interviewed him for several dozen hours, he remains a remote and somewhat chilly figure, a perfectionist not unlike Mr. Jobs, often given to confrontation and fits of rage.

What does come through is a sense of legitimate wonder at what humans can accomplish when they aim high, and aim weird. The animosity and jealousy some feel toward Mr. Musk’s achievements put me in mind of a great line from the HBO show “Silicon Valley,” in which the tech chief executive Gavin Belson comments, “I don’t know about you people, but I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.”

Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

By Ashlee Vance

392 pages. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $28.99.

The Books of The Times review on Wednesday, about “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” by Ashlee Vance, misspelled part of the name of the company that bought Mr. Musk’s first start-up for $22 million. It was Compaq Computer, not Compac Computer.

An earlier version of this review rendered incorrectly a quotation from the HBO show “Silicon Valley.” In the show, the character of the tech chief executive Gavin Belson says, “I don’t know about you people, but I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do,” not “I don’t know about you people, but I wouldn’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place than we do.”

The Books of The Times review on May 13, about “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” by Ashlee Vance, erroneously attributed a distinction to the company SpaceX. Besides SpaceX, Orbital Sciences Corporation also docked a spacecraft with the International Space Station; SpaceX is not the only private company to have done so.

How we handle corrections

The World of Elon Musk

The billionaire’s portfolio includes the world’s most valuable automaker, an innovative rocket company and plenty of drama..

Tesla: Elon Musk has gutted the part of the carmaking company responsible for building charging stations for electric vehicles , sowing uncertainty about the future of the largest and most reliable U.S. charging network.

X: An Australian court extended an injunction ordering the social media platform to remove videos depicting the recent stabbing of a bishop , setting the country’s judicial system up for a clash with Musk.

A $47 Billion Pay Deal: Despite   facing criticism that Tesla is overly beholden to Musk , its board of directors said that the company would essentially give him everything he wanted, including the biggest pay package in corporate history.

SpaceX: President Biden wants companies that use American airspace for rocket launches to start paying taxes into a federal fund  that finances the work of air traffic controllers.

Business With China : Tesla and China built a symbiotic relationship that made Musk ultrarich. Now, his reliance on the country may give Beijing leverage .  

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• Elon Musk Biography

Elon Musk Story

Elon Musk life story begins in South Africa, where he was born. Later, he went on to become an American entrepreneur who co-founded PayPal and established SpaceX, a launch vehicle and spacecraft manufacturer. He was also one of the original major investors in and the CEO of Tesla, an electric car company.

Elon Reeve Musk is the eldest of his parents' three children, and a citizen of three countries: South Africa, Canada, and the United States. He was born in 1971 to Maye Musk, a model and nutritionist, and Errol Musk, an electromechanical engineer whom Elon has described as "a dreadful human being." Read the entire article to learn about Elon Musk History which is inspiring for generations to come.

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Elon Musk Early Life

Musk was born in Canada to a Canadian mother and a South African father. Musk grew up with his head stuck in books and computers. He was bullied by his classmates and often beaten up by class bullies as a little, timid youngster until he grew strong enough to defend himself during a growth spurt in his teens. He developed a video game at the age of 12 and sold it to a computer magazine. Musk left South Africa in 1988 after getting a Canadian passport because he refused to support apartheid through compulsory military duty and wanted to pursue the higher economic prospects offered in the United States.

Elon Musk Qualification

Musk travelled to Canada at the age of 17 to attend Queen's University and evade military service in South Africa. Musk got his Canadian citizenship the same year, partly because he thought it would be easier to get American citizenship that way. Musk moved to the United States in 1992 to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned an undergraduate degree in economics before continuing on to earn a second bachelor's degree in physics. Musk went to Stanford University in California to earn a Ph.D. in energy physics after leaving Penn. But that Ph.D couldn’t make it to Elon Musk Degrees since he walked out of Stanford after only two days to start his first firm.

Elon Musk Works

In the summer of 1995, Musk relocated to Silicon Valley. He enrolled at Stanford University's PhD programme in applied physics, but dropped out after only two days. Kimball Musk, Elon's 15-month younger brother, had recently graduated from Queen's University with a business degree and had travelled to California to join him. As the early Internet grew in popularity, the brothers decided to develop a company called Zip2, an internet business directory with maps. That’s how Elon Musk started entering into the business world.

Zip2 eventually recruited angel investors and grew into a profitable firm thanks to the brothers' efforts. Zip2 was sold to Compaq for ＄307 million in 1999 by the brothers. Elon subsequently went on to create his own online financial services company, X.com. Confinity, a company formed by Peter Thiel and two others mere months after X.com and with headquarters in the same building, was its main competitor. In March 2000, the two firms joined and adopted the name of their major product, PayPal, an online money transfer service for individuals. In October 2002, Ebay, the online auction site, purchased PayPal for ＄1.5 billion in Ebay stock. Elon Musk, who had been the largest shareholder in PayPal with 11.7% of the company's equity shares, found himself with ＄165 million in Ebay stock at the age of 31.

Since leaving PayPal, he has founded, co-founded, and/or led companies focused on addressing three distinct existential risks to humanity's long-term survival: climate risk, single-planet dependency risk, and human species obsolescence risk. Two of these companies, SpaceX and Tesla Motors, he risked his entire early fortune to build.

Elon Musk Success Story

Musk joined engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning to help operate Tesla Motors in 2004, where he played a key role in the development of the world's first electric vehicle, the Tesla Roadster. Musk took over as CEO and product architect after Eberhard was fired from the company in 2007 due to a series of conflicts. Tesla has grown to be one of the most popular and desirable vehicle brands in the world under his leadership.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has signed many high-profile contracts with NASA and the US Air Force to manufacture rockets and execute military missions. Musk has been vocal about his desire to work with NASA on a collaborative mission to deploy an astronaut to Mars by 2025. Elon Musk has always been a proponent of various space-age technologies, but it hasn't always been a smooth journey for him. He went on to become a small business owner and eventually the CEO of two creative firms after being bullied in school. But he made the decision to ascend from there and never settle for anything less.

Tesla, in addition to creating electric automobiles, has a strong presence in the solar energy sector, courtesy to its purchase of SolarCity. This clean-energy services company, which was founded in 2006, now develops two rechargeable solar batteries that are primarily used for stationary energy storage. The Powerwall is designed for residential backup power and off-grid use, whereas the Powerpack is designed for business or electric utility grid use.

Facts about Elon Musk

Elon Musk was born in the year 1971 in South Africa.

He is best known for co-founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, but he first got his wealth as a PayPal co-founder.

Tony Stark, the fictional character created, was heavily influenced by Musk (a.k.a. Iron Man). Indeed, elements of Iron Man 2 were shot both inside and outside of SpaceX. Even Elon Musk makes an appearance in the film!

Musk's official annual pay for Tesla Motors is ＄1, similar to that of Steve Jobs and other well-known entrepreneurs.

Musk taught himself computer programming at the age of 12 and produced the video game Blastar, which he sold for $500.

Elon Musk did not become an American citizen until he was 31 years old, in 2002.

Elon Musk immigrated to Canada from South Africa when he was 17 years old. He eventually went to the University of Pennsylvania in the United States for college.

Musk moved to California after graduation to pursue physics graduate school at Stanford University. He dropped out of Stanford after only two days, opting to take advantage of the booming Internet industry.

Musk swiftly founded his first startup, Zip2, which supplied online newspapers with maps and business directories, after dropping out of graduate school. In 1999, he sold the company for ＄307 million.

Musk co-founded X.com in 1999, an online payment startup that later became PayPal before being purchased by eBay for ＄1.5 billion in equity (of which Musk received ＄165 million).

Tesla Motors, a firm that designs and manufactures electric sports automobiles, was co-founded by Musk. Tesla was able to flourish where other significant manufacturers failed in the electric vehicle sector. He is presently Tesla's CEO and chief product architect.

The National Highway Safety Administration gave the Tesla Model S a 5.4/5 safety rating, the highest ever given to a car.

Musk is one of the driving drivers behind SolarCity, which he and his cousins created. He is also the company's main shareholder.

Elon Musk also created SpaceX (formerly known as Space Exploration Technologies), a corporation that designs and manufactures space launch vehicles, with a concentration on rocket technology. His goal is to lower the cost of space travel in order to expand human life beyond the Earth.

Musk originally struggled to raise funds for SpaceX, which investors dismissed as a pipe fantasy. Musk put all of his personal funds into SpaceX in order to make it a reality (going against every piece of business advice ever written).

Elon Musk has shown entrepreneurial inclinations since he was a child. His Engineer father and Dietician mother, who recognised and encouraged his son's passion in technology, accepted him warmly. He got his first computer when he was ten years old and taught himself how to programme. At the age of 12, the young boy built a fully playable video game called "Blastar," which he allegedly sold for ＄ 500. Elon Musk attended Pretoria Boys High School and graduated in 1988. To avoid South Africa's obligatory military duty, he went to Canada in 1989 and enrolled at Queen's University in Ontario. He only stayed at the University of Pretoria for five months after that. Musk went on to the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business to earn a bachelor's degree in economics. He also left after two days to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions after being accepted into the University of Stanford's Physics Graduate Program. As we learn about Elon Musk biography, we understand that he has pursued goals that have motivated not only himself, but also the team of people he has engaged to work with him. Whether it's interplanetary space flight or electric vehicles, these objectives are all geared toward the future and dramatically improving existing conditions.

FAQs on Elon Musk Biography

1. What is Elon Musk's Full Name?

Ans: Elon Musk is an American entrepreneur and businessman who was born in South Africa. His full name is Elon Reeve Musk.

2. What Did Elon Musk Study?

Ans: Elon earned a double major in physics and business at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Elon says that while his business schooling was superb, he loved physics.

3. What are Some Interesting Facts About Elon Musk?

Ans: Some interesting facts about Elon Musk are:

Musk was born in the country of South Africa.

Musk developed a video game when he was 12 years old and sold it for ＄500.

Fun fact about Elon Musk qualification is that he dropped out of Stanford after only two days.

Musk is the father of six boys, all of which are boys.

To date, Musk has started eight businesses.

Musk earns ＄1 million a year at Tesla.

Musk has appeared in a number of Hollywood films and shows.

May 14, 2024

Life Story of Famous People

Short Bio » Entrepreneur » Elon Musk

Elon Musk is a South African-born Canadian-American business magnate. He is also an investor, engineer, and inventor. He is the founder, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX, co-founder, CEO, and product architect of Tesla Motors, co-founder, and chairman of SolarCity, co-chairman of OpenAI, co-founder of Zip2, and founder of X.com which is merged with PayPal of Confinity. As of June 2016, he has an estimated net worth of US$11.5 billion, making him the 83rd wealthiest person in the world.

Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa. He is the son of Maye Musk, who is a Canadian model and dietitian. His full name is Elon Revee musk. After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk lived mostly with his father in locations in South Africa. Musk’s childhood was quite rough. Musk was severely bullied throughout his childhood. He was also hospitalized once. Because a group of boys threw him down a flight of stairs. Then they beat him until he blacked out. But he survived.

Elon Musk became interested in computing and computer programming at the age of 10. Two years later, he sold the code for a BASIC-based video game called Blastar. He sold it to a magazine called PC and Office Technology for approximately 500US$.

At the age of 19, Musk started his undergraduate study at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in 1992. After spending two years at Queen’s University, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. At the age of 24, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from its College of Arts and Sciences. He also got a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from its Wharton School of Business. Musk extended his studies for one year to finish the second bachelor’s degree.

While at the University of Pennsylvania, Elon Musk and fellow Penn student Adeo Ressi rented a 10-bedroom fraternity house. After that, They used it as an unofficial nightclub. In 1995, at age 24, Musk moved to California to begin a Ph.D. in applied physics and materials science at Stanford University. But he left the program after two days to pursue his entrepreneurial aspirations in the areas of the Internet, renewable energy, and outer space. In 2002, he became a U.S. citizen.

In 1995, Musk and his brother, Kimbal, started Zip2, a web software company. The company developed and marketed an Internet “city guide” for the newspaper publishing industry. Musk also obtained contracts with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.

In March 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services, and e-mail payment company, with US$10 million from the sale of Zip2. One year later, the company merged with Confinity, which had a money transfer service called PayPal.

• Born: June 28, 1971
• Birth Place: Pretoria, South Africa
• Height: 6′ 2″
• Net worth: 12 billion USD (2017) Forbes
• Education: Stanford University (1995–1995), More
• Spouse: Talulah Riley (m. 2013–2016), Talulah Riley (m. 2010–2012), Justine Musk (m. 2000–2008)
• Children: Xavier Musk, Kai Musk, Griffin Musk, Nevada Alexander Musk, Damian Musk, Saxon Musk

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Elon Musk facts for kids

Elon Reeve Musk (born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO , and chief engineer of SpaceX ; angel investor, CEO, and product architect of Tesla, Inc. ; founder of the Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI ; president of the Musk Foundation ; and owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc. As of November 11, 2022, Musk had a net worth of about $174 billion. He is the wealthiest person in the world according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes 's real-time billionaires list.

Leadership style

Philanthropy, existential threats, media appearances, awards and honors, elon musk quotes, interesting facts about elon musk.

Musk was born and grew up in Pretoria , South Africa . Musk has British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. His mother is Maye Musk ( née  Haldeman), a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan , Canada , and raised in South Africa. His father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot , sailor , consultant , and property developer, who was a half-owner of a Zambian emerald mine near Lake Tanganyika . Musk has a younger brother, Kimbal , and a younger sister, Tosca . After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk chose to live primarily with his father. Musk later regretted his decision and became estranged from his father.

Musk had been described as an awkward and introverted child. He was an enthusiastic reader of books, later attributing his success in part to having read Benjamin Franklin: An American Life , The Lord of the Rings , the Foundation series , and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy .When he was ten, he became interested in computers and video games. He taught himself how to program Commodore VIC-20 user manual and created a game. When he was twelve, he sold his BASIC -based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500.

Musk graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. When he was 17, he became a Canadian citizen and moved to Canada. Two years later, in 1990, he attended Queen's University, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania , where he received bachelor's degrees in economics and physics .

Business career

In 1995, Musk moved to California to attend Stanford University but decided to instead pursue a business career. He partnered with his brother Kimbal and Greg Kouri to begin Zip2. Errol Musk provided them with $28,000 to start the company, which developed an Internet city guide with maps, directions, and yellow pages . Compaq purchased Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999, and Musk received $22 million for his 7 % share.

In 1999, Musk co-founded the online bank X.com, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal . eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

In early 2001, Musk became involved with the nonprofit Mars Society. He wanted to help pay for placing a growth-chamber for plants on Mars . Because of his inexperience, companies did not want to pattern with him, so he began his own company, SpaceX , in 2002. Musk wants to make rockets that are reusable so they can make many trips to space. The first rocket, Falcon 1, failed to reach earth's orbit three times, but it succeeded in 2006. Another rocket, the Falcon 9 , has been launched over 100 times. In 2008, SpaceX signed a contract with NASA to fly 12 flights of its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station to resupply it. Since 2019, SpaceX has been developing Starship , a fully-reusable, super-heavy-lift launch vehicle. In 2020, SpaceX launched its first crewed flight, the Demo-2 . It became the first private company to place astronauts into orbit and dock a spacecraft with its crew at the International Space System. SpaceX has also developed a group of satellites called Starlink . They provide satellite Internet access to customers on earth. SpaceX also designs and launches custom military satellites for the Space Development Agency as part of a new missile defense system in low Earth orbit.

In 2004, Musk invested in the electric vehicle company Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc. ). He became its chairman and was active in creating several vehicles for the company. In 2008, he became Tesla's CEO. In 2022, Musk unveiled a robot developed by Tesla, Optimus.

In 2006, he helped create SolarCity, a solar energy company that was later purchased by Tesla and became Tesla Energy. By 2013, SolarCity was the second largest provider of solar power systems in the United States.

In 2013, Musk announced plans for a version of a vactrain—a vacuum tube train. The purpose of the train was to travel quickly between major cities. He called it the hyperloop . In 2015, he began a design competition for students and others to build Hyperloop pods that would run on a mile-long track owned by SpaceX.

In 2016, Musk co-founded Neuralink , a neurotechnology startup company. Neuralink believes it is able to merge the human brain with artificial intelligence (AI) by creating devices that are implanted in the brain to help it merge with the machines. This kind of technology could improve memory or allow the devices to communicate with software. The company also hopes to create devices with which to treat neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's disease , dementia , and spinal cord injuries.

In 2017, Musk founded the Boring Company to construct tunnels. He revealed plans for specialized, underground, high-occupancy vehicles that could travel up to 150 miles per hour. His goal is to reduce above-ground traffic in large cities. Two tunnel projects announced in 2018, in Chicago and West Los Angeles , have been canceled. However, a tunnel under the Las Vegas Convention Center was completed in early 2021. Local officials have approved further expansions of the tunnel system. In 2021, tunnel construction was approved for Fort Lauderdale , Florida.

Elon Musk Twitter @elonmusk I made an offer April 14, 2022

Since joining Twitter in 2009, Musk has been an active user and has over 100 million followers as of June 2022 [update] . Musk expressed interest in buying Twitter as early as 2017. In January 2022, Musk started purchasing Twitter shares. He quickly became the company's largest shareholder. On April 13, Musk made a $43 billion offer to buy Twitter. On October 27, 2022, the deal was final, and Musk became the owner of Twitter. He immediately fired many of the company's top executives .

Musk is often described as a micromanager and has called himself a "nano-manager." He expects his employees to work hard. Musk's leadership has been praised by some, who credit it with the success of Tesla and his other businesses. It has been criticized by others who see him as insensitive and too harsh.

Musk is the president of the Musk Foundation. The foundation has many goals.

• It helps provide solar-power energy systems in areas that have been hit by disasters.
• It supports research and development for human space exploration, pediatrics , renewable energy , and safe artificial intelligence .
• It supports education in science and engineering.

In 2015, Musk founded OpenAI , a not-for-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research company, whose goal is to make artificial general intelligence that is meant to be safe and helpful to humanity. He left OpenAI in 2018 so that someone else could run it and still use Tesla products and ideas.

In July 2018, Musk arranged for his employees to build a mini-submarine to help rescue the children trapped in a flooded cavern in Thailand. Engineers worked hard on this project. However, by the time it was ready to use, eight of the 12 children had already been rescued using full face masks, oxygen, and anesthesia . Rescuers helped the other children in this way, too, so the submarine was never used.

Musk made $175.8 million when PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002. He was first listed on the Forbes Billionaires List in 2012, with a net worth of $2 billion. In January 2021, Musk became the richest person in the world. He says he is gathering resources for humanity's outward expansion to space .

Personal views

Musk has stated that AI could be a great existential threat to humanity. In order to prevent AI taking over humanity, as is seen in several movies, he believes the government should be careful to limit how AI is used.

After AI, Musk sees climate change as the greatest threat to humanity. He believes there should be a carbon tax so people are more careful about preventing global warming.

Musk said fewer people being born each year is one of the biggest risks to human civilization. He believes that humans have the ability to live on Mars , and we will need many from earth to move there.

Musk has called himself "politically moderate" and was a registered independent voter when he lived in California. Musk voted for the Democratic party candidate for President in the 2016 and 2020 elections. However, he has since stated that he could "no longer support" the Democrats because they are the "party of division & hate." He encouraged "independent-minded voters" to vote Republican in the 2022 U.S. elections.

Musk criticized COVID-19 lockdowns, but closed the Tesla Fremont Factory because of the shelter-in-place order. In May 2020, he reopened the Tesla factory, even though the shelter-in-place order was still in effect.

Musk bought and donated BiPAP and CPAP machines, which are non-invasive ventilators. These machines helped many people who had to be treated for COVID-19.

In September 2020, Musk stated that he would not get the COVID-19 vaccine ; however, he did receive the vaccine because he had to travel to visit Tesla Giga Berlin and felt that he was given no choice. He said on Twitter, "I had major side effects from my second booster shot. And my cousin, who is young & in peak health, had a serious case of myocarditis ."

Musk has stated that he does not believe the U.S. government should provide subsidies to companies; instead they should impose a carbon tax to discourage poor behavior. He says that the free market would achieve the best solution.

Musk has promoted cryptocurrencies and supports them over traditional government-issued fiat currencies . However, when Musk was shown that cryptocurrency mining took more energy than it was worth from the environment, he announced on Twitter that Tesla would not use Bitcoin until the energy consumption issues are solved.

Musk has been known to criticize public transportation and encourage the use of private vehicles. Urban planners have pointed out that public transportation in dense urban areas is more economical, more energy efficient, and requires much less space than private cars.

Personal life

From the early 2000s until late 2020, Musk resided in California, where both Tesla and SpaceX were founded. In 2020, he moved to Texas, stating that California had become "complacent" about its economic success. While hosting Saturday Night Live in May 2021, Musk stated that he has Asperger syndrome .

Musk has 10 surviving children. He met his first wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson, while attending Queen's University in Ontario, Canada; they married in 2000. In 2002, their first child died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of 10 weeks. After his death, the couple had twins in 2004 followed by triplets in 2006. The couple divorced in 2008 and shared custody. In 2022, the eldest twin officially changed her name to reflect her gender identity as a trans woman and to use Wilson as her last name because she no longer wished to be associated with Musk. Musk blamed the estrangement of his daughter on what the Financial Times characterized as "the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists."

In 2008, Musk began dating English actress Talulah Riley . They married two years later at Dornoch Cathedral in Scotland. In 2012, the couple divorced, before remarrying the following year. After briefly filing for divorce in 2014, Musk finalized a second divorce from Riley in 2016. Musk then dated Amber Heard for several months in 2017; he had reportedly been pursuing her since 2012.

In 2018, Musk and Canadian musician Grimes said that they were dating. Grimes gave birth to their son in May 2020. According to Musk and Grimes, his name was "X Æ A-12" ; however, the name would have violated California regulations as it contained characters that are not in the modern English alphabet, and was then changed to "X Æ A-Xii" . This drew more confusion, as Æ is not a letter in the modern English alphabet. The child was eventually named X AE A-XII Musk, with "X" as a first name, "AE A-XII" as a middle name , and "Musk" as surname.

In December 2021, Grimes and Musk had a second child, a daughter named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk (nicknamed "Y"), born via surrogacy . Despite the pregnancy, Musk confirmed reports that the couple were "semi-separated" in September 2021; in an interview with Time in December 2021, he said he was single. In March 2022, Grimes said of her relationship with Musk: "I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, but we're very fluid." Later that month, Grimes tweeted that she and Musk had broken up again. In September 2023 it was reported that the pair had a third child, a son named Techno Mechanicus "Tau" Musk. In October 2023, Grimes sued Musk over parental rights and custody of their eldest son.

In July 2022, Insider published court documents revealing that Musk had had twins with Shivon Zilis, director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, in November 2021. They were born weeks before Musk and Grimes had their second child via surrogate in December. The news "raise[d] questions about workplace ethics", given that Zilis directly reported to Musk.

Musk was one of the three men who were an inspiration for the character of Tony Stark in the Marvel film Iron Man . The other two men were Steve Jobs and Donald Trump . He has made guest and cameo appearances in several movies, TV shows, and documentaries.

• Received an honorary doctorate in engineering and technology from Yale University (2015)
• Awarded an IEEE Honorary Membership (2015)
• Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) (2018)
• Won the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics George Low Transportation Award (2008)
• Won the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale Gold Space Medal (2010)
• Won the Royal Aeronautical Society Gold Medal (2012)
• Listed among Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People (2010, 2013, 2018, and 2021)
• Selected as Time ' s " Person of the Year " (2021)
• Elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2022)
• "I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary."
• "I'm nauseatingly pro-American. I would have come here from any country. The U.S. is where great things are possible."
• "If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic."
• "Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."
• When Musk was 12 years old, he created the video game Blastar. He ended up selling it to a computer magazine in 1984 for $500.
• Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla in 2003. Musk and his money joined a year later.
• He almost sold Tesla to Google for $6 billion in 2013.
• His first cameo was in the 2010 movie Iron Man 2 and he played himself on TV’s The Big Bang Theory .
• Musk was able to start SpaceX with the $100 million he earned when eBay bought PayPal .
• He has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome , a milder form of autism .
• Musk’s wealth is based on stocks and his ownership of companies. He takes no salary .
• Musk’s son Xavier has a special inspiration for his name: Comic book character Professor Xavier of Marvel ’s X-Men .
• Musk purchased James Bond ’s classic submarine car at a London auction in 2013 for close to $1 million.
• Maye Musk , Elon's mother, is currently a model .
• This page was last modified on 28 February 2024, at 12:12. Suggest an edit .

Home — Essay Samples — Business — Elon Musk — Short Biography Of Elon Musk

Short Biography of Elon Musk

• Categories: Biography Elon Musk

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Published: Apr 29, 2022

Words: 468 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

• Vance, A. (2015). Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the quest for a fantastic future. HarperCollins Publishers.
• Musk, E. (2017). Elon Musk's TED talk : The future we're building with hyperloop, rockets, and electric cars. TED Conferences LLC. https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_future_we_re_building_and_boring
• Vance, A. (2020). Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the quest for a fantastic future. Ecco.
• O'Connell, M. (2021). Becoming Elon Musk: How to build a tech giant from scratch. Scribe Publications.
• Vance, A. (2013). Elon Musk: The real Iron Man. Bloomberg Businessweek.
• Musk, E. (2019). Tesla, SpaceX, and the future of technology. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/01/132834/elon-musk-on-how-to-save-humanity/
• Hanlon, M. (2017). How Elon Musk's first principles thinking can help you problem solve. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelhanlon/2017/05/22/how-elon-musks-first-principles-thinking-can-help-you-problem-solve/?sh=2f069e4116db
• Vance, A. (2017). Elon Musk: How the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is shaping our future. Virgin Books.
• Vance, A. (2018). Elon Musk: The unauthorized autobiography. Lulu.com.
• Musk, E. (2013). The Elon Musk interview: Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity and his plans for colonizing Mars. AllThingsD.

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Biography of Elon Musk: All About Elon Musk and What You Can Learn From His Life History Paperback – March 23, 2021

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Have you heard about Elon Musk, a multi-billionaire?

Elon Musk is a South African-born, Canadian/American entrepreneur, business magnate, industrial designer, and engineer. He founded X.com in 1999, which later became PayPal. He is also the founder, CEO, CTO, and chief designer of SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla Motors in 2003.

Elon Musk is also the founder of The Boring Company, the co-founder of Neuralink, co-founder, and the initial co-chairman of OpenAI.

He made his first million in his late 20s when Compaq Computers purchased his start-up company Zip2. He is a hard worker, and he works as many as 80 to 120 hours per week.

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The daily schedule of Elon Musk, from a morning doughnut to a 3 a.m. bedtime

• Elon Musk has amassed a $198 billion fortune through his work at Tesla, SpaceX, and more.
• The 52-year-old is also the father of 10 children and finds time to post on X almost daily.
• Here's how the Tesla CEO structures his days.

Elon Musk is a busy man, with interests across several massive tech companies.

He's the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, the owner of Twitter — now X — and he's also a father of 10 children.

According to Forbes, he's amassed a fortune worth $198 billion, making him the world's third-richest person. Musk said he didn't get there by working 40 hours a week. The billionaire is known to have a strenuous schedule that he said has demanded 120-hour workweeks in the past.

Still, the South African mogul has similarities to the average Joe in his routine. Like many of us, Musk has a sweet treat in the morning and spends time scrolling social media.

Here's how his days go, according to interviews and posts by Musk himself over the years.

Musk wakes up around 9 a.m. and has said he starts every morning with a doughnut

Musk told The Wall Street Journal in 2023 that he usually goes to bed around 3 a.m. and sleeps for six hours. So, he's typically waking up around 9 a.m. each day.

He might've been trolling when he wrote a response to a doctor that same year on X saying he eats "a donut every morning," but a quick search of Musk's posts reveals he's quite a fan of the pastry.

But, it's all about moderation, according to Musk.

"I only have 0.4 donuts at a time, because my brain neural network quantizes it down to 0 donuts," he posted to X in October.

His mornings usually start with his phone in his hand

Musk said in 2022 that he was trying to break the cycle of checking his phone as soon as he woke up. While on the Full Send Podcast , Musk described it as "a terrible habit" he hoped to escape.

But as of last year, he still wakes up and immediately looks at his phone for emergencies, the Journal reported.

If his posts on X (formerly Twitter) are any indication, the habit persists. He's been active on Twitter since before he bought it in 2022.

It's unclear if Musk slots in time to post and respond to others each day, but it certainly looks like he rarely takes a day off from the app.

"Some days I wake up and look at Twitter to see if it's still working," Musk told Walter Isaacson in the "Elon Musk" biography.

Showering is an important part of his daily routine

Musk previously credited showering with having the biggest positive effect on his daily life .

During an AMA session on Reddit in 2015, a user asked which of his daily habits impacted his life the most.

"Showering," Musk responded.

He decides which Tesla to commute to the office in

As the CEO of one of the leading EV makers, it's no surprise that Musk has more than one option for his daily commute.

When an X user posted a meme about deciding between driving a Cybertruck without autopilot or Tesla Model S with self-driving technology, Musk responded that it's a choice he faces "every day."

The Cybertruck has been in the backdrop of many celebrity paparazzi shots and Instagram posts since its official launch in November.

It's unclear if Musk is keeping up with the daily lifting routine he spoke about in 2023

Like many, Musk appears to have had ups and downs in his relationship with physical exercise over the years. In 2021, he told Joe Rogan that he'd avoid it altogether if he could.

"I almost never work out, except for picking up my kids & throwing them in the air," he said on X in June 2023.

But less than two months later, he said he was "lifting hard almost every day." Around the same time, talks of Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg going head-to-head in a fight swirled online.

Sometimes, his work days can last all night

Musk has admitted on several occasions that running more than one company isn't easy. He splits time between his companies depending on the "crisis of the moment," the 52-year-old said in 2021.

One X user pointed out in January 2023 that Musk had testified in a lawsuit in the morning, attended an event at a Nevada Tesla factory in the evening, and worked with Tesla on AI at night — all in one day.

Musk responded that he'd also spent time at "Twitter HQ past midnight."

And then was at Twitter HQ past midnight. Very long day. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 26, 2023

"I go to sleep, I wake up, I work, go to sleep, wake up, work—do that seven days a week," Musk told the Journal in 2023. "I'll have to do that for a while — no choice — but I think once Twitter is set on the right path, I think it is a much easier thing to manage than SpaceX or Tesla."

On the Tesla earnings call in April 2024, Musk said: "Tesla constitutes the majority of my work time, and I work pretty much every day of the week. It's rare for me to take a Sunday afternoon off."

Musk goes to bed around 3 a.m. and gets about 6 hours of sleep every night

Although he's not getting eight hours a night, Musk has upped his sleeping schedule from being nearly nonexistent in the past.

In May 2023, Musk told CNBC that he's no longer pulling all-nighters. Instead, he said he tries to get at least six hours of sleep.

According to Isaacson's biography of Musk, the billionaire has spent many nights awake and pondering the issues his companies face. His former partner Claire Boucher — known by her stage name Grimes — also told Isaacson that Musk once stayed up all night playing the "Elden Ring" video game when it first came out.

He has a history of sleeping on the floors of his offices and the Tesla factory .

After purchasing Twitter in 2022, Musk all but moved into its San Francisco headquarters . He said there's a couch in the library that he would crash on from time to time.

• Main content

I Read Everything Elon Musk Posted for a Week. Send Help.

If your media diet looked like his, you’d be red-pilled too..

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Mother Jones illustration; Michel Euler/AP

Last January, not long after agreeing with an actual Nazi that western Jews have brought antisemitism upon themselves by welcoming “hordes of minorities” to their countries, Elon Musk took a quick trip to Poland. The billionaire chief of SpaceX, Tesla, and X laid a wreath at Auschwitz and then proceeded on to a symposium in Krakow, where he told the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro that social media could have averted the Holocaust and bragged that he considered himself “aspirationally Jewish.” The tweet, he explained in a different interview, at a different symposium “might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done.” But he did not take it down, nor has he moderated his views. If anything his descent into the online fever swamp has only accelerated.

It is hard to appreciate just how thoroughly one of the world’s richest men has been red-pilled until you actually follow along with his media diet. So that’s what I decided to do. Last month, I read everything Musk had to say on X for a week and tracked everyone he interacted with. He tweeted 389 times in five days. He posted the laughing/crying emoji 45 times. But there was a clear signal piercing through the noise. Musk is not a tech visionary with a side interest in politics these days, nor is he just another bored billionaire with a nativist streak; the political activism and the technological ambitions are inseparable. He believes his work is part of a civilizational struggle in which woke progressives pose an existential threat to humanity. And he spends most of his days inside a feedback loop that’s radicalizing him even more.

Over the course of the week, Musk dabbled in a range of small-scale freakouts and smoldering obsessions. He sent 13 tweets about Brazil’s supreme court, as part of a weeks-long battle with the government over efforts to censor disinformation and hate speech. He twice promoted a statistic about the murder rate among Black Americans. He spent one afternoon earnestly amplifying a follower who claimed that “Over 1,000 African migrants have taken over NYC’s City Hall.” (It was an overflow crowd for a hearing on racial disparities in the shelter system.) But one subject came to drown out all the rest. During the week Tesla recalled its CyberTruck for a faulty accelerator pedal, Musk’s most urgent public concern was Katherine Maher.

Musk tweeted about Maher, the CEO of National Public Radio who formerly served as executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, nearly 60 times. It began relatively simply, with Musk lamenting the resignation of Uri Berliner, a former NPR staffer who wrote a critical essay about what he considered the media outlet’s leftward drift. Then Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo—the conservative strategist who helped orchestarate the backlash to Critical Race Theory—began dredging up old comments from Maher, in which she talked about correcting for white historical biases at Wikipedia and pushing back against disinformation at NPR. “Katherine Maher is blatantly racist and sexist – one of the worst human beings in America,” Musk tweeted at Rufo. “She’s evil,” he tweeted again, one minute later.

Rufo and the Canadian behavioral marketing guru Gad Saad are two of Musk’s favorite sounding boards when it comes to wokeness. From Rufo, Musk learns what he should be mad about—clips of Maher speaking to the Atlantic Council, clips of Maher delivering a Ted Talk, screenshots of Maher’s old tweets. From Saad, he gets a more holistic intellectual framework for being mad. Musk is obsessed with the idea that a “woke mind virus” is infecting society. Saad happens to be the author of a book called The Parasitic Mind , which Musk has said gave him “ nightmares .” In March, a few months after Saad tweeted at Musk to ask him to promote the book, they held a glitchy 38-minute public discussion on X Spaces. The billionaire has continued to plug the book—including three different times in the week I tuned in.

If you only pay glancing attention to Musk, it’s tough to fully grasp both the intensity and shallowness of his conservative convictions. I knew that he previously said that the rise of Artificial Intelligence could bring about “ civilizational destruction ,” but I had, in my ignorance, assumed that this fear stemmed from a simple Matrix -style kind of doomism: Machines will grow sentient and enslave us. The reality, which became clear as Musk’s fixation with Maher progressed, was a bit darker: He believes AI will destroy the world with wokeness.

It was a “severe civilization-level risk,” Musk wrote in a late-night exchange with the billionaire venture-capitalist Marc Andreesen. (Andreesen’s own spiraling antipathy toward progressive buzzwords like “sustainability” and “social responsibility” has made him a leading proponent of Effective Accelerationism—sort of the anti-woke mind virus.)

“Now imagine if this is programmed, explicitly or implicitly, into super powerful AI – it could end civilization,” he said in response to a Rufo tweet about Maher’s TED Talk, in which she discusses how Wikipedia moderators think about truth when it comes to thorny subjects like religion. “Now, no need to imagine. It is already programmed into Google Gemini and OpenAI ChatGPT.”

Musk returned to the theme of civilization-destroying woke AI throughout the week. “Imagine if instead of merely rendering forced ‘diverse’ images,” he said in reply to a follower with the handle DogeDesigner , “it decided to make that true in reality, potentially killing millions of people to achieve diversity goals.”

Imagine! With those stakes, everything fits in this heroic or apocalyptic dichotomy.

“[T]he West…wishes to be eaten alive and to have its children sacrificed because then death could be the ultimate expression of its progressive purity,” Saad wrote toward the beginning of the week.

“Suicidal empathy for the L,” Musk agreed.

All of this might sound familiar. That’s because it’s a facet of the same complaint that led to his remedial education at Auschwitz last year, stripped of the most obvious antisemitic signifiers: Woke progressives are opening the doors to the forces that will destroy us all: Falling birth rates, gender ideology, flag-burning immigrants, socially-conscious AI. There was a basic fallacy in expecting a tour about the horrors of genocide to soften the views of someone currently worried about “ white genocide ” and civil war , and who believes the ideology of his critics could lead to millions of deaths.

Musk described the current state of his red-pilling, and how all-encompassing it is, most succinctly in a response to Rufo about a five-year-old tweet from Maher about feeling “deep discomfort” about having children.

“Once you see that the true battle is expansionists vs extinctionists,” he wrote , “you can’t unsee it.”

And once you see that Musk truly can’t see anything else, you can’t unsee that. Still, there are some things Musk does want AI to kill off. The emerging tech is a boon to Musk not just because of what it promises for his companies, but because of what he hopes it can replace. “Legacy media simply can’t compete with hundreds of millions of humans providing real-time, AI-assisted, interactive information,” he boasted , responding to a chart from DogeDesigner showing declining traffic at major news sites. Musk is doing his part. His feed looks like a newsroom after private equity came to town—one of the only articles from a legacy media outlet he shared all week was a New York Post story about X’s advertising situation, and the only reporter from a legacy news outlet he interacted with was Bill Melugin, Fox News’ man on the border.  

Musk touts his platform as the future of news even as he uses it to spread misinformation. Not long after taking over the platform, he shared— and later deleted —a report from a notorious fake-news site that falsely asserted that Nancy’s Pelosi’s husband, Paul, had not been brutally attacked by a home invader and instead had gotten in a fight with a male prostitute. Communicating in emojis and exclamation marks makes it harder to commit factual errors, but he still made some. Musk twice expressed his alarm at a too-good-to-check story about a non-profit that works with migrants in Mexico handing out flyers asking them to vote for Joe Biden when they get to the United States. The non-profit said it had nothing to do with the flyers, and the text appeared to have been crudely translated using an online app. The allegation, which originated with a right-wing site called Muckraker.com, was amplified by the Heritage Foundation and found its way to Musk by way of both the Heritage Foundation and Nate Hochman, a Republican writer and activist who was fired from Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign after featuring a Nazi symbol in a campaign video. It may seem like a small thing, but there’s no such thing when it comes to truth—I’m told the future of civilization hangs in the balance.

A lot of his time is just spent saying the same grim things, to the same grim people, over and over. He has the mannerism not of a master of the universe, but of the reply guys clamoring for their attention. Musk tweeted “DefundNPR” at Rufo three times in two days, like a man at a ballpark by himself, trying to start the wave. He will sometimes respond to the same post multiple times, hours apart with a slightly different reaction. One of the big stories last week in Musk’s circle was a report from the popular account End Wokeness that the actress Naomi Watts has a daughter who is trans.

“Funny how so many progressive actors have children who are transgender,” Gad Saad wrote.

“Terrible,” Musk said.

“‘A ‘trans’ child is the ultimate Hollywood virtue signal, meaning EXTRA approval. Two is even better. 3 is god mode,” said a finance influencer and self-described Tesla shareholder, a few hours later.

“Yup,” said Musk.

It is hard to overstate that this is just what one of the most powerful men in the world does all day. It is the media diet of one of those influencers who only eats organ meat . At least Howard Hughes kept out of sight. But even amidst this right-wing emoji-storm, there were still occasional glimpses of the Musk who, until fairly recently, enjoyed a less polarizing reputation as a billionaire who built cool stuff. He does talk a lot about SpaceX, although those interstellar ambitions take on a different light when you realize his quest is now part of a civilization struggle against pronouns. If you catch him at the right moment, you can still find Musk sharing math jokes, politely engaging with people with product complaints, and offering unsolicited medical advice. “If you’re experiencing severe neck/back pain, I recommend looking into a disc replacement,” he suggested. I don’t know if that’s good advice or not, but I do at least get where he’s coming from. 

Once, in the course of 389 tweets, the father of 11 even talked about what it’s like to be a parent.

“Whoa, I just realized that raising a kid is basically 18 years of prompt engineering 🤯,” he wrote.

“Our first child will be born next month – what’s your biggest piece of advice?” a former Tesla employee asked in response.

It was right there for him on a platter—a chance to be normal. What would it be: Treasure every moment? Stock up on wipes?

“Be super careful about what schools teach your kids,” Musk replied.

Never mind.

Communicating With Elon Musk’s X Is Like Traversing a Scorched Hellscape

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Elon Musk and Grimes' son X appears in rare photo on 4th birthday

Elon musk posted a rare pic of his and ex grimes' eldest child together, son x æ a-xii, or x, as part of a fourth birthday tribute., by corinne heller | e • published may 5, 2024 • updated on may 5, 2024 at 8:23 pm.

Originally appeared on E! Online

Elon Musk 's eldest child with ex Grimes , X Æ A-Xii, is all smiles in a new pic his dad shared on his fourth birthday.

The billionaire Tesla CEO posted the photo of the boy, nicknamed X, on the social media platform he owns, X, formerly Twitter. Musk captioned the post , which shows the child sitting on what appeared to be a reception desk, "Lil X turns 4 today on May 4th."

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Lil X turns 4 today on May 4th pic.twitter.com/YbyJ4DHTBa — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 4, 2024

The Space X founder, a father of 11 and one of the top three richest people in the world, rarely shares pics of his kids on social media. He has occasionally been photographed out with X , most recently in March during a visit to Tesla's electric car plant in Gruenheide, Germany.

In addition to X, Musk and Grimes, who broke up in 2022, are also parents to Exa Dark Sideræl, or Y, 2, and Techno Mechanicus, or Tau, whose birth was confirmed in 2023 .

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Musk, 52, also fathered six children with ex-wife Justine Wilson Musk: Twins Vivian and Griffin, 19, triplets Kai, Damian, and Sax, 18, and eldest child, son Nevada, who tragically passed away at age 10 weeks in 2002.

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In 2021, the businessman welcomed twins Strider and Azure. with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis. She has occasionally shared pics of their kids on her own X account.

In April, Musk jokingly reflected on his parenting journey on X. "Whoa," he wrote , "I just realized that raising a kid is basically 18 years of prompt engineering."

This article tagged under:

Elon Musk Enables Dogecoin (DOGE) Payment For Tesla, Is DOGE Integration Imminent for X Too?

E lon Musk has strongly supported DOGE for several years, dating back to his first tweet about the token in 2019. Since then, Musk has made multiple moves to incorporate DOGE into his various business ventures. Most recently, he has enabled DOGE as a form of payment for Tesla merchandise and is securing payment licenses for his social media platform, X. These moves signal that Musk is intent on providing DOGE payments on X, which could have a huge impact on the cryptocurrency industry. 

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In early May 2024, Musk and Tesla quietly enabled DOGE payments on the Tesla website. The new feature came after Musk visited the Berlin gigafactory, where he was asked about enabling DOGE payments. "We should enable that," Musk responded . Tesla customers can now send DOGE to the Tesla wallet in exchange for merchandise. Though Tesla did not formally announce the change, DOGE enthusiasts were quick to spot it and the price of DOGE rallied more than 20% in the following days. 

Additionally, Musk and X have been acquiring payment licenses in U.S. states. At the time of this report, they hold 25 licenses, and the count is growing monthly. These licenses are necessary for enabling peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, similar to how Venmo and Cash App operate. Also, an interesting anecdote from Musk's biography notes that he had dreamed of offering DOGE as a form of payment on a social media platform long before he even acquired X. So, the money transmitter licenses could indicate that the X team is moving closer toward DOGE payments on the platform.

This idea was furthered by a retweet from Musk that had a picture of the old X.com logo next to the current X.com logo with the caption "The Everything App." The post was originally tweeted by a DogeDesigner on X. The account says that they work for DOGE, doing UX/UI design. Musk commented on the retweet saying, "The circle will be complete." The post currently has over 65 million views and 126,000 likes. 

The old X.com was a banking and payment website in the early 2000s that Musk founded. The company merged with Confinity to form PayPal, where Musk served a short stint as CEO. Flash forward to 2024, and Musk is hoping to complete the circle by bringing back the payment aspect of the original X.com. 

So, the signs point toward Musk wanting to offer DOGE as a form of peer-to-peer payment on the X platform. However, different regulatory hurdles could make this somewhat challenging. Acquiring the payment licenses is a very tedious and slow process. However, Musk seems determined to bring payments to the app and move closer to the "everything app" that he has envisioned for years. 

• If you invested $1000 in DOGE when Elon Musk first tweeted about it in 2019, here’s how much you’d have today .
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© 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

This article Elon Musk Enables Dogecoin (DOGE) Payment For Tesla, Is DOGE Integration Imminent for X Too? originally appeared on Benzinga.com .