Elon Musk is the owner, chairman, and CTO of X Corp
Elon Musk is the owner, chairman, and CTO of X Corp., the founder of the Boring Company, the co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI, the chairman, CEO, and chief technology officer of SpaceX. He is also the president of the Musk Foundation and an angel investor, CEO, product architect, and previous chairman of Tesla, Inc. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes, he is the richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $217 billion USD as of August 2023.
This wealth is largely the result of his ownership holdings in both Tesla and SpaceX. Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, temporarily attended the University of Pretoria, then immigrated to Canada at the age of 18 to obtain Canadian citizenship through his mother, who was also born in Canada. He started classes at Kingston, Ontario’s Queen’s University two years later.
Musk later changed schools and graduated from the University
Musk later changed schools and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with bachelor’s degrees in both economics and physics. In 1995 he relocated to California to enroll at Stanford University. Musk left the project, though, after only two days and co-founded Zip2 with his brother Kimbal, a startup that makes software for online city guides. In 1999, the business was purchased by Compaq for $307 million, and the same year, Musk co-founded the direct bank X.com with the help of $12 million from his earnings.
In order to create PayPal, X.com and Confinity merged. In 2002, eBay paid $1.5 billion to acquire PayPal, and in the same year, Elon Musk established SpaceX, a provider of rocket services, with the help of $100 million of his own earnings. He invested in Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.) in 2004 and was one of the company’s early investors. After being appointed CEO in 2008, he was became its chairman and product architect.
Musk contributed to the founding of SolarCity in 2006; Tesla Energy, which SolarCity had become when Tesla had acquired it in 2016, was a solar energy provider. He put forth a high-speed vacuum train system called the hyperloop in 2013. He joined others in establishing nonprofit artificial intelligence research organization OpenAI in 2015.
Musk co-founded the Tunneling Company and Neuralink
The following year, Musk co-founded the Tunneling Company and Neuralink, two businesses that develop brain-computer interfaces. He bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion, combined it with the newly founded X Corp., and changed the name of the site to X the following year. His artificial intelligence business, xAI, was established in March 2023.
Musk is a divisive personality due to the opinions he has stated. He has drawn fire for allegedly distributing false information on the COVID-19 and for endorsing conspiracies, among other unscientific and inaccurate claims. Similar controversy has surrounded his ownership of Twitter, including the firing of a sizable number of employees, an uptick in hate speech on the site, and the introduction of contentious features like Twitter Blue and daily limits on the number of Tweets that can be seen by others.
When he fraudulently tweeted that he had funds for a private buyout of Tesla in 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against him. Musk gave up his position as Tesla’s chairman and paid a $20 million fine to resolve the legal dispute.
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Musk has endorsed cryptocurrencies and favors them above conventional government-issued fiat currency. Given Musk’s ability to move cryptocurrency prices with his tweets, some people, including economist Nouriel Roubini, have accused him of manipulating the market with his comments regarding cryptocurrencies.
Due to Musk’s social media activity, Tesla’s 2021 revelation that it had purchased $1.5 billion in Bitcoin generated doubts. Due to the negative effects bitcoin mining has on the environment, investors and environmentalists have reacted negatively to Tesla’s news that it will take Bitcoin as payment. A few months later, in response to the criticism, Musk declared on Twitter that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin payments and will refrain from conducting any Bitcoin transactions until the environmental problems are resolved.
Musk has opposed public transportation and supported individualized mobility (private autos), despite the Boring Company’s role in developing mass transit infrastructure. Experts in urban planning and transportation have dubbed his remarks “elitist” and have harshly criticized them, pointing out that using public transportation in crowded cities is more cost-effective, environmentally friendly, and takes up a lot less space than using private vehicles.
