The title of world's richest person can vary on any given day, based on corporate stock prices, although Elon Musk has recently held the distinction. Musk has been recognised as a genius for his business acumen, communication skills, and role as a tech visionary.
Musk is the CEO and co-founder of Tesla (TSLA), an electric vehicle manufacturer, as well as the CEO and chief designer of SpaceX, an aerospace firm. Elon Musk's fortune was built mostly through the companies he started, but he also has money from passive investments. Continue reading to find out which of Musk's ventures made the top five list.
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Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and email payment startup, with $10 million in 1999. The following year, X.com merged with Confinity, which was became PayPal in 2001. (PYPL).
PayPal was purchased by eBay (EBAY) for $1.5 billion on October 3, 2002.
Musk had 7,109,989 shares in PayPal at the time of the sale, making him the company's largest shareholder with an 11.7 percent stake.
PayPal is no longer owned by Musk. He left his role once the firm was sold, and he utilised the earnings to fund investments in SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity.
Musk established Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, in 2002.
3 The company's basic objective is to transform space technology, including the development of spaceships that will transport humans to Mars and other locations around the solar system.
In 2006, NASA gave SpaceX a hefty contract. Falcon 1, the first private liquid-propellant rocket to reach space, was launched by SpaceX in 2008. SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station in 2010. (ISS). In 2012, NASA awarded SpaceX a second contract to assist shuttle crew members in getting from the International Space Station to Earth.
Another $2.9 billion contract with NASA was signed in 2021 to transfer astronauts aboard its Starship spacecraft from lunar orbit to the moon's surface.
DeepMind Technologies, an artificial intelligence (AI) business, was founded in late 2010 with Musk as one of its primary angel investors. Google stated in January 2014 that it had purchased the company for an undisclosed sum.
Musk is well-known for his concerns about AI surpassing humans, and he is said to have invested in DeepMind not to earn money, but to keep up with how quickly AI technology is evolving.
DeepMind has spent a lot of time working on deep reinforcement learning, which is an AI technique that blends deep learning (which is typically used for pattern recognition) with reinforcement learning. DeepMind created this sort of learning based on reward signals, such as a game score, and named the concept in a white paper published in 2013. 9
DeepMind has failed to find many commercial uses for deep reinforcement learning, despite the fact that it was a breakthrough in AI. Google's parent firm, Alphabet, has used the approach internally to lower the price of cooling Google's servers in data centres.
Musk was not a founder member of Tesla, but he was instrumental in the company's early funding round in 2004. Musk rose from being a Tesla board member to CEO in 2008, while also acting as the CEO of SpaceX. 11 Tesla's initial public offering (IPO) on Nasdaq began on June 28, 2010, with shares of common stock priced at $17 per share. Tesla stock was trading for more than $1,000 on December 7, 2021.
Tesla's goal is to make sustainable transportation more accessible to the general public by producing mass-market electric vehicles. Companies including United Parcel Service (UPS) and PepsiCo preordered fully electric tractor-trailer vehicles when Tesla unveiled them in November 2017. 14 The Model S, Model X, Model, and the high-end Roadster supercar are among the company's electric vehicles. 15
Elon Musk owns 169. million Tesla shares worth $181.5 billion as of December 2, 2021.
Elon Musk is the company's largest stakeholder and has major influence over its long-term strategy and operational objectives.
Musk created The Boring Company, an infrastructure and tunnel construction company, in late 2016. The organisation was formed on the idea that while traffic is bad, travelling above ground isn't necessary—traffic problems may be "fixed" by utilising the millions and miles of earth beneath highways. The company's mission is to lower tunnelling costs while increasing production efficiency.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority approved a $48 million plan from The Boring Company in May 2019 to develop the LVCC Loop, an underground tunnel that will run beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center and include three stations as well as a pedestrian tunnel.
17 The Boring Company had completed the first of two planned tunnels in the loop by February 2020. Baltimore, Chicago, Hawthorne, Calif., Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. were among the cities where The Boring Company was working in 2020.
Elon Musk, the world's richest person and the founder of multiple companies that have disrupted their respective industries, has piqued the interest of people all around the world. Given the track record of his investments, few would argue that Musk is a gifted entrepreneur. Though you have the option to invest in one or more of Musk's businesses, your investment and business decisions should be tailored to your own needs.
Although Musk co-founded and leads Tesla, SpaceX, the neurotechnology company Neuralink, and The Boring Company, he is best recognised for his leadership of the electric automobile company Tesla.
Based on the entire projected acquisition price of $1.5 billion, Musk gained upwards of $175 million when PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002.
1 Musk, as the largest stakeholder at the time of the sale, owned 11.7 percent of PayPal, or 109,989 shares.
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