Elon Musk is the (although it is true that largely due to his actions), he was chosen Person of the Year last year by Time magazine and, now also, except for surprise, he will be the new sole owner of Twitter.
The company has accepted the tycoon’s offer to acquire 100% of the social network company. In this way, Twitter will cease to be listed on the stock market, remaining under a Musk who uses it almost obsessively and in which he has promised to promote freedom of expression, make his algorithms public or activate new features.
Surely a while ago it would be unthinkable to think of something like this, but it has happened. Mind you, before Musk became so famous and controversial, and even before he set up Tesla or SpaceX, he had a start as an entrepreneur. This is the story that led him to be the richest man in the world and now also the owner of Twitter.
Son of a wealthy family but without much affinity with his father
Musk from a young age had an early aptitude with computers, designing his own video game at the age of 12. He grew up in a wealthy family with whom he had made his fortune in the country’s emerald mines. At the age of 17 he moved to Canada, where he easily naturalized thanks to the fact that his mother, Maye, was born there, and she stayed with his cousin, with whom he started working on the family farm. All this initial intrahistory of the now tycoon is told in the book ‘Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future’, by Ashlee Vance.
In the book, it is said that Musk left South Africa in part to avoid conscription, which he saw as a waste of time. But that decision made his father refuse to pay for the University.
in the province of Saskatchewan, in the center of the country. After a while, and in an effort to make money, Musk asked the local employment office which jobs were the best paid, which was cleaning the boiler room of a sawmill. And he took the job.
Musk ended up leaving manual work and dedicated himself to technology. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in Economics and Physics in May 1997 and then considered attending Stanford University in California for further education, but never did.
The first successful company, a technology initiative together with his brother
Then, already in the 90s, he went to Silicon Valley guided by the siren songs of the programmers who had managed to generate fortune. With a background somewhere between formal materials physics and self-taught computer science, Musk enrolled in a Ph.D. program in physics at Stanford, but dropped out after two days.
Musk tried his luck in the wild west of the internet and it worked out for him. Along with his brother Kimbal, Musk founded a company called Zip2 as an online business directory, a kind of yellow pages with maps that seemed like a very good idea in the mid-1990s.
Elon and Kimbal recruited investors and hired outside help to run the company, which struck deals with media outlets including the New York Times. In 1999, they sold the Zip2 to Compaq, a then-declining computer manufacturing giant, for $307 million. Musk made $22 million from the sale of the Zip2, and quickly spent $1 million on a McLaren F1 supercar. “It’s not consistent with the rest of my behavior,” he told CNN, which filmed Musk as the car was delivered to his home.
A year later, Musk wrecked the car: he was trying to show off his acceleration and ended up crashing it. The million dollar sports car was not insured.
But by then, Musk was already thinking about his next adventure. On the day of the accident, Peter Thiel, co-founder of a payment company called Confinity and today one of the largest (and also most controversial) investors in the technological world, was with him in the McLaren, from which they emerged unharmed.
Musk had invested part of his $22 million from the sale into creating another online banking company called X.com. The two companies merged in March 2000, forming a business that eventually became PayPal.
Musk was named CEO, but in September, while on vacation, the board of directors fired him, replacing him with Thiel, in part over a disagreement over changing company servers. “It’s not a good idea to leave the office when there are a lot of important things going on that are causing people a lot of stress,” Musk later reflected.
The sale of PayPal, the beginning of his great fortune
However, Musk still had a stake in the company. When eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, Musk made a mega-fortune of $180 million from the deal.
So, with the new money in his pocket, Musk decided to go a step further. Or several: specifically, to space. In 2002, he founded SpaceX with the almost ridiculous mission of colonizing Mars. The following year, he put an initial investment of more than $6 million into Tesla, then not much more than a couple of founders and a vision to create electric sports cars.
The company sought to harness new, lightweight, energy-dense lithium-ion batteries to revolutionize a fledgling industry. At that time, lithium-ion cells were only used in small electronic devices, and one of Tesla’s main innovations was their expansion, which allowed him to create an electric vehicle with a much greater range than previous ones had achieved. electric cars.
Tesla and SpaceX almost bankrupted him
Both companies got off to a rocky start in the early years: Musk says he ended up spending virtually all of the proceeds from the PayPal sale to fund the companies. SpaceX had to endure multiple failed launches, nearly bankrupting it, while Tesla ran into trouble when its engineers realized its prototype batteries could catch fire. Tesla later came close to bankruptcy during the 2008 crash.
Over time, Musk’s investments began to pay off. In 2008, SpaceX secured a $1.6 billion deal with NASA, while Tesla, in 2012, began building its first mass-market car, the Model S. Today, Tesla is a behemoth that controls about two thirds of the US electric vehicle market. SpaceX is the undisputed leader in private space exploration.
Once already a millionaire, Musk has also invested his money in new companies. In 2016, Musk founded The Boring Company, which digs tunnels to create alternative routes in cities to avoid gridlock, and the neurotech startup Neuralink.
And from there, the story is known. Tesla and SpaceX have continued to grow, up to the purchase of Twitter.
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