Elon Musk is a business magnate, inventor, investor, industrial designer, and engineer. He is famous for being the founder, CEO, CTO, and chief designer of SpaceX; early investor, CEO, and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink; co-founder and initial co-chairman of OpenAI and owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc. In 2022, Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion.
With an estimated net worth of around $210 billion as of October 27, 2022, he is the wealthiest person in the world according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes’s real-time billionaire list.
Here are the 10 Things you didn’t know about Elon Musk.
Everything To Know About Elon Musk
1. Elon Musk took birth in South Africa
Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, one of the capital cities of South Africa on 28th June 1971. His mother is Maye Musk (née Haldeman), a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised in South Africa. His father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, and property developer, who was a half-owner of a Zambian emerald mine near Lake Tanganyika. He has a younger brother, Kimbal, (born 1972), and a younger sister, Tosca, (born 1974). It was in June 1989, he arrived in Canada when he was about 17 years old. After he got a Canadian passport, he then moved to the USA. At present, he holds citizenship of Canada, South Africa, and the United States.
2. His very first invention was a game
When Elon Musk was 12 in 1984, he invented a space fighting game called “Blastar”. Later, he sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500. He later said that it was “a trivial game…but better than Flappy Bird,” referencing the massively popular, yet crude mobile game launched in 2013.
3. Married and Divorced man, Elon Musk is currently in a relationship
Elon Musk married Justine Wilson in the year 2000. He had six children with his first wife, Justine Wilson. Their first child, Nevada Alexander Musk, died at 10 weeks old of sudden infant death syndrome. Their children are all boys, two are twins, and three are triplets. The couple divorced in 2008 and shared custody of their children. In 2022, one of the twins officially changed her name to reflect her gender identity, and to use Wilson as her last name because she no longer wished to be associated with Musk.
In February 2022, Elon Musk started dating Australian actress, Natasha Bassett (aged 27, at that time). They were already friends. Even some days ago, she was seen leaving Musk’s private jet in Los Angeles.
4. He dropped out of Stanford University after attending for two days
In Canada, Elon joined Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, for undergraduate study. After studying for two years at the university, he took a transfer in 1992, to the University of Pennsylvania. In May 1997, he graduated with 2 Bachelor’s degrees: a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from its College of Arts and Sciences, and a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the Wharton School of Business. He then moved to California in 1995 and decided to pursue a Ph.D. in applied physics and material science at Stanford University. But, just after 2 days, he left the course to start his own company in the field of the internet, renewable energy, and outer space.
5 He purchased a James Bond car
In the year 2013, Elon Musk purchased James Bond’s iconic Lotus Espirit car in a London auction that was featured in The Spy Who Loved Me, with the intention of making its movie transformation from car to submarine a reality. He bought the car for £616,000 ($997,000) at an auction in London in September. The buyer’s identity wasn’t made public at the time. Automotive blog Jalopnik reported that Musk was the buyer last night, and subsequently confirmed it with the PR team from Tesla Motors, his electric cars company.
“It was amazing as a little kid in South Africa to watch James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me drive his Lotus Esprit off a pier, press a button, and have it transform into a submarine underwater,” said Musk in a statement. “I was disappointed to learn that it can’t actually transform. What I’m going to do is upgrade it with a Tesla electric powertrain and try to make it transform for real.”
6. His first company was Zip2
In 1995, Musk, his brother Kimbal, and Greg Kouri founded Zip2 which was Elon’s first company. The company developed an Internet city guide with maps, directions, and yellow pages, and marketed it to newspapers. Later, the company was sold for nearly $307 million in cash in February 1999 to Compaq. Musk received $22 million for his 7-percent share.
7. He has appeared in TV series and films as well
Elon Musk has made cameos and appearances in films such as Iron Man 2 (2010), Machete Kills (2013), Why Him? (2016), and Men in Black: International (2019). In the TV series, he has appeared in The Simpsons (“The Musk Who Fell to Earth”, 2015), The Big Bang Theory (“The Platonic Permutation”, 2015), South Park (“Members Only”, 2016), [446] Rick and Morty (“One Crew over the Crewcoo’s Morty”, 2019), Young Sheldon (“A Patch, a Modem, and a Zantac®”, 2017), and Saturday Night Live (2021).
8. He was an inspiration for Iron Man
The Tony Stark character in the 2008 film “Iron Man” was inspired by Elon Musk, Robert Downey Jr. admitted. Musk even made a cameo in Iron Man 2, in which he and Downey Jr.’s Stark discuss working together on an electric jet. Though the 2008 movie was based on the Marvel comic books, director Jon Favreau told Recode that star Robert Downey Jr. proposed meeting with Musk to see “what it’d really be like to be Tony Stark.”
9. Elon Musk helped create SolarCity
In 2006, he helped create SolarCity, a solar energy company. By 2013, SolarCity was the second-largest provider of solar power systems in the United States. In 2014, Musk promoted the idea of SolarCity building an advanced production facility in Buffalo, New York, triple the size of the largest solar plant in the United States. It also operated as a joint venture with Panasonic until early 2020. Tesla acquired SolarCity for over $2 billion in 2016 and merged it with its battery unit to create Tesla Energy. At the time, SolarCity was facing liquidity issues.
10. He is the founder of 8 companies till date
Elon Musk is the founder of eight different companies – “Zip2” (Musk’s first tech company), “Paypal” (co-founded X.com and was renamed to Paypal which was acquired by E-Bay), “SpaceX”, “Tesla, Inc”, “Hyperloop”, “OpenAI”, “Neuralink”, and “The Boring Company”. Recently, Elon Musk completes a $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
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