Tesla CEO Elon Musk has officially surpassed Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos to become the richest person on the planet on Bloomberg’s billionaire rankings with an estimated current fortune of $195 billion.
Elon Musk: The “crazy” billionaire who likes to burn money on fantasy things
Tesla’s stock price skyrocketed 743% last year, which was the main driving force behind the meteoric rise in billionaire Elon Musk’s total assets. It is estimated that in 2020, Elon Musk earned more money than the total current net worth of billionaire Bill Gates.
Not too keen on his current wealth, Mr. Musk wrote on Twitter when he received the news that he was the richest person on the planet: “That’s weird. Now back to work!” It seems that for the Tesla CEO, true happiness is when “humanity escapes Earth and colonizes Mars” rather than owning a huge fortune.
As CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, founder of The Boring Company, OpenAI and Neuralink; It seems like there is no future technology that does not have the mark of billionaire Elon Musk. The name Elon Musk is present everywhere at once, from the ambition to dominate the electric car industry, solar batteries to building a city on Mars. That is why the Tesla CEO became the inspiration for the main character Tony Stark in the Marvel superhero movie “Iron Man” (2008).
28-year-old millionaire with a desire to change the world
Born in South Africa, Elon Musk had a troubled childhood, his parents divorced and he was severely bullied at school. When he immigrated to Canada, the young man also went through difficult days, trying his hand at dozens of hard jobs to make ends meet: from cleaning up waste in factories to repairing computers in university dormitories. Graduating with two bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics at a time when the Internet began to dominate many fields and the holy land of Silicon Valley became the “promised land”, billionaire Elon Musk decided to turn in a new direction.
Failing to apply to the Internet “empire” Netscape did not discourage Musk, the young man decided to start his own technology company with his brother Kimbal Musk at the age of 23. The idea of starting a business came from a time when Musk witnessed a sales staff of a business directory calling to invite companies that were interning to join the service. Immediately, with his acumen, Musk wanted to start creating a website that integrated an online directory and a map of business addresses in each locality and region.
Startup Zip2 went into operation soon after with little initial capital. The company headquarters was located in a cramped, shabby office with no bathroom and the floor was a bed. But just a short time later, Zip2’s potential in the era of the Internet boom in the US convinced the first investors, creating the premise for Zip2 to grow like a kite with a series of customers across the country. Until now, Zip2 is still considered one of the pioneers in the online yellow page search revolution. Later, Compaq offered to buy Zip2 for up to 307 million USD, a huge number for a technology startup at that time. The deal made Mr. Elon Musk a millionaire when he pocketed 22 million USD.
With the motto of not letting money die, Elon Musk immediately searched for a second startup idea with $22 million and a series of personal relationships built through Zip2. This time, the young man tried his hand in the field of financial technology with the ambition of overcoming the slow money transfer system of banks, taking advantage of the power and development of the Internet to promote secure online payment tools via email. X.com (later renamed PayPal) is Mr. Musk’s second brainchild, which also brought this billionaire a huge amount of $170 million when this startup was acquired by eBay. It was also X.com that taught Musk many lessons, from the increasingly fierce competition in Silicon Valley to being “kicked out” of the CEO position of the company he founded.
Billionaire Elon Musk became bored with Internet startup ideas, bored with fundraising rounds and left the company after pocketing millions of dollars through mergers and acquisitions. Musk’s desire is greater than that, the young man wants to change the world like a true hero, wants to pursue passions beyond space even if he has to bet everything he has.
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“Crazy” Elon Musk burns money on fantasy
Elon Musk left the holy land of Silicon Valley to find Los Angeles, the aerospace center of the United States. At that time, no one could have expected that this 30-year-old man would be one of the people who changed the history of the American aerospace industry, writing impossible dreams about rockets and space travel, about space Internet coverage and “colonization” of Mars.
A burning passion for space exploration has driven Elon Musk to found SpaceX and his own Life to Mars fund. Seemingly “obsessed” with the red planet, Musk wants to turn Mars into a second home for humanity, transforming the Martian soil into vegetable nurseries and building a city of millions of people – sounds like something out of a Hollywood sci-fi movie. At the age of 30, Musk embarked on that “illusory” passion with hundreds of millions of dollars earned from the sale of PayPal. And Musk knew that to start his space journey, he first needed a rocket.
For 4 months from October 2001 to April 2002, Elon Musk tried to convince Russia to sell him a ballistic missile with a budget of 20 million USD but failed. In desperation, Musk and his associates decided to build their own rockets. Not interested in the title of millionaire, the “crazy” guy poured 100 million USD into SpaceX’s rocket project. Experts went from indifference to surprise at Musk’s madness and “extravagance”. But 100 million USD is nothing in the money-consuming aerospace industry. It is only enough for at most 4 failed rocket launches. And in the 3 years from 2006 to 2008, SpaceX launched a total of 3 failed rockets, falling before entering orbit. The 4th launch was considered the fateful bet that bet all that was left of Elon Musk. If he continues to fail, Musk will return empty-handed, and both SpaceX and Tesla will go bankrupt.
A miracle happened, the Falcon 1 rocket successfully launched into orbit. That moment was not only a part of history, the sweet fruit of Elon Musk and his associates’ 8 years of hard work, but also a lifeline for both Tesla and SpaceX in the context of the global financial crisis, a time when Musk was penniless. After this success, NASA decided to pour 1.6 billion USD into SpaceX, opening a new era in Elon Musk’s ambition to conquer space.
Tesla, the electric car project in which Musk has invested $70 million, is also a risky bet. It goes against a world where cars have run on gasoline since the early days of their invention. It challenges many notorious oil empires backed by billionaires and tycoon families with global economic and political influence. It is no coincidence that Elon Musk set Tesla the goal of “changing the world”.
And the world has really changed more than a decade after Tesla launched its first electric car. Its stock has skyrocketed 23,900% since its IPO in 2010, making Tesla the world’s most valuable automaker ($828.16 billion), surpassing industry giants like GM, Toyota, Hyundai, etc. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, Tesla still shipped a record 499,550 electric cars in 2020, mostly the low-cost Model 3 electric car. After Tesla, many giants like GM, Honda, and Toyota have now poured money into research and launched their first environmentally friendly electric cars.
Besides Tesla, SolarCity – the leading solar panel distributor in the US is another effort of Elon Musk in promoting the use of clean energy. In addition, with a creative mind full of ambitions, the richest billionaire on the planet is also implementing a series of projects such as high-speed travel in the vacuum environment Hyperloop, decoding Deepmind intelligence…
Get used to failure to change the future
During the journey to promote future technology, Elon Musk has experienced all the levels from the peak of success to the bitter fruit of failure. From a South African immigrant with a troubled childhood, divorced parents and being severely bullied at school, Elon Musk has broken all limits with his never-ending passion for science and endless ideas. He wrote his own life story like a science fiction movie about the most influential technological inventor of the century, the most controversial billionaire in the business world, and more than that, a master of… countless failures.
