How Elon Musk Became A Billionaire : The Space Man, his early life, Net Worth and Business life

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic—being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

                                                                        -Elon Musk

Elon Musk is an engineer, ‘techpreneur’, investor, and philanthropist with a flair for new technologies and innovations. He is the founder and CEO of SpaceX, Tesla (TSLA), The Boring Company, and Zip2; Co-founder of Nuralink and Paypal; Co-chairman of OpenAI, and the chairman of SolarCity.  He is also the Product Architect of Tesla Inc.  He ranks No.24 on the Forbes 2020 World's Billionaires list.

Elon Musk Net Worth

Elon Musk’s net worth is now $70.5 billion following Telsa’s 10 percent single-day move on July 10, 2020. We will continue to update his net worth regularly for the rest of the year. 

Early life & education

Elon Reeve Musk was born on the 28^th of June 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. His father, Maye Musk was a South African electromechanical engineer, and his mother, Errol Musk, a Canadian model.

After Musk’s parents divorced when he was 9, he continued to live with his father in South Africa, where he got his foundational education. When he was only 10 years old, Musk picked up a keen interest in computers and was introduced to the Commodore VIC-20. He learned to program and by 12, he had already developed and sold a game, Blastar to Spectravideo at $500.

By the time he was 17, he enrolled at Queen’s University Ontario, Canada. He then later took a transfer to Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where he bagged a bachelor’s degree in economics—and yet a bachelor’s degree in physics from the College of Arts and Sciences. In 1995, he enrolled at the Stanford University to study Applied Physics and Material Sciences, it didn’t fully actualize as he left after two days to pursue his entrepreneurial career, the period of the internet and Silicon Valley boom

Entrepreneurial journey

His journey as an entrepreneur started properly after he opted out of his Ph.D. program at Stanford University. In 1995, he co-founded the Zip2, a $28,000 web software company, with his brother Kimbal. The Zip2 served as an online city guide and a sole provider of online content for The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. The company was later sold off to Compaq Computer Corporation for $307 million in cash, and $34 million worth of stock.

 With the money gotten from the Zip2 sell out, Musk founded the X.com, an online bank, in 1999, and later incorporated it with Confinity. The new merger name then became PayPal and was later sold off to eBay at $1.5billion in 2002.

SpaceX

After stepping down from Paypal in 2002, he moved on to found an aerospace company, SpaceX which dealt with aerospace manufacturing and space transport services for commercial space travel. By 2008, SpaceX was fully set up and was awarded a NASA contract of handling cargo transport for the International Space Station. In May 2012, SpaceX made headlines after its Falcon 9 rocket launch. The rocket had transported 1,000 pounds worth of supplies to the International Space Station for the astronauts stationed there. It was the first time a private company would launch a rocket into space. The idea behind the SpaceX was to send a commercial vehicle into space and to create an opportunity for the ordinary man to visit space.

The successful rocket launch didn’t just end in 2012. By 2013, the Falcon 9 rocket transported a satellite to geosynchronous transfer orbit. In 2015, a modified version of the Falcon 9 was yet again launched. In its settings came the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite which was targeted to monitor excess emissions from the sun that affects the power grids and communication systems on Earth.

In 2017, SpaceX experienced a major setback with the explosion of the Block 5 Merlin engine, though the company reported that no one was hurt, the explosion delayed the Falcon 9 operations for some time. By 2018, the project was back on track as the company recorded another successful test launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket which was designed to carry heavy payloads into orbit, and serve as a vessel for deep ‘space missions’.

Tesla Inc.

With the back-to-back impressive rocket launch of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, Musk hasn’t relented in his quest for creating the next tech innovations in the years to come. He joined the Tesla team which was incorporated in 2003. Before Elon Musk came on board, Tesla was run by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.  After making a series of investments into Tesla, Musk was made the chairman of the Tesla board of directors in 2004.

Tesla isn’t just any automobile company, but its aim is to build affordable and luxurious electric cars. It also deals with the manufacturing of battery products and solar roofs. Tesla began its automobile launch with the creation of electric sports cars. By March 2008, Tesla unveiled the ‘Roadster’, a sports car with a 0 to 60mph per 3.7 seconds acceleration. It could also travel almost 250 miles at an interval of its lithium-ion battery charges.

By 2012, Tesla moved on to the creation of its first electric car, the Model S which entered production at the starting price of $58,570. Also covering about 265 miles charge interval

 Since its inception, Tesla has successfully launched car models. With its Roadster model no longer in production, Tesla is currently left with four car models: The Model S, Model X, Model 3, and its recently announced Model Y which is set to launch by fall of 2020. Tesla has shaken the automobile market with the announcement of its Cybertruck, an all-electric-battery-powered light commercial vehicle. The Cybertruck’s features are as follows:

-       Self-leveling suspension (some models will have the all-wheel-drive)

-       Power inverters (supplying 120 and 240-Volt electricity)

-       Air compressor

-       Bullet-resistant

-       Tesla Autopilot