Who is Elon Musk? Twitter and Tesla owner's life and how he made his billions
| Published date | 29 April 2022 |
| Publication title | Manchester Evening News: Web Edition Articles (England) |
The 50-year-old CEO and founder of Space X was born and raised in South Africa. The entrepreneur showed signs of having a business mindset from an early age. The entrepreneur went door to door selling homemade chocolate Easter eggs with his brother before going on to develop his first computer game at the age of 12.
Elon's early life wasn't all flowers and roses. His parents went through a divorce and Elon was bullied at school, facing difficulties due to his Asperger's Syndrome.
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He moved to Canada and then the US and later received a Bachelor's Degree in Economics and Physics from the University of Pennsylvania.
How did Elon become a billionaire
In 1995, Elon moved to California to attend Stanford University but instead dropped out and co-founded a web software company with his brother Kimbal. The company was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999.
That same year, Elon co-founded online bank X.com, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form Paypal. Two years later, he sold the company to eBay for $1.5 billion.
In 2002, Elon founded SpaceX and two years later joined Tesla as chairman and product architect before becoming its CEO in 2008.
How much is Elon Musk worth
Elon Musk is now the world's richest person, according to Forbes and Bloomberg, with an astonishing net worth of about about $250 billion. His wealth is largely based on his shares in Tesla of which he owns about 17%.
In 2020, he had passed Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to become the third richest person in the world, and a week later had passed Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to become the second-richest.
It was in November last year, Elon became the first person with a net worth over $300 billion. However, Musk has repeatedly described himself as "cash poor", and has "professed to have little interest in the material trappings of wealth".
"Some people think I have a lot of cash, I actually don't," Mr Musk told investor Cathie Wood on a podcast in 2020. By continually investing and saving their money, high earners often don't actually have that much cash on call.
While seeming cash poor might surprise some, the majority of top earners do it on purpose -and Elon admitted he would even forgo his own pay check.
What are Elon Musk's political views
Money and net worth aside, Elon has had his fair share of controversy. Elon is has been criticised over his views and...
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