Elon Musk Biography

                                   ELON REEVE MUSK BIOGRAPHY

 Elon Reeve Musk is 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 hawaiian and Openal; president of the Musk Foundation; and owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc. With an estimated net worth of around $181 billion as of November 18, 2022, Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes's real-time billionaires list.

Musk became was born and grew up in Pretoria, South Africa. He attended the University of Pretoria before moving to Canada at age 17, acquiring citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. Two years later, he matriculated at Queen's University and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received bachelor's degrees in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University, but dropped out after two days to instead pursue a business career, co-founding the web software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal; the startup was acquired by Compaq for $307 million 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 2002, Musk founded SpaceX, an aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company, and is its CEO and chief engineer. In 2004, he was an early investor in the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.). He became its chairman and product architect, eventually assuming the position of CEO in 2008. In 2006, he helped create SolarCity, a solar energy company that was later acquired by Tesla and became Tesla Energy. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company. The following year, he co-founded Neuralink—a neurotechnology company developing brain–computer interfaces—and The Boring Company, a tunnel construction company. In 2022, Musk purchased the social media platform Twitter for $44 billion. He has proposed a hyperloop high-speed vactrain transportation system, and is the president of the philanthropic Musk Foundation.

Musk has made controversial statements regarding politics and technology, particularly on Twitter, and is a highly polarizing figure. He has also been criticized for making unscientific and misleading statements, such as spreading COVID-19 misinformation. In 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Musk for falsely tweeting that he had secured funding for a private takeover of Tesla. Musk stepped down as chairman of Tesla and paid a $20 million fine as part of a settlement agreement with the SEC. Following his failed submarine proposal during the Tham Luang cave rescue, Musk won a defamation case brought against him by a British caver involved in the operation. In 2022, he was widely criticized for spreading misinformation regarding a violent attack on then Speaker of The House Nancy Pelosi's husband, In 2022, Musk made political statements about what he called the "the woke mind virus" in American politics.  In 2022 he waded further into the U.S. debate on race, criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and Twitter employees who supported it, by tweeting that the protest chant "hands up, don't shoot" that arose after the 2014 fatal shooting of an unarmed black man Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri was based in "fiction," linking to a federal report that found no reliable evidence that Brown's hands were raised. 

EDUCATION

Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Bryanston High School, and Pretoria Boys High School, from which he graduated.Musk applied for a Canadian passport via his Canadian-born mom, understanding that it might be less complicated to immigrate to the United States this way.While waiting for his utility to be processed, he attended the University of Pretoria for five months. Musk arrived in Canada in June 1989 and lived with a 2nd cousin in Saskatchewan for a year, working extraordinary jobs at a farm and lumber-mill. In 1990, he entered Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Two years later, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, wherein he finished studies for a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the Wharton School in 1995. He reportedly hosted large, ticketed house parties to help pay for lessons, and wrote a marketing strategy for an digital book-scanning service just like Google Books. In 1994, Musk held internships in Silicon Valley: one at the strength storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic ultracapacitors for strength storage, and every other at the Palo Alto–based startup Rocket Science Games. In 1995, he turned into prevalent to a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) application in substances technology at Stanford University.However, Musk decided to enroll in the Internet boom, rather losing out days after being commonplace and implemented for a job at Netscape, to which he reportedly never obtained a reaction.

WEALTH

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. At the start of 2020, Musk had a net worth of $27 billion. By the year's end his net worth had increased by $150 billion, mostly driven by his ownership of around 20% of Tesla stock During this period, Musk's net worth was often volatile. For example, it dropped $16.3 billion in September, the largest single-day plunge in Bloomberg Billionaires Index's history.In November of that year, Musk passed Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to become the third-richest person in the world; a week later he passed Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to become the second-richest. In January 2021, Musk, with a net worth of $185 billion, surpassed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to become the richest person in the world.Bezos reclaimed the top spot the following month.On September 27, 2021, after Tesla stock surged, Forbes announced that Musk had a net worth of over $200 billion, and was the richest person in the world.In November 2021, Musk became the first person worth over $300 billion. Around three-quarters of Musk's wealth derives from Tesla. Musk does not receive a salary from Tesla; he agreed with the board in 2018 to a compensation plan that ties his personal earnings to Tesla's valuation and revenue. The deal stipulated that Musk only receives the compensation if Tesla reaches certain market values.It was the largest such deal ever done between a CEO and a company board. In the first award, given in May 2020, he was eligible to purchase 1.69 million Tesla shares (about 1% of the company) at below-market prices, which was worth about $800 million. Musk paid $455 million in taxes on $1.52 billion of income between 2014 and 2018.According to ProPublica, Musk paid no federal income taxes in 2018.He claimed his 2021 tax bill was estimated at $12 billion based on his sale of $14 billion worth of Tesla stock. In 2003, Musk said his favorite plane he owned was an L-39 Albatros.He uses a private jet owned by Falcon Landing LLC, a SpaceX-linked company, and acquired a second jet in August 2020.The jet's heavy use of fossil fuels—it flew over 150,000 miles in 2018—has received criticism. Musk has repeatedly described himself as "cash poor"and has "professed to have little interest in the material trappings of wealth.In May 2020, he pledged to sell almost all physical possessions.Musk defended his wealth by saying he is accumulating resources for humanity's outward expansion to space.