Personal life

On June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, a segregated city in South Africa during the apartheid era, Elon Reeve Musk was born. His mother, Maye Musk (née Haldeman), is a model and dietician who was reared in South Africa after being born in Saskatchewan, Canada. Errol Musk, a White South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, and real estate entrepreneur, is the father of Elon Musk. He was a half-owner of an emerald mine in Zambia that was located close to Lake Tanganyika. Kimbal Musk, Musk’s younger brother, was born in 1972. Tosca Musk is Musk’s younger sister (born 1974). Joshua Haldeman, his maternal grandpa, was a daring American-born Canadian who flew his family to Australia and Africa in a single-engine Bellanca airplane, breaking records in the process. Musk is descended from Pennsylvania Dutch and British people.

When Musk was younger, his family was affluent. The Musk children allegedly share their father’s distaste for apartheid, as evidenced by the fact that his father was elected to the Pretoria City Council as a member of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party. Musk largely resided with his father when his parents were divorced in 1980, a decision he made two years later and later regretted. Musk and his father are no longer close.  He has a half-sister and a half-brother on his paternal side.

Doctors removed Musk’s adenoids as a toddler because they thought he could be deaf, but his mother ultimately came to the conclusion that he was just thinking “in another planet.” When Musk was ten years old, he became interested in computers and video games and bought a Commodore VIC-20. At the age of 12, he sold the source code for Blastar, a BASIC-based video game he had developed, to PC and Office Technology magazine for about $500. He had learnt computer programming using a handbook. Musk, a shy and timid youngster, endured bullying his whole life and was once sent to the hospital after a bunch of lads hurled him down a flight of stairs. Before completing his studies at Pretoria Boys High School, he attended Bryanston High School and Waterkloof House Preparatory School.

Musk and Canadian artist Grimes made their relationship public in 2018. His name was originally “X A-12,” according to Musk and Grimes, but it was altered to “X A-Xii” since the original name would have been illegal in California . Since is not a letter in the current English alphabet, this caused more misunderstanding. The baby’s final name was “X AE A-XII” Musk, consisting of the letters “X” for the first name, “AE A-XII” for the middle name, and “Musk” for the last name.

Marriages, dating life, and children

While attending Queen’s University, Musk got married to Justine Wilson, a Canadian, in 2000. At the age of 10 weeks, their first child passed away in 2002 from sudden infant death syndrome. The couple made the decision to use IVF to start a new family after his passing.  After divorcing in 2008, the couple divided custody of the kids. One of their daughters made a formal name change in 2022 to represent her gender identity and her desire to distance herself from Musk.

They exchanged vows at Scotland’s Dornoch Cathedral in September 2010. He made Riley’s divorce from him official in 2012. Musk and Riley were wedded in 2013. He sought Riley’s second divorce in December 2014, but the process was later discontinued. In 2016, a second divorce was completed. After that, Musk allegedly started seeing Amber Heard in 2012 and dated her for a number of months in 2017. Later, Johnny Depp claimed that Musk had an affair with Heard while she was still married to Depp. Both Musk and Heard rejected the relationship.

 Education

a lavish school structure

South Africa’s Pretoria Boys High School is where Musk received his diploma.

Musk sought for a Canadian passport through his mother, who was born in Canada, since he was aware it would be simpler to enter the country from there. He spent five months studying at the University of Pretoria while he waited for the paperwork, which allowed him to escape being drafted into the South African military. Musk entered Canada in June 1989 and spent a year in Saskatchewan living with a second cousin while doing various jobs at a farm and a timber plant. He started at Kingston, Ontario’s Queen’s University in 1990. He went to the University of Pennsylvania two years later and earned both a Bachelor of Science and a Bachelor of Arts in physics from there in 1997.

During the summer of 1994, Musk worked two internships in Silicon Valley: one at the Palo Alto-based business Rocket Science Games and the other at the energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which looked into electrolytic ultracapacitors for energy storage. He was granted admission to Stanford University in California’s doctor of philosophy (Ph.D.) program in materials science in 1995. Musk tried to apply for a position at Netscape, but he never heard back.

Business career

Main article: Zip2

video symbol On YouTube, Musk discusses his early business experiences during the USC 2014 commencement speech.

With money lent by Musk’s father, Greg Kouri, his brother Kimbal, and Musk started the online software business Zip2 in 1995. They kept the business in a modest rental office in Palo Alto. For the newspaper publishing sector, the company created and promoted an online city guide complete with maps, directions, and yellow pages.

According to Musk, “I was constantly coding it at night, seven days a week, while the website was online during the day. The Musk brothers were able to convince the board of directors to drop their intentions to merge with CitySearch and get contracts with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. The board blocked Musk’s attempts to take over as CEO. In February 1999, Compaq paid $307 million in cash to purchase Zip2, and Musk got $22 million for his 7% ownership.

PayPal and SpaceX

Prior to going to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1992, Musk completed his studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He obtained his bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics from there, which he later added in 1997. He enrolled in Stanford University’s physics graduate program but dropped out after just two days because he believed that working in the field of the Internet would have a greater impact on society than studying physics.In 1995, he founded Zip2, a service that provided online publications with maps and company directories.. After the computer maker Compaq paid $307 million for Zip2 in 1999, Musk launched X.com, which eventually changed its name to PayPal, a firm that specialized in online money transfers. PayPal was purchased by the internet marketplace eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

Musk has long held the belief that for life to continue, humans must evolve into a multiplanetary species. To construct rockets more cheaply, he founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in 2002.. The Falcon 1 (first launched in 2006) and the bigger Falcon 9 (first launched in 2010) were the first two rockets produced by the business, and both were designed to be far less expensive than competing rockets.. A third rocket, the Falcon Heavy, which made its debut in 2018, was made to lift 117,000 pounds (53,000 kg) into orbit, more than double the capacity of its main rival, the Boeing Company’s Delta IV Heavy, for only a third of the price. The Super Heavy-Starship, which SpaceX has unveiled, will replace the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy.100,000 kilograms (220,000 pounds) would be able to be lifted into low Earth orbit by the Super Heavy first stage. The Starship, a spacecraft built for creating bases on the Moon and Mars as well as offering quick travel between cities on Earth, would be the payload. SpaceX also built the Dragon, a supply vessel for the International Space Station (ISS). The Dragon spacecraft, which sent astronauts Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken to the ISS in 2020 on a crewed mission, has room for up to seven people. The Super Heavy-Starship system began conducting its inaugural test flights in 2020. In addition to being the lead designer of the Dragon, Starship, and Falcon rockets, Musk served as the company’s CEO.

Tesla

Elon Musk has long been intrigued by the potential of electric vehicles, and in 2004 he started supporting the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, later renamed Tesla, which was established by businessmen Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. The Tesla Roadster, which had a range of 394 km on a single charge, was introduced in 2006. This was a sports automobile that could accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour (97 kilometers per hour) in under four seconds, in contrast to most prior electric vehicles, which Elon Musk found to be stodgy and boring. The firm raised about $226 million in its IPO in 2010. Tesla introduced the Model S car two years later, and automotive journalists praised both its performance and appearance. The business has also received praise.

Elon Musk has voiced opposition to Tesla becoming public. In August 2018, he tweeted about taking the business private and claimed to have “secured money.” The United States Securities Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against him the following month, accusing him of defrauding the stock market with “false and deceptive” tweets. After that, Elon Musk threatened to leave, and Tesla’s board of directors rejected the SEC’s settlement proposal. A harder bargain was ultimately reached, but the announcement caused Tesla shares to plunge. Elon Musk was permitted to continue serving as CEO after resigning for three years as chairman.

Elon Musk proposed the Hyperloop in 2013, a pneumatic tube in which a gondola carrying 28 passengers would travel the 350 miles (560 km) between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 35 minutes at a top speed of 760 miles (1,220 km/h), nearly the speed of sound, in response to dissatisfaction with the projected cost ($68 billion) of a high-speed rail system in California. He asserted that the Hyperloop would only cost $6 billion and could carry the six million passengers that use the route annually with average departures every two minutes.

Twitter

Musk questioned Twitter’s commitment to free speech principles in light of the company’s content-moderation limitations. From the start of April 2022, according to Twitter’s SEC filings, Musk had bought more than 9% of the company. Twitter quickly declared that Musk will be joining the board of directors. Musk later changed his mind and made an offer of $44 billion, or $54.20 per share, for the entire company. The board accepted the arrangement, which would have made him Twitter’s sole owner.

As part of his ambitions for the business, Musk said, the company will “enhance the product with additional features, make the algorithms open source to promote confidence, destroy the spam bots, and authenticate all people.” The corporation was in “material violation of many conditions” of the purchase agreement, according to Musk, who stated that Twitter had not supplied enough information concerning bot accounts when he announced in July 2022 that he was withdrawing his offer. In response, Twitter’s board chair Bret Taylor stated that the business was “committed to concluding the acquisition on the price and conditions agreed upon with Mr. Musk.”