what is a short biography of elon musk

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Elon Musk: The Complete Biography of an Extraordinary Innovator

• by history tools
• March 26, 2024

Elon Musk is one of the most famous entrepreneurs and business leaders of the 21st century. As the co-founder of PayPal, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, and driving force behind many other companies, Musk has had an outsized influence on technology, space exploration, and solving some of humanity‘s biggest challenges.

Let‘s take a closer look at Musk’s remarkable life story, complex persona, monumental successes and occasional setbacks, and what makes him such a polarizing character.

Childhood and Early Life in South Africa

Musk was born on June 28, 1971 in Pretoria, one of South Africa’s wealthiest and most segregated cities during apartheid. His mother Maye was a famous dietitian and model who grew up in Canada, while his father Errol was a wealthy white South African electromechanical engineer.

As a child, Musk was an avid reader and self-taught computer programmer. At age 12 he created and sold a video game called Blastar to a computer magazine for $500. But his relationship with his father was difficult – his parents divorced when he was 9 years old. Musk chose to live mostly with his father, which he would later regret considering they became estranged.

Discovering His Calling

After spending two years in the South African military, Musk moved to Canada at age 19. He studied at Queen‘s University in Ontario for two years, avoiding mandatory service in the South African military, before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania.

At Penn, Musk pursued a Bachelor’s degree in Physics as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Economics. Most notably, he rekindled an early passion by taking extra classes at the Stanford School of Engineering. It was a harbinger of innovations to come.

Founding Zip2 and PayPal

In 1995 Musk dropped out of Stanford’s PhD program to found his first startup Zip2 Corporation with his brother Kimbal. Zip2 provided online city guides to newspapers like the New York Times and Chicago Tribune.

Compaq bought Zip2 in 1999 for $307 million, earning Musk $22 million. He soon co-founded X.com, one of the first online banks providing services like checking accounts and money transfers.

X.com merged with its rival Confinity in 2000 to become PayPal, with Musk serving as the new CEO. Despite internal struggles at the new company, PayPal went on to revolutionize online payments. In 2002 eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk received $175 million.

“If something‘s important enough you should try, even if the probable outcome is failure.”

Making History with SpaceX

Flush with cash from the PayPal sale, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in 2002 with an audacious long-term goal: make humanity multi-planetary by establishing a human colony on Mars.

SpaceX develops rockets, spacecraft and satellites aimed at revolutionizing space transportation to eventually make it affordable for private citizens to travel into orbit and to other planets. It almost went bankrupt in 2008, but Musk kept it afloat with personal funds.

In 2012 SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial spaceship to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. And in 2020 SpaceX sent astronauts to the ISS for the first time, effectively resurrecting American manned spaceflight.

Tesla Accelerates Ahead with Musk at the Helm

Also in 2004 Musk made the series A investment round in Tesla Motors and joined Tesla’s board of directors as chairman. Founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003, Tesla aimed to prove electric cars could be better than gasoline-powered cars.

The original Roadster sports car impressed critics, but by 2007 Tesla was also on the verge of bankruptcy. Musk invested heavily in Tesla and took over leadership of the company, serving as CEO and product architect.

Under his guidance, Tesla went public in 2010 to raise funds and the Model S sedan was named Motor Trend‘s 2013 Car of the Year. By 2023 Tesla had become the world‘s most valuable automaker, dominating the rapidly growing EV market.

Expanding His Entrepreneurial Portfolio

In addition to SpaceX and Tesla, Musk has founded or co-founded a number of new companies over the last two decades. These include:

• The Boring Company (2016) – Develops tunnels aimed at eliminating street traffic to reduce transportation time
• Neuralink (2016) – Develops implantable brain-machine interfaces to connect human brains with computers
• OpenAI (2015) – Non-profit AI research company working to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits humanity
• Starlink (2019) – SpaceX project to provide global satellite Internet access coverage

Not all of these companies have proven successful so far. But Musk continues to think big while attracting top talent to bring innovative new technologies to reality.

Taking Over Twitter for $44 Billion

In January 2022, Musk started acquiring shares of social media company Twitter. By March he had accumulated a 9.2% stake to become Twitter‘s largest shareholder. This set in motion a tumultuous year that eventually led to his purchase of Twitter for $44 billion on October 27, 2022.

Shortly after acquiring Twitter, Musk laid off roughly half the company‘s 7,500 employees and radically changed the platform‘s operations. Many users have quit the platform over concerns about misinformation as Musk grants "amnesty" to suspended accounts. The long-term implications of his takeover remain uncertain.

“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

Marriages, Relationships and Family

In 2000, Musk married Canadian author Justine Wilson. Their first son died unexpectedly from SIDS at 10 weeks old. They share custody of 5 sons – a set of twins and a set of triplets – born through IVF. Musk and Wilson separated in 2008.

From 2010 to 2012, Musk was married to English actress Talulah Riley. After divorcing, they remarried in 2013 before finalizing their divorce again in 2016. Musk also had an on-and-off relationship with musician Grimes which began in 2018. They had 2 children – a son born in 2020 and daughter born in 2021 via surrogate.

In 2022 it was revealed that Musk secretly had twins in 2021 with Shivon Zilis, a top executive at his company Neuralink. He now has 10 children from 3 relationships. But his 18-year-old transgender daughter has disowned him, changing her name in opposition to Musk‘s "public transphobia."

Losing and Regaining Title of World‘s Richest Person

Thanks mostly to his shares in Tesla Motors, Musk experienced an astronomical rise in his personal net worth. He became the richest person in the world for the first time in January 2021 when he surpassed Jeff Bezos.

But his net worth dropped in 2022 and early 2023 as Tesla‘s share price declined. On January 6, 2023 Musk lost the title of world‘s richest person to Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH.

What‘s more, with an estimated $183 billion loss between November 2021 and January 2023, Musk holds the record for the largest loss of personal fortune in history according to Guinness World Records. Despite these setbacks, Musk’s supporters are betting he’ll reclaim the top spot someday.

What Makes Musk Such a Polarizing Figure

Musk has earned both ardent fans and vocal critics. So what makes him such a polarizing public figure?

Reasons supporters are drawn to Musk include:

• Daring vision for future innovations
• Willingness to take risks
• Commitment to tackling climate change with sustainable energy
• Power to make things happen that others consider impossible
• Relatable sense of humor on social media

However some people are strongly critical of Musk for:

• Poor treatment of employees by demanding unrealistic hours and goals
• Controversial public stances on issues like pandemic lockdowns
• Spreading misinformation and making questionable promises on Twitter
• Brash communication style and vindictiveness towards naysayers
• Concerns about concentration of power held by billionaires

But there‘s no questioning the outsized impact Musk already made on multiple industries. Even his detractors admit they‘re curious to see what he’ll achieve next.

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• Introduction & Quick Facts

PayPal and SpaceX

• X (formerly Twitter)

When was Elon Musk born?

Where did elon musk go to school, what did elon musk accomplish.

Elon Musk (born June 28, 1971, Pretoria , South Africa) South African -born American entrepreneur who cofounded the electronic-payment firm PayPal and formed SpaceX , maker of launch vehicles and spacecraft . He was also one of the first significant investors in, as well as chief executive officer of, the electric car manufacturer Tesla. In addition, Musk acquired Twitter (later X) in 2022.

Musk was born to a South African father and a Canadian mother. He displayed an early talent for computers and entrepreneurship. At age 12 he created a video game and sold it to a computer magazine. In 1988, after obtaining a Canadian passport, Musk left South Africa because he was unwilling to support apartheid through compulsory military service and because he sought the greater economic opportunities available in the United States .

Musk attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and in 1992 he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania , Philadelphia, where he received bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics in 1997. He enrolled in graduate school in physics at Stanford University in California , but he left after only two days because he felt that the Internet had much more potential to change society than work in physics. In 1995 he founded Zip2 , a company that provided maps and business directories to online newspapers. In 1999 Zip2 was bought by the computer manufacturer Compaq for $307 million, and Musk then founded an online financial services company, X.com, which later became PayPal, which specialized in transferring money online. The online auction eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

Musk was long convinced that for life to survive, humanity has to become a multiplanet species. However, he was dissatisfied with the great expense of rocket launchers. In 2002 he founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) to make more affordable rockets. Its first two rockets were the Falcon 1 (first launched in 2006) and the larger Falcon 9 (first launched in 2010), which were designed to cost much less than competing rockets. A third rocket, the Falcon Heavy (first launched in 2018), was designed to carry 117,000 pounds (53,000 kg) to orbit, nearly twice as much as its largest competitor, the Boeing Company’s Delta IV Heavy, for one-third the cost. SpaceX has announced the successor to the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy: the Super Heavy–Starship system. The Super Heavy first stage would be capable of lifting 100,000 kg (220,000 pounds) to low Earth orbit . The payload would be the Starship, a spacecraft designed for providing fast transportation between cities on Earth and building bases on the Moon and Mars. SpaceX also developed the Dragon spacecraft, which carries supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). Dragon can carry as many as seven astronauts, and it had a crewed flight carrying astronauts Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken to the ISS in 2020. The first test flights of the Super Heavy–Starship system launched in 2020. In addition to being CEO of SpaceX, Musk was also chief designer in building the Falcon rockets, Dragon, and Starship. SpaceX is contracted to build the lander for the astronauts returning to the Moon by 2025 as part of NASA ’s Artemis space program.

Musk had long been interested in the possibilities of electric cars, and in 2004 he became one of the major funders of Tesla Motors (later renamed Tesla), an electric car company founded by entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning . In 2006 Tesla introduced its first car, the Roadster , which could travel 245 miles (394 km) on a single charge. Unlike most previous electric vehicles, which Musk thought were stodgy and uninteresting, it was a sports car that could go from 0 to 60 miles (97 km) per hour in less than four seconds. In 2010 the company’s initial public offering raised about $226 million. Two years later Tesla introduced the Model S sedan, which was acclaimed by automotive critics for its performance and design. The company won further praise for its Model X luxury SUV, which went on the market in 2015. The Model 3, a less-expensive vehicle, went into production in 2017 and became the best-selling electric car of all time.

Dissatisfied with the projected cost ($68 billion) of a high-speed rail system in California, Musk in 2013 proposed an alternate faster system, the Hyperloop , a pneumatic tube in which a pod 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) per hour, nearly the speed of sound . Musk claimed that the Hyperloop would cost only $6 billion and that, with the pods departing every two minutes on average, the system could accommodate the six million people who travel that route every year. However, he stated, between running SpaceX and Tesla, he could not devote time to the Hyperloop’s development.

X (formerly Twitter )

Musk joined the social media service Twitter in 2009, and, as @elonmusk, he became one of the most popular accounts on the site, with more than 85 million followers as of 2022. He expressed reservations about Tesla’s being publicly traded, and in August 2018 he made a series of tweets about taking the company private at a value of $420 per share, noting that he had “secured funding.” (The value of $420 was seen as a joking reference to April 20, a day celebrated by devotees of cannabis .) The following month the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Musk for securities fraud, alleging that the tweets were “false and misleading.” Shortly thereafter Tesla’s board rejected the SEC’s proposed settlement, reportedly because Musk had threatened to resign. However, the news sent Tesla stock plummeting, and a harsher deal was ultimately accepted. Its terms included Musk’s stepping down as chairman for three years, though he was allowed to continue as CEO; his tweets were to be preapproved by Tesla lawyers, and fines of $20 million for both Tesla and Musk were levied.

Musk was critical of Twitter’s commitment to principles of free speech , in light of the company’s content-moderation policies. Early in April 2022, Twitter’s filings with the SEC disclosed that Musk had bought more than 9 percent of the company. Shortly thereafter Twitter announced that Musk would join the company’s board, but Musk decided against that and made a bid for the entire company, at a value of $54.20 a share, for $44 billion. Twitter’s board accepted the deal, which would make him sole owner of the company. Musk stated that his plans for the company included “enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.” In July 2022 Musk announced that he was withdrawing his bid, stating that Twitter had not provided sufficient information about bot accounts and claiming that the company was in “material breach of multiple provisions” of the purchase agreement. Bret Taylor, the chair of Twitter’s board of directors, responded by saying that the company was “committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk.” Twitter sued Musk to force him to buy the company. In September 2022 Twitter’s shareholders voted to accept Musk’s offer. Facing a legal battle, Musk ultimately proceeded with the deal, and it was completed in October.

Among Musk’s first acts as Twitter’s owner were to lay off about half the company and to allow users to purchase for $8 a month the blue check-mark verification, which had previously been bestowed by Twitter upon notable figures. In addition, he disbanded Twitter’s content-moderation body and reinstated many banned accounts, most notably that of former U.S. president Donald Trump , which had been suspended after the U.S. Capitol attack on January 6, 2021 . Advertising revenue fell sharply as many companies withdrew their ads from the platform. Musk changed the name of the company from Twitter to X in July 2023. (Tweets became posts with the change.)

• World Biography

Elon Musk Biography

1971 • South Africa

Entrepreneur, philanthropist.

Elon Musk was a multi-millionaire by the time he reached the age of thirty-one thanks to his creation of the company that became PayPal, the popular money-transfer service for Web consumers. Musk has become one of a new breed of what the New York Times called "thrillionaires," or a class of former high-tech entrepreneurs who are using their newfound wealth to help turn science-fiction dreams into reality. Musk is the founder of Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, a company based in El Segundo, California. In 2005 SpaceX was busy building the Falcon rocket, which he hoped could some day make both space tourism and a colony on the planet Mars realistic goals for humankind.

Sells homemade video game

Musk is a native of South Africa, born in 1971 to parents who later divorced. His father was an engineer and his mother—originally from Canada—was a nutritionist. Musk was fascinated by science fiction and computers in his adolescent years. When he was twelve, he wrote the code for his own video game and actually sold it to a company. In his late teens, he immigrated to Canada in order to avoid the required military service for white males in South Africa. It was still the era of apartheid, the South African legal system that denied political and economic rights to the country's majority-black native population. Musk was uninterested in serving in the army, which was engaged at the time in a battle to stamp out a black nationalist movement. Thanks to his mother's Canadian ties, he was able to enroll at Queen's University in Kingston, one of Ontario's top schools.

Musk had planned on a career in business, and he worked at a Canadian bank one summer as a college intern. This was his only real job before he became an Internet entrepreneur. Midway through his undergraduate education, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor's degree in economics and a second bachelor's in physics a year later. From there, he won admission to the prestigious doctoral program at Stanford University in California, where he planned to concentrate on a Ph.D. in energy physics. He moved to California just as the Internet boom was starting in 1995, and he decided he wanted to be in on it, too. He dropped out of Stanford after just two days in order to start his first company, Zip2 Corporation. This was an online city guide aimed at the newspaper publishing business, and Musk was able to land contracts with both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune to provide content for their new online sites.

Musk was just twenty-four when he started the company, and he devoted all of his energies to see it succeed. At one point,

"Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

he lived in the same rented office that served as his company's headquarters, sleeping on a futon couch and showering at the local YMCA, which "was cheaper than renting an apartment," he explained in an interview with Roger Eglin of the Sunday Times of London. Still, the company struggled to fulfill its contracts and meet the payroll and other costs, and he looked for outside financing. Eventually a group of venture capitalists, investors who provide start-up money to new businesses, financed Zip2 with $3.6 million, but he gave up majority control of the company in exchange.

Starts online bank

In the end, Musk's decision was a smart one. In February 1999 Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash, which was one of the largest cash deals in the Internet business sector at the time. Out of that amount, Musk was paid $22 million for his 7 percent share, which made him a millionaire at twenty-eight. In 1999, he used $10 million of it to start another company, which he called X.com. This was an online bank with grand plans to become a full-range provider of financial services to consumers. The company's one major innovation was figuring out how to securely transfer money using a recipient's e-mail address.

Musk's proven track record from Zip2 helped it gain serious attention and generous investors right away. Two important executives signed on with him: investment banker John Story and Bill Harris, the former chief executive officer of Intuit Corporation, the maker of the best-selling Quicken accounting software as well as TurboTax, a tax-preparation program. Harris was appointed president and chief executive officer of X.com, with Musk serving as company chair. The company received a generous infusion of $25 million in start-up capital from Sequoia Capital, a leading venture-capital firm in California.

X.com went online in December 1999 with a bold offer for new customers: those who opened an online checking account with X.com received a $20 cash card that they could use at an automatic-teller machine (ATM). If they referred a friend, they received a $10 card for each new member who signed up. Within two months, X.com had one hundred thousand customers, which was close to the number reached by its major competitor, Etrade Telebank. But consumer skepticism about the security of online banking was X.com's biggest obstacle to success, and there was a setback when Musk and the other executives had to admit that computer hackers had been able to perform some illegal transfers from traditional bank accounts into X.com accounts. They immediately started a new policy that required customers to submit a canceled check in order to withdraw money, but there were tensions in the office about the future of the company.

Buys PayPal

In March 2000, X.com bought a company called Confinity, which had started an Internet money-transfer presence called PayPal. PayPal was originally set up to let users of handheld personal digital assistants, or PDAs, transfer money. It had only been in business a few months when X.com acquired it, and Musk believed that its online-transfer technology, which was known as "P2P" for "person-to-person," had a promising future. He and Harris did not agree, and Harris resigned from X.com in May 2000. Five months later, Musk announced that X.com would abandon its original online bank and instead concentrate on turning itself into the leading global payment transfer provider. The X.com name was dropped in favor of PayPal.

PayPal grew enormously through 2001, thanks in part to its presence on eBay, the online auction Web site where person-to-person sales were happening in the hundreds of thousands. When PayPal became a publicly traded company with an initial public offering (IPO) of stock in February 2002, it had an impressive debut on the first day of Wall Street trading. Later that year, eBay bought the company outright for $1.5 billion. At the time, Musk was PayPal's largest shareholder, holding an 11.5 percent stake, and he netted $165 million in valuable eBay stock from the deal.

By then Musk had already moved on to his next venture. In June 2002 he founded SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies. He had long been fascinated by the possibility of life on Mars and was a member of the Mars Society, a nonprofit organization that encourages the exploration of the red planet. Filmmaker James Cameron (1954–) is one of several notable Mars Society members. Musk wanted to create a "Mars Oasis," sending an experimental greenhouse to the planet, which in favorable alignment of the planets is about 35 million miles distant from Earth. His oasis would contain a nutrient gel from which specific Mars-environment-friendly plant life could grow. His plan had a cost of $20 million. But then he learned that to send something into space with the standard delivery method, a Delta rocket made by the Boeing Corporation, would add another $50 million to the cost. Musk even tried to buy a rocket from Russia, but realized that dealing with the somewhat suspect international traders who dealt in such underground, or illegal, items was just too risky.

Borrows star Wars >name

Musk thought that maybe he might be able to build his own rocket instead. He began contacting innovators and technicians in the American aerospace industry, and he managed to lure some experienced engineers and technical specialists away from companies like Boeing and TRW to come and work for him at SpaceX's headquarters in El Segundo, California. He had a much more difficult time attracting venture capital for this idea, however. "Space is pretty far out of the comfort zone of just about every VC on Earth," he admitted to Matt Marshall of the San Jose Mercury News. Instead, he was forced to put up his own money to build what would become the first reusable rocket in the private sector.

Musk and his new SpaceX team began to build two types of Falcon rockets. The name came from the "Millennium Falcon," the spacecraft in the Star Wars movies. The plan was to build a rocket by using existing technology and at the lowest possible cost. The Falcon I, for example, uses a pintle engine, which dates from the 1960s. It has one fuel injector, while standard rockets used by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) generally use what is known as a "showerhead" design that features several fuel injectors. The company also needed a theodolite, which is used to align rockets, and instead of buying it new, they saved $25,000 by finding one on eBay.

There are other, equally expensive costs associated with rocketry. Since Musk's design would be reusable, the company needed to get back the rocket's first stage, which the rocket sheds as it leaves the Earth's atmosphere. The part usually falls into the ocean, according to safety plans, but retrieval at sea is expensive.

The New "Thrillionaires"

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (1953–) is ranked the seventh richest person in the world. Allen has used his wealth to finance SpaceShipOne. This private manned spacecraft, built by aircraft design pioneer Burt Rutan (1943–), was the first of its kind to reach suborbital space twice, which it did in 2004. For this two-time achievement, SpaceShipOne met the conditions of the $10 million Ansari X prize, established by the X Prize Foundation to encourage private entrepreneurship in aerospace.

Doom video game co-creator John Carmack (1970–; see entry) founded a computer game development company called id Software in 1991. He is considered one of the most gifted programmers ever to work in the gaming industry. He was one of the creators of the successful Doom and Quake games, which sold millions in the 1990s and attracted legions of devoted fans. In 2000, Carmack funded a new venture, Armadillo Aerospace in Mesquite, Texas, with the goal of building a manned suborbital spacecraft. It lost its bid to win the Ansari X prize when its vehicles ran into technical problems and crashed in 2004 and 2005.

Companies that contract with NASA charge $250,000 to bring such parts back, but Musk found some ocean-salvage companies that knew how to handle sensitive material. He found one that agreed to do the job for just $60,000. The Falcon does not have a specialty computer on board, which can cost $1 million alone to install and maintain. Instead its computer is a basic one that uses the same technology as an automatic teller machine and costs just $5,000.

Envisions Hondas in space

By building a reliable rocket at an affordable cost, SpaceX hopes to be able to take small satellites into orbit for a fee of around $6 million. This is half the standard rate in the aerospace business to take something into space. The company already had two customers—the U.S. Department of Defense and the government of Malaysia. "Many times we've been asked, 'If you reduce the cost, don't you reduce reliability?' This is completely ridiculous," Musk explained to Fast Company writer Jennifer Reingold. "A Ferrari is a very expensive car. It is not reliable. But I would bet you 1,000–to–1 that if you bought a Honda Civic that that sucker will not break down in the first year of operation. You can have a cheap car that's reliable, and the same applies to rockets."

Musk serves as the chief technology officer of SpaceX. All employees are shareholders, and the company's casual but committed atmosphere is reinforced by the workday presence of Musk's four dogs. He no longer sleeps at the office, however, for he has a home, a wife there, and in the garage a McLaren F1, a $1.2 million car that is the fastest production, or non-customized race car, in the world. He has testified before members of the U.S. Congress on the possibility of commercial human space flight and has also established the Musk Foundation, which is committed to space exploration and the discovery of clean energy sources. The Foundation runs the Musk Mars Desert Observatory telescope in southern Utah, as well as a simulated Mars environment where visitors can experience what life on Mars might be like, including waste-burning toilets. "I think human exploration of space is very important," he told Reingold. "Certainly, from a survival standpoint, the probability of living longer is much greater if we're on more than one planet."

For More Information

Periodicals.

Corcoran, Elizabeth. "Something Better than Free." Forbes (February 21, 2000): p. 62b.

Eglin, Roger. "Silicon Valley Shows How to Reach Stars." Sunday Times (London, England) (December 1, 2002): p. 7.

Lubove, Seth. "Way Out There." Forbes (May 12, 2003): p. 138.

Marshall, Matt. "Venture Capital Column." San Jose Mercury News (July 13, 2004).

Ptacek, Megan J. "X.com Scraps Bank Strategy to Focus on PayPal System." American Banker (October 11, 2000): p. 1.

Reingold, Jennifer. "Hondas in Space." Fast Company (February 2005): p. 74.

Schwartz,John."Thrillionaires: The New Space Capitalists." New York Times (June 14, 2005): p. F1.

Wallace, Nora K. "Vandenberg Air Base, Calif., to Launch SpaceX Reusable Rocket in January." Santa Barbara News-Press (October 5, 2003).

The Mars Society. http://www.marssociety.org/ (accessed on August 23, 2005).

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation. http://www.spacex.com/ (accessed on August 23, 2005).

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk: His career, life, and companies he started

• Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla. He's also cofounder other major companies, including SpaceX.
• He was born in South Africa and founded his first startup in the '90s.
• Musk is a polarizing figure who has incited lawsuits and SEC investigations. 

Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa.

His mother, Maye Musk , is a professional dietitian and model, appearing on boxes of Special K cereal and the cover of TIME magazine. Last year, at the age of 74, she was on the cover of Sport Illustrated's swimsuit edition.

Maye and Musk's father, Errol, were married for nearly a decade before they divorced. Maye said in her book that she'd wanted to end the marriage earlier, but the Divorce Act, which legalized the termination of a marriage in South Africa, was not enacted until 1979. Musk's parents divorced the same year the law was passed.

After their parents divorced, 9-year-old Musk and his younger brother Kimbal  decided to live with their father. It wasn't until after the move was made that his notoriously troubled relationship with his dad began to emerge. "It was not a good idea," Musk said of the move in an interview with Rolling Stone.

Musk's school days weren't easy — he was once hospitalized after being beaten by bullies. The bullies threw Musk down a set of stairs and beat him until he blacked out, as detailed in Ashlee Vance's book "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future." Musk's father told Business Insider the incident took place after Musk made some insensitive comments to a classmate.

The Tesla CEO has said he didn't always feel he was on the same wavelength as his classmates.

"Social clues were not intuitive," Musk said during a TED conference last year. In 2021, the billionaire said during his performance on " Saturday Night Live " that he has Asperger's syndrome.

Musk has said he spent a lot of his childhood reading and coding late into the night — and it paid off. At 17, he took a university-level aptitude test on his computer programming skills. Examiners made him retake the test because they had never seen such a high score, his mother said in a tweet. 

After graduating from high school, Musk moved to Canada with his mother, Maye; his sister, Tosca, and his brother, Kimbal, and spent two years studying at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, according to the school.

He later finished his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, earning degrees in physics and economics.

While studying at the  University of Pennsylvania , Musk and a classmate rented out a 10-bedroom frat house and turned it into a nightclub. The move, which Musk undertook with Adeo Ressi, was one of his first entrepreneurial experiments, Vogue reported.

After graduation, Musk traveled to Stanford University to study for his Ph.D. — but he barely started the program before leaving it. He deferred his admission after only two days in California, deciding to test his luck in the dot-com boom that was just getting underway. He never returned to finish his studies at Stanford.

Musk's college girlfriend Jennifer Gwynne would later auction a set of photos of Musk from his time studying at the University of Pennsylvania.

Late 1990s - 2000: Early career

With brother Kimbal, Musk launched Zip2. A cluster of Silicon Valley investors helped to fund the company, which provided city travel guides to newspapers like The New York Times and Chicago Tribune, per the Rolling Stone interview with Musk.

While Zip2 got off the ground, Musk lived in the office and showered at a local YMCA, he said in a Stanford University video. The hard work paid off when Compaq bought Zip2 in a deal worth $341 million in cash and stock, earning Musk $22 million.

Musk next started  X.com , an online banking company. He launched the company in 1999 using $10 million of the money he got from the Zip2 sale, Investopedia reported. About a year later, X.com merged with Confinity, a financial startup cofounded by Peter Thiel, to form PayPal.

Musk was named the CEO of the newly minted PayPal — but it wouldn't last long. While Musk was en route to Australia for a much-needed vacation, PayPal's board fired him and made Thiel the new CEO. "That's the problem with vacations," Musk told Fortune years later about his ill-fated trip in late 2000.

2002-2004: Elon Musk starts SpaceX and invests in Tesla

But things worked out for Musk — he made another windfall when eBay bought PayPal in late 2002. As PayPal's single biggest shareholder, he netted $165 million of the $1.5 billion price eBay paid, Money.com reported.

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Even before the PayPal sale, Musk was dreaming up his next move, including a wild plan to send mice or plants to Mars. In early 2002, Musk founded the company that would be known as Space Exploration Technologies , or SpaceX, with $100 million of the money received from the PayPal sale. Musk's goal was to make spaceflight cheaper by a factor of 10.

One early SpaceX vehicle was named after the song "Puff the Magic Dragon." The name of the spacecraft, the Dragon, was Musk's jab at skeptics who told him SpaceX launches would never be able to put vehicles into space, Musk later shared on Twitter.

SpaceX's long-term goal is to make colonizing Mars affordable. Musk has said that SpaceX stock won't be available an initial public offering until what Musk calls the "Mars Colonial Transporter" is flying regularly.

Musk had also been keeping plenty busy here on Earth, particularly with Tesla Motors. In 2004, Musk made the first of what would be $70 million of total Tesla investments, an electric car company. Tesla's founders were veteran startup executives Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.

Musk has said he took an active product role at the carmaker, helping develop its first car, the Tesla Roadster , the Roadster.

The Roadster was built on the chassis of a Lotus Elise — a tiny British sports car that Tesla remade into an electric car with a lithium-ion battery. The all-electric Roadster debuted in 2006 when Musk was serving as Tesla's chairman. 

2008: Elon Musk becomes Tesla CEO

In 2007, Musk staged a boardroom coup at Tesla, first ousting Eberhard from his CEO seat and then from the company's board and executive suites entirely.

In 2008, with the financial crisis seriously limiting his options, a Tesla bankruptcy was personally halted by Musk. He invested $40 million in Tesla and loaned the company $40 million more. Not coincidentally, he was named CEO the same year.

But between SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, Musk nearly went broke. He described 2008 as "the worst year of my life" in an interview with 60 Minutes. Tesla kept losing money, and SpaceX was having trouble launching its Falcon 1 rocket. By 2009, Musk was living off personal loans just to survive.

Right around Christmas 2008, Musk got two pieces of good news: SpaceX had landed a $1.5 billion contract with NASA to deliver supplies into space, and Tesla finally found more outside investors.

Musk's career was starting to get noticed in other circles, too, most notably in Hollywood. Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal of Tony Stark in the "Iron Man" movies is at least partially based on Musk, director Jon Favreau said on the "Recode Decode" podcast. Musk even had a cameo in " Iron Man 2 ."

2015: OpenAI

In late 2015, Musk also cofounded OpenAI , a nonprofit dedicated to researching artificial intelligence and ensuring it doesn't destroy humanity.

He later announced that he would step down from the board to avoid any potential conflicts of interest with Tesla , which has made strides into artificial intelligence for its self-driving car technology.

The billionaire has since spoken out against the company on multiple occasions and is even attempting to launch his own competitor, which he jokingly dubbed " Truth GPT " after the success of OpenAI's ChatGPT.

By the end of 2015, 24 SpaceX launches had been made on assignments like resupplying the International Space Station, setting some records along the way. 

That year, Tesla also released its first version of Autopilot , a driver-assist feature for its EVs. Musk later went on to release an enhanced version of Autopilot called Full Self-Driving beta several years later.

He has since said that Tesla FSD is the difference between being "worth a lot of money or worth basically zero." However, Autopilot has generated its fair share of lawsuits, as well as investigations from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over the years.

2016: SolarCity and The Boring Company

In late 2016, Tesla bought SolarCity in a $2.6 billion deal. That same year some Tesla shareholders filed a lawsuit accusing Musk of putting pressure on Tesla's board members to buy SolarCity and bail it out. Musk later won the lawsuit in 2022.

In 2016, he also started The Boring Company , which has a mission to dig a network of tunnels under and around cities for high-speed, no-traffic driving.

Boring's first tunnel network for commercial use, located in Las Vegas, opened in April 2021.

2017: Neuralink

Musk founded another company: Neuralink , in 2017, which is trying to build devices that can be implanted inside the human brain. The billionaire has described the device as a "Fitbit in your skull" and has said it will allow people to perform tasks using only their minds. The company has experimented with putting the device in pigs and monkeys and won approval from the US Food and Drug Administration to begin human trials in 2023.

In 2017, Musk also joined President Trump's business advisory council — a move that caused a huge public backlash. He initially defended the move but then quit after Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. Musk said he tried to convince Trump not to withdraw.

2018: Tesla Roadster in space

The Falcon Heavy, the successor to the Falcon 9 and the most powerful rocket SpaceX has built to date, completed a successful maiden launch in February 2018. The Falcon Heavy carried a unique payload: a dummy dubbed "Starman," and Musk's personal cherry red Tesla Roadster, which were launched toward Martian orbit.

"We really wanted to get the public here to wonder, to get excited about the possibility of something new happening in space — of the space frontier getting pushed forward," Musk told an audience at the 2018 South by Southwest conference. "The goal of this was to inspire you and make you believe again, just as people believed in the Apollo era, that anything is possible."

SEC subpoenas Tesla

Musk ran into some trouble in 2018 when he sent a tweet declaring he was considering taking  Tesla private at $420 per share and had already secured funding. Just a few days later, the SEC sent Tesla subpoenas about the company's plans to go private and Musk's comments.

By September, the SEC had formally filed a lawsuit against Musk, accusing him of making "false and misleading statements." Musk settled with the SEC, which resulted in both him and Tesla paying a $20 million fine and Musk stepping down as chairman of Tesla's board. Additionally, Tesla was required to appoint a committee to oversee Musk's communications.

One month later, Musk won a victory in court when a jury ruled he was not guilty of defaming the British diver Vernon Unsworth . Unsworth had filed a defamation lawsuit in 2018 after Musk called him a "pedo guy" on Twitter.

2021: Musk becomes richest person in the world

Musk's net worth has soared in recent years. The Tesla CEO became the richest man in the world in 2021 when his fortune surpassed $200 billion, passing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' net worth.

Musk said he commemorated the occasion by sending Bezos, his longtime rival, a silver medal. Musk's status as the richest man in the world was eclipsed by LVMH owner Bernard Arnault in 2023. Since, he has remained near the top of the list of wealthiest people in the world.

He also won Time's Person of the Year award in 2021.

2022: The 'Technoking' sets his sights on Twitter 

In 2022, Musk started buying up shares of Twitter and later turned down an offer to join the board in favor of buying Twitter outright for $44 billion.

Musk, who has become one of the most-followed accounts on the social media site, attempted to backtrack on his offer to buy Twitter in July.  Twitter sued Musk promptly, in order to force him to go through with the purchase. 

After months of back and forth leading up to a trial in the Delaware Court of Chancery, Musk agreed to buy the company in October. The same day he took over Twitter, he ousted several key executives including then-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. Musk took over as "Chief Twit" and proceeded to cut the Twitter workforce in half in the chaotic months following the Musk acquisition .

He later brought in a new CEO for Twitter in May 2023 after the billionaire said Twitter was no longer "in the fast lane to bankruptcy."

The platform was also rebranded "X" in July 2023.

The billionaire has also expressed interest in launching his own AI venture. In April 2023, Musk confirmed reports that he's planning to create an AI startup to build a ChatGPT rival .

Katie Canales, Matt Weinberger, and Mary Meisenzahl contributed to an earlier version of this story. 

• Main content

5 Things You May Not Know About Elon Musk

Elon Musk is one of the brilliant minds who helped reshape the global economy following the tech boom of the late 1990s. The South African native became a millionaire many times over upon selling his shares in Zip2 in 1999 and PayPal in 2002 and made electric cars cool after taking over as CEO of Tesla Motors in 2008. Since launching Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in 2002, Musk has contracted with NASA and the U.S. government to develop his company’s fleet of rocket ships, and he fully believes in the importance of colonizing Mars to extend human existence. Here are five things to know about the man whose ideas are literally out of this world:

He developed and sold a video game at age 12

The budding CEO got his start in the technology industry after seeing a computer in a store for the first time at age 10. He learned to program and developed the code for a shooting-spaceship game called Blastar, which he sold to a computer magazine for $500. Naturally, the boy with grand ambitions didn't stop there, and he devised plans with his younger brother, Kimbal, to open an arcade near their school. However, those plans were nixed when their parents refused to provide their legal consent for a permit, and the brothers wound up selling chocolates to classmates instead.

He spent just two days at Stanford University

Musk enrolled at Stanford in 1995 for graduate studies in applied physics, but by that point, he was consumed with the game-changing capabilities of the internet. When applying for academic deferment, Musk said he would return in six months if his endeavors didn't pan out; the department chairman replied that he didn't expect to see the young computer whiz again, a prediction that proved 100 percent accurate. Musk went on to found Zip2, which established an online presence for brick-and-mortar organizations, and by the time Compaq swooped in to buy the company four years later, there was little need to resume his formal education.

He inspired the creation of a solar power company

In 2004, Musk was driving with his cousin Lyndon Rive to Burning Man, the annual late-summer festival held in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. A successful software entrepreneur in his own right, Rive confessed a desire to embark on a more meaningful enterprise. Musk suggested he consider the possibilities of solar power, and over the course of the drive and subsequent hedonism in the desert, the idea blossomed. Rive and his brother Peter created SolarCity, which grew into the country’s largest solar provider with their cousin on board as chairman. Something about Burning Man clearly fires up Musk’s imagination; he claims to have conceived the idea of a vertical takeoff and landing electric plane at the festival, calling it a "very creative place."

He is the real-life model for 'Iron Man's' Tony Stark

When Iron Man writer and director Jon Favreau was exploring ways to humanize the character of Tony Stark, the charismatic, super-smart protagonist of the comic book and movie series, actor Robert Downey Jr. suggested he get in touch with Musk. Favreau wound up shooting parts of Iron Man 2 at the SpaceX factory, and Musk later found a way to replicate his fictional counterpart’s methods of designing rocket parts on a computer screen by waving his hands across a sensor.

He owns a James Bond car

Musk owns the Lotus Esprit from the 1977 James Bond flick The Spy Who Loved Me , which (spoiler alert!) turns into a submarine after Bond and his beautiful female companion zoom off a pier to escape the enemy. Known as "Wet Nellie," the stunt car languished for years in a storage unit before being sold to an anonymous buyer at a London auction in 2013. After the buyer was revealed to be Musk, he released a statement in which he expressed disappointment that the car did not actually turn into a real submarine, adding, "What I'm going to do is upgrade it with a Tesla electric powertrain and try to make it transform for real."

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Biography of Elon Musk

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Elon Musk is best known for being the co-founder of PayPal, a money-transfer service for Web consumers, for founding Space Exploration Technologies or SpaceX, the first private company to launch a rocket into space and for founding Tesla Motors, which builds electric cars.

Famous Quotes from Musk

• "Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."
• "It is where great things are possible" [Musk on moving to the USA]

Background and Education

Elon Musk was born in South Africa, in 1971. His father was an engineer and his mother is a nutritionist. An avid fan of computers, by the age of twelve, Musk had written the code for his own video game, a space game called Blastar, which the preteen sold for a profit.

Elon Musk attended Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned two bachelor's degrees in economics and physics. He was admitted to Stanford University in California with the intention of earning a PhD in energy physics. However, Musk's life was about to change dramatically.

Zip2 Corporation

In 1995, at the age of twenty-four, Elon Musk dropped out of Stanford University after just two days of classes to start his first company called Zip2 Corporation. Zip2 Corporation was an online city guide that provided content for the new online versions of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune newspapers. Musk struggled to keep his new business afloat, eventually selling majority control of Zip2 to venture capitalists in exchange for a $3.6 million investment.

In 1999, the Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million. Out of that amount, Elon Musk's share was $22 million. Musk had become a millionaire at the age of twenty-eight. That same year Musk started his next company.

Online Banking

In 1999, Elon Musk started X.com with $10 million dollars from the sale of Zip2. X.com was an online bank, and Elon Musk is credited with inventing a method of securely transferring money using a recipient's e-mail address.

In 2000, X.com bought a company called Confinity, which had started an Internet money-transfer process called PayPal. Elon Musk renamed X.com/Confinity Paypal and dropped the company's online banking focus to concentrate on becoming a global payment transfer provider.

In 2002, eBay bought Paypal for $1.5 billion and Elon Musk made $165 million in eBay stock from the deal.

Space Exploration Technologies

In 2002, Elon Musk started SpaceX aka the Space Exploration Technologies. Elon Musk is a long-standing member of the Mars Society , a nonprofit organization that supports the exploration of Mars, and Musk is interested in establishing a greenhouse on Mars. SpaceX has been developing rocket technology to enable Musk's project.

Tesla Motors

In 2004, Elon Musk cofounded Tesla Motors, of which he is the sole product architect. Tesla Motors builds electric vehicles . The company has built an electric sports car, the Tesla Roadster, the Model S, an economy model four door electric sedan and plans to build more affordable compact cars in the future.

In 2006, Elon Musk co-founded SolarCity, a photovoltaics products and services company with his cousin Lyndon Rive.

In December 2015, Elon Musk announced the creation of OpenAI, a research company to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity.

In 2016, Musk created Neuralink, a neurotechnology startup company with a mission to integrate the human brain with artificial intelligence. The aim is to create devices that can be implanted in the human brain and merge human beings with software.

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Elon Musk Biography

Birthday: June 28 , 1971 ( Cancer )

Born In: Pretoria, South Africa

Elon Musk is one of the greatest and most prolific modern inventors and is responsible for monumental advancements in futuristic technology like renewable energy and space travel. Many of his innovations seem to be right out of a science-fiction movie, but throughout his career he has brought about huge scientific breakthroughs. After making his first fortune from the internet payment service ‘PayPal’, he invested $100 million in his space travel company, ‘SpaceX’ and began building satellites, launch vehicles and other spacecraft both for NASA and for his own company, creating new milestones with his privately funded spacecraft. Many of his revolutionary ideas and inventions focus on space travel, renewable energy, commercial electric cars and other technologies, that look to a future where fossil fuels and other resources may be in shorter supply. His futuristic and visionary ideas have won him both scientific and philanthropic recognition and awards. The pop culture sometimes portrays him as a sort of real life super hero, dedicated to providing worldwide solutions to international problems. Musk looks to the future, hopes for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and continues to plan far-reaching futuristic goals such a human colony on Mars. Scroll down to learn all about this illustrious personality.

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Girlfriend: Grimes (2018)

Also Known As: Elon Reeve Musk

Age: 53 Years , 53 Year Old Males

Spouse/Ex-: Justine Musk (m. 2000–2008), Talulah Riley (m. 2010–2012; m. 2013–2016)

father: Errol Musk

mother: Maye Haldeman

siblings: Kimbal Musk , Tosca Musk

children: Damian Musk, Griffin Musk, Kai Musk, Nevada Alexander Musk (died), Saxon Musk, Xavier Musk

Born Country: South Africa

CEOs Automobile Industry

Ancestry: German American, South African American, South African Canadian

Personality: INTJ

City: Pretoria, South Africa

Founder/Co-Founder: PayPal, SpaceX, Zip2, X.com, Musk Foundation, Tesla Motors

education: University Of Pennsylvania

You wanted to know

What companies does elon musk own, what is elon musk's role at tesla, what is neuralink and what is elon musk's involvement with it, what is the hyperloop and how is elon musk associated with it, what are some notable achievements of spacex, founded by elon musk.

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Elon Musk was briefly in a relationship with American actress Amber Heard in 2016, but the couple split owing to their conflicting schedules.

Elon Musk started dating Canadian musician Grimes in 2018. In May 2020, Grimes gave birth to their son. In March 2021, Musk stated that he was single. In March 2022, Grimes revealed that they have broken up and she further stated that they welcomed a daughter through surrogacy in December 2021. 

In 2022, Insider, an American financial and business news website published court documents stating that Musk fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, the company's top executive, in November 2021. As of June 2022, Elon Musk has nine children with three different women.

See the events in life of Elon Musk in Chronological Order

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Elon Musk biography

Elon Reeve Musk was born on the 28th of June of 1972 in Pretoria, South Africa. He is known for being one of the founders of Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, OpenAl, and Hyperloop, among other companies. The entrepreneur and inventor appears in the list of the richest in the world, occupying the position number 56, in 2017, with 17.4 billion dollars. Forbes magazine, for the December 2016 publication, named him the 21st person with the most power in the world. His greatest goal, according to Musk, is to change humanity drastically; for this purpose, he works in SolarCity, SpaceX, and Tesla. One of his interests is the abandonment of petroleum fuels in order to reduce global warming. Perhaps Elon’s most ambitious project, so far, is the establishment of a human colony on Mars, with nearly a million people.

He spent his childhood in South Africa with his parents, an engineer from South Africa and a nutritionist from Canada. At age 10, with his first computer, a Commodore VIC-20, he began to learn to programme on his own. Two years later he sold his first videogame called Blastar for about $ 200. At that time he went through difficult times; his schoolmates subjected him to bullying because of his uncommon interests for them. Elon spent his money on science fiction books, comics, and video games.

In the period between 12 and 15 years of age, he entered into an existential crisis influenced by the readings of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. The situation went to the extreme of taking him to the hospital because of beatings by his companions. In his home things were not better, the relationship with his father was quite complicated. He suffered the emotional violence of a father unable to understand him. Compulsory military service bothered him. For these reasons, at age 17, after graduating from high school in Pretoria, he decided to leave South Africa and take refuge with his mother in Canada.

What Musk wanted most was to reach the United States. He found in that country a way to make possible everything he imagined. Elon’s father conditioned his support: he would not pay for a university outside of South Africa. In 1989, while in Canada, he found a chance to study thanks to his maternal relatives, who came from North America. By 1992, Elon counted on a scholarship in the University of Pennsylvania. The young entrepreneur began his studies in Business Administration, in parallel he began his career in Physics. He was fortunate to have the support of one of his teachers, who turned out to be the executive director of Los Gatos, a company located in the southern part of San Francisco Bay, California. The experience gained on ultracapacitors in that company, and then in Pinnacle Research, along with the inspiration it had for inventors such as Nikola Tesla, made him define the fields in which he would focus on the future: renewable energy, the Internet and outer space.

The beginning on the Internet began with Zip2, in 1995, along with his brother Kimbal Musk and a friend named Greg Curry. The company was dedicated to the development and maintenance of web pages dedicated to the media. The idea was a success, managing around 200 sites on the Internet in the year of 1999. For that year the company was sold to Compaq for 300 million dollars; money that would help him found X.com. The next plan was to systematize payments and money management through the Internet, offering security and speed. The ease offered by X.com and security made the project a very profitable idea, as well as merging, in 2000, with Confinity; company that provided a similar service, but only between Palm Pilot devices. In 2001 X.com decided to change its name to Paypal.inc a well-known company that provides the service to make online payments internationally.

With the growing success, problems soon appeared. Different companies tried to close Paypal, including eBay, which ended up buying it in October 2002, for 1.5 billion dollars. The sale of Paypal gave way to the creation, by its former members, of companies such as LinkedIn and YouTube. The next Musk project was called Tesla Motors, the company that created the first functional electric car. The main investment in Tesla was solar energy. The idea was born in 2003 in the company AC Propulsion, which had a prototype electric car. Musk wanted to help design a sports car with the same base of AC Propulsion.

In 2004, along with Matt Tappenhig and Martin Eberhard, Tesla Motors was created, with the intention of mass producing the model T-Zero of AC Propulsion. Musk invested nearly 98% of the capital. The start of the company was hard; the budget for the first models exceeded what was expected, but they managed to sell enough to continue developing models. For 2012, 2100 Tesla Roadster was sold in different countries. In 2015 the Tesla Model X was launched, designed to cover all types of terrain.

Another of Musk’s three projects involves SpaceX. Thinking of establishing a colony on Mars, he began, in 2002, to investigate how to send a rocket to Mars. His initial idea was to obtain reusable rockets to carry out the two trips for reconnaissance missions. For that year, Space Exploration Technologies was founded, focused on launching rockets and reducing fuel costs and materials for launch with increases in viability. In 2008, an agreement was made between NASA for twelve rocket flights. Currently, SpaceX is responsible for the development of Falcon rockets, which use liquid fuel.

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Nipsey Hussle Biography

Ermias Asghedom (August 15, 1985 – March 31, 2019), better known as Nipsey Hussle, was an American rapper, businessman, and community activist, who rose to fame in 2018 with his debut album Victory Lab . Nipsey began his career towards the mid-2000s releasing several successful mixtapes such as Slauson Boy Volume 1, Bullets Ain’t Got No Name series and The Marathon. His fame came to him, along with his first Grammy nomination, with his debut album in 2018. He had previously created his label All Money In No Money Out (2010).

Following his death, he received two posthumous Grammys for the songs Racks in the Middle and Higher. He was known for his social work on behalf of the Crenshaw community.

Early years

He was born in Los Angeles, United States, on August 15, 1985 . Son of Angelique Smith and Eritrean immigrant Dawit Asghedom, he grew up in Crenshaw, a neighborhood located south of Los Angeles, with his siblings Samiel and Samantha. He attended Hamilton High School but dropped out before graduating. Since he was little he looked for a way to help around the home, so over time, he began to work selling different products on the street.

After leaving school he became involved in the world of gangs, however, he turned away from it when he realized that it was not what he expected for his future. Decided then to dedicate himself to music, he sold everything that linked him to the gangs and worked for a time to buy his own production tools. After finishing his studies, he began to write and produce his own mixtapes, which he sold from a car. After finding inspiration from a trip he took to Eritrea with his father and spending time in prison, Nipsey turned fully to his career and business. He always looked for ways to start and help the community in which he grew up: giving jobs, helping students, renovating public spaces, etc …

Community activist

Nipsey was admired for his work at Crenshaw because instead of moving or investing in hedge funds, he preferred to help the community by boosting the local economy.

In late 2005, Nipsey Hussle released his first mixtape, Slauson Boy Volume 1, independently, to great local success. By then he already had a fan base at the regional level, so it took him a while to sign a contract with the Epic Records and Cinematic Music Group labels. Later, the first volumes of the Bullets Ain’t Got No Name series appeared, with which he expanded his popularity. Burner on My Lap, Ridin Slow, Aint No Black Superman, Hussle in the House and It’s Hard out Here , were some of the songs included in the series.

By 2009, Nipsey would make a name for himself collaborating with Drake on Killer and with Snoop Dog on Upside Down. He also released Bullets Ain’t Got No Name vol.3 and in 2010, he left Epic and opened his own label All Money In No Money Out. Under this label, he would soon release The Marathon, a mixtape in which hits such as Love ?, Mr. Untouchable, Young Rich and Famous and Late Nights and Early Mornings appeared. He also created The Marathon Clothing at that time, a sports and casual clothing brand that was based in his neighborhood. He then released the mixtape The Marathon Continues (2011), participated in the We Are the World 25 for Haiti campaign, and was featured in the popular XXL Magazine Annual Freshman Top Ten.

In 2013 came Crenshaw , a mixtape that would become famous because Jay-Z himself bought 100 copies for $ 100 each.

Victory Lap

After many delays, Nipsey would release his long-awaited debut album Victory Lap , on February 16, 2018, to great success. It was praised by critics and received a Grammy nomination for best rap album of the year. It was such a success that many singles entered the Billboard and Itunes charts. However, Nipsey did not enjoy much fame.

Hussle was assassinated on March 31, 2019, outside his store in South Los Angeles. He was shot multiple times by a man he had previously clashed with, he was arrested and charged with murder on April 2 of the same year. After his death, many personalities expressed the pain caused by the news. It is worth mentioning that the Mayor of Los Angeles himself gave his condolences to the family, recognizing Hussle’s social work in Crenshaw.

He was the partner of actress Lauren London and was the father of two children.

Sales strategies and greatest hits

Hussle was known for his sales strategies, since, he used to upload his singles in free download and then sell some limited editions for a cost of 100 to 1000 dollars . It promoted the sale of his work with campaigns such as Proud2Pay and Mailbox Money, in which he gave special incentives (autographed photos, dedication calls, tickets to his studio, and special events) to buyers. His revolutionary ideas promised him a fruitful career.

Some of his greatest hits

• Rose Clique
• Forever On My Fly Shit
• Thas Wat Hoes Do Proud of That (with Rick Ross)
• Face the world
• Bless, 1 of 1
• Where Yo Money At
• Fuck Donald Trump
• Young Rich and Famous

Jimmy Hoffa

Jimmy Hoffa Biography

James Riddle Hoffa (February 14, 1913 – July 30, 1975), better known as Jimmy Hoffa, was an American union activist. A reference to the working class of the 20th century, Hoffa began his union activity at the age of 18 within the trucker union. With time, he was gaining importance and enemies. He mixed with the mob and was the leader of the most important union organization in the U.S.A ., the International Brotherhood of Truckers. His actions took a toll on him and in 1967 he was arrested for bribery. In 1975, he disappeared after having dinner at a Detroit restaurant. To date, it is unknown what happened or where his body is. His disappearance was portrayed in Scorsese’s The Irishman .

He was born in Brazil, Indiana, on February 14, 1913. James was the son of John Hoffa and Viola Riddle. His father passed away when he was 7 years old, of Irish descent and working as a miner. When the dad died, the family moved to Detroit, where Hoffa lived the rest of his life. He studied until he was 14 years old and began working as a teenager, to help the family. At the age of 18, he began to participate in the union demonstrations of the truck driver’s union, and over time he gained recognition. However, Hoffa had never driven a truck.

Jimmy Hoffa, the truckers, and the mob

Despite his clear inexperience, Hoffa managed to earn the respect of all road workers thanks to his charisma and effective acting. He was thus elected president of the famous International Brotherhood of Truckers or “Teamsters” in 1957. From then on he would be known for his aggressive methods and connections with the Cosa Nostra (Italian mafia). It is known that Jimmy used the mob to gain notoriety and destroy his competitors, while the union served as a front to clean up dirty money from the mob.

As time went by, his relationship with Cosa Nostra became increasingly evident, becoming the target of various investigations (fraud, conspiracy, evasion, extortion, laundering…). Behind them was the prosecutor Robert Kennedy, who later became a solicitor, his sole objective being the capture of Hoffa. Although he managed to leave the courts unscathed on several occasions – thanks to his intimidation and bribery strategies – he was finally locked up in 1967.

Hoffa had faced justice several times, so the confinement did not scare him, he planned to continue running the union and all its businesses from jail, leaving someone manageable in command. But this did not turn out as he expected, his puppet rebelled and the mafia took advantage of his confinement to expand their business with more facilities. It was clear that everyone was better off without Hoffa at the helm.

The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa

In 1971 his sentence was commuted and Hoffa returned to work, he tried to regain his place and strength, but had little luck, because the mafia was clear that the business was better without him. The day he arrived, on July 30, 1975, he was summoned by Anthony Provenzano and Anthony Giacalone, two gangster bosses who were tired of his instance. They summoned him to a restaurant in Detroit, but never showed up, Hoffa waited for more than an hour and then got into a car, disappearing ever since. Nobody saw him again.

Jimmy was powerful, but he had made many enemies and was in the crosshairs of the mob, making his disappearance one of the most famous of the 20th century. His body was never found and in 1982 he was presumed dead. Although over time many took credit for his disappearance (and his death) from him, little is known for sure.

One of the possible culprits is perhaps Frank Sheeran, the Irishman , Hoffa’s henchman, who, pressured by the gangsters, would have killed the union leader. According to Sheeran’s version, that day he would have taken Hoffa to a house, where he shot him three times, and then moved his body to a still uncertain place.

His body and his disappearance became one of the best-known mysteries of the time . To date, the fate of his body is unknown. Many say it is buried, others that it was dismembered and thrown into a river, and others that it was compacted. There were many complaints about the discovery of his body, but all false.

His legacy was continued by his son, the current head of the International Brotherhood of Truckers, James P. Hoffa.

He was married to Josephine Poszywak and was the father of James P. Hoffa and Barbara Ann Crancer.

On July 30, 1982, he was declared legally dead.

Scorsese’s The Irishman

Scorsese’s The Irishman premiered on Netflix in 2019. The film follows Hoffa’s hitman and right-hand man, Frank Sheeran, as he thus narrates his story and participation in the disappearance of Hoffa. In the film, Hoffa is played by Al Pacino , while Sheeran and the prosecutor Kennedy are played by Robert De Niro and Jack Huston.

Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker biography

Peter Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) writer, consultant, entrepreneur, and journalist. He was born in Vienna, Austria. He is considered the father of the Management to which he devoted more than 60 years of his professional life. His parents of Jewish origin and then converted to Christianity moved to a small town called Kaasgrabeen. Drucker grew up in an environment in which new ideas and social positions created by intellectuals, senior government officials and scientists were emerging. He studied at the Döbling Gymnasium and in 1927, Drucker moved to the German city of Hamburg, where he worked as an apprentice in a cotton company.

Then he began to train in the world of journalism, writing for the Der Österreichische Volkswirt. Then he got a job in Frankfurt, his job was to write for the Daily Frankfurter General-Anzeiger. Meanwhile, he completed a doctorate in International Law. Drucker began to integrate his two facets and for that, he was a recognized journalist. Drucker worked in this place until the fall of the Weimar Republic. After this period he decided to move to London, where he worked in a bank and was also a student of John Maynard Keynes .

Although he was a disciple of Keynes, he assured, decades later, that Keynesianism failed as an economic thesis where it was applied. Because of the ravages of Nazism and persecution of Jews, he emigrated to the United States, where he served as a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, from 1939 to 1949 and simultaneously was a writer. His first job as a consultant was in 1940. He then returned to teaching at Bennington College in Vermont. Thanks to his popularity he received a position to teach in the faculty of Business Administration of the University of New York.

He was an active contributor for a long period of time to magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and was a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. The quality and recognition of his writings assured him important contracts both as a writer and as a consultant with large companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Quickly and surprisingly his fortune grew. Drucker served as honorary president of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management.

In 1971, he obtained the Clarke Chair of Social Sciences and Administration at the Graduate School of Management at the University of Claremont. Now, at present Drucker is considered the most successful of the exponents in matters of administration, his ideas and terminologies have influenced the corporate world since the 40s. Drucker was the first social scientist to use the expression “post-modernity” something that caught the attention of this man is that he does not like receiving compliments. He was simple, visionary, satirical and vital.

Within his studies, he says that his greatest interest is people. His work as a consultant began in the General Motors Multinational Companies, from that moment begins to raise the theory of Management, Management trends, the knowledge society. Thanks to this theory he has published several books, these are consulted often and are fundamental for the career of business administrator. In his works, he deals with the scientific, human, economic, historical, artistic and philosophical stage.

He was founder and director of a business school that bears his name. For Drucker, it was beneficial that many of his ideas have been reformed because of the innovative way of thinking and analyzing business issues. Although approaches such as the knowledge society are the basis of the current company and the future is still maintained. He has published more than thirty books, which include studies of Management, studies of socio-economic policies and essays. Some are Best Sellers. The first book was The end of economic man (1939), The future of industrial man (1942), The concept of Corporation (1946). Later he published The Effective Executive (1985). He focused on personal effectiveness and changes in the direction of the 21st century. In 2002 the society of the future was published.

His first book caused much controversy because he talked about the reasons why fascism initiated and analyzed the failures of established institutions. He urged the need for a new social and economic order. Although he had finished the book in 1933, he had to wait because no editor wanted to accept such horrible visions. Now, Drucker has dealt with such controversial issues as individual freedom, industrial society, big business, the power of managers, automation, monopoly, and totalitarianism.

We must indicate that his analysis of the Administration, is a valuable guide for the leaders of companies that need to study their own performance, diagnose its failures and improve its productivity, as well as that of your company. Several companies have taken their approaches and put them into practice, such as Sears Roebuck & Co., General Motors, Ford, IBM, Chrysler, and American Telephone & Telegraph.

The consultant assured that there are some differences between the figure of the manager and that of the leader. For him, true leaders recognize their shortcomings as mortal beings, but they systematically concentrate on the essentials and work tirelessly to acquire the decisive competences of management. Actually, the contributions of this character in the world of administration and in the economic and social world have been significant. Drucker died on November 11, 2005, leaving a great legacy.

Jeff Bezos biography

Jeff Bezos (January 12, 1964). His birth name is Jeffrey Preston Bezos. Businessman and founder and CEO of Amazon. He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States. His mother, Jacklyn Gise, had him as a teenager and his biological father, Ted Jorgensen, left them as soon as he heard the news. Years later his mother married Miguel Bezos a Cuban. Now, Miguel adopted Jeffrey and he received his last name. The family moved to Houston, Texas. Jeffrey Bezos studied at River Oaks Elementary, he was always a very smart and witty little boy.

They moved to Miami, where he studied at Miami Palmetto Senior High School. And upon graduating he entered Princeton University to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, his thesis was cum laude. In 1996, he started working in a fiber optic company, FITEL, where he was responsible for the development of computer systems, his performance was so good that he became vice president. After moving to New York with the idea of ​​entering the world of finance, in Bankers Trust, he also held the position of vice president in 1990. In the following four years, Bezos worked with another Wall Street company: D.E. Shaw and Co.

Bezos realized that the purchase/sale of products and services on the internet or other electronic means would be a great field to explore and exploit. For this reason, he founded the electronic commerce company Amazon in 1995. Its service was something new for the netizens, which produced an increase in the visits quickly. Only in the first month of operation had books been sold in all corners of the United States. Months later it reached 2,000 daily visitors, a figure that would multiply abysmally in the next year. In 1997, the success made Amazon become one of the most important companies online.

Bezos had managed to conquer the internet business. Encouraged by the reception of consumers, he undertook the diversification of products, including CD and DVD media and electronic devices. As demand increased, this ingenious man included new products to his virtual store. The growth and its popularity were such that today it distributes from food to home, clothes and shoes, video games and music, to toilet paper and diapers. Amazon has experimented with the lucrative benefit of advertising since it gives the possibility to companies to advertise their products and mark them as featured products.

Bezos established independent Amazon websites for United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Austria, France, China, Italy, Spain, Japan, the Netherlands, Brazil, India and Mexico, the variety of products can be several in each country. Currently, the services are enjoyed by companies such as Target Corporation, Marks & Spencer, the NBA, Sears Canada, Timex or Bombay Company. The AOL online sales service also supports. In 2007, Bezos shook the world with the creation and launch of Amazon’s alter ego: Amazon Kindle, a device specially designed for the visualization of electronic books. Amazon Kindle was launched for the first time in North America and is currently available in 45 countries.

In 2011, The Economist awarded Bezos and Gregg Zehr an Innovation Award for the Amazon Kindle. The following year, Bezos was named Entrepreneur of the Year by Fortune. It is part of the Bilderberg Group. Bezos has given several conferences in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and participated in the conference in Watford, Hertfordshire, England. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Business Council in 2011 and 2012. In 2018, he appeared on the Forbes list, where a net wealth of 106 billion dollars was estimated. He has also received other awards as the best CEO in the world by Harvard Business Review. Jeff Bezos has also been on Fortune’s list of the 50 best leaders in the world. In September 2016, he was awarded the Heinlein Prize for advances in Space Marketing. He donated the prize money to the international student organization Students for the Exploration and Development of Space by Bezos.

Since 2017, he has seen an increase in Amazon shares. They went up more than 130%, which made him have a profit of more than 100 billion dollars, after this, he returned to be the richest person in the world. He was named Person of the Year in Time magazine and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science and Technology degree at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. Really, the awards and awards have been impressive. Much of this is because Bezos, started in the field of journalism, looking beyond its commercial horizons; beyond the web. Bezos entered the world of media, acquiring the traditional newspaper The Washington Post for the sum of 250 thousand dollars.

Henry Gantt

Henry Gantt Biography

Henry Laurence Gantt (May 20, 1861 – November 23, 1919) industrial engineer . He was born in Calvert County, Maryland, United States. During his childhood and youth, he and his family lived devastating moments, especially in the economic part. His parents owned crops in Calvert but remained in ruins after the devastation caused during the Civil War. After that political and social event, they did not overlap economically so they had to live various hardships.

In spite of this, his parents did everything possible so that the young Gantt finished his school training at McDonogh School in 1878 and went to Johns Hopkins University to study industrial engineering. His performance was very good, when he graduated he started working as a teacher and draftsman, Gantt had a great skill for drawing since he was a kid. Then he studied mechanical engineering at the same university. In 1887, he was hired in Frederick W. Taylor to carry out an application of the principles of the Scientific Administration with his work in Midvale Steel and Bethlehem Steel, he carried out this work until 1893. In his career as a consultant, he invented the Gantt diagram.

Later, he designed some systems to measure the efficiency and productivity of workers, such as task bonds and the payment system and other methods that facilitate this process. This diagram became very popular for its simplicity, performance, and quality at that time, as well as at this time, pointed out the various tasks to be performed in a horizontal timeline, it has been used as a tool in operations that require strict temporal planning. However, Henry Gantt’s studies focused on the analysis of the performance of work methods, which depends on his judgment of the willingness to use the correct methods and skills.

Gantt was very concerned about leaving his knowledge embodied in paper, therefore, in 1908 presented before the American Society of Mechanical Engineers the text: Training of workers in habits of diligence and collaboration, in which he exposed the need to change the employer’s tactics; it is not a way of acting in the place, in the techniques, in the work, in the information, in the habits, in the possibilities, in the efficiency and in the efficiency of his work. As a complement to this, it is a bonus system that has been added to work and work done in a standardized time standard.

With these measures we tried to raise, not only the quantity, but above all the quality of work, following Taylor’s theory, the so-called common prosperity theory: what he says is that the worker has a kind of personal satisfaction to do the job well, this generates a feeling of pride that will make you try harder. For his part, the employer will notice an increase in productivity and the sum of a reduction in labor disputes. This is exposed with mastery in work, wages, and benefits (1913).

In the field of administration, his most known contribution is the graph of the bars such as the chart or the Gantt chart, which is composed in a diagram in which the horizontal axis represents the units of time, and in the vertical is recorded the different functions, which are represented by horizontal bars. With the help of this engineer, companies and the discipline of business administration is very broad, some of them are: the Gantt diagram, the development of the concept of industrial efficiency, the implementation of the system of Bonds of Tasks, with this adopted the premium to the workers. And he also implemented the Daily Balance Chart.

It was also very emphatic to ensure that companies have a social responsibility, in their opinion, companies have obligations for the welfare of society. His support for the scientific organization of work is also highlighted. When he worked for Frederick W. Taylor, with whom he collaborated in the application of his own doctrine to improve productivity, and in the second stage of the Industrial Revolution .

After 14 years of being at Taylor’s side, he made the decision to separate from this because his interest was the humanization of industrial practices and the dehumanized theories of Frederick Taylor . Unfortunately, in his last years of life, Gantt did not have the opportunity to finish several of his projects because his health was undermined. Finally, Henry Gantt died on November 23, 1919, in the town of Pine Island in New York .

His importance lies in the fact that it is the founder of scientific administration , an activity developed in the United States that later spread throughout the world with the idea of ​​achieving humanization, rationalization, and performance.

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Introduction

(born 1971). South African-born American entrepreneur Elon Musk cofounded the online money-transfer firm PayPal. In the early 21st century he turned his attention to the manufacture of space vehicles. Musk was also one of the first significant investors in and chief executive officer (CEO) of the electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors. In 2022 he acquired the social media service Twitter .

Early Life and Education

Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, to a South African father and a Canadian mother. He became interested in computers at an early age. When he was 12 years old he created a video game and sold it to a computer magazine. In 1988 Musk left South Africa because he was unwilling to support apartheid through mandatory military service and because he sought the greater economic opportunities available in the United States.

Musk attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and in 1992 he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. There he received bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics. In 1995 he moved to California to attend graduate school in physics at Stanford University. However, he left after only two days, believing that the Internet had much more potential to change society than work in physics.

PayPal and SpaceX

Later in 1995 Musk founded Zip2, a company that provided maps and business directories to online newspapers. In 1999 the computer manufacturer Compaq bought Zip2 for millions of dollars. Musk then founded an online financial services company, X.com, which later became PayPal. The online auction eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for more than $1 billion.

Long interested in space exploration , Musk in 2002 founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) to make more affordable and fully reusable rockets. Its first two rockets were the Falcon 1 (first launched in 2006) and the larger Falcon 9 (first launched in 2010). They were designed to cost much less than competing rockets. A third rocket, the Falcon Heavy, was first launched in 2018. It was designed to carry nearly twice as much to orbit as its largest competitor for one-third the cost. The successor to the Falcon rockets was the Super Heavy–Starship system. The rocket was designed to lift the heavier Starship spacecraft into orbit. The first test flights of the system were launched in 2020. SpaceX also developed the Dragon spacecraft, which carry supplies and astronauts to the International Space Station . In addition to being CEO of SpaceX, Musk was also chief designer of the rockets and spacecraft.

Tesla and Hyperloop

In 2004 Musk became one of the major funders and chairman of Tesla Motors (later renamed Tesla), an electric car company. In 2006 Tesla introduced its first car, the Roadster, which could travel 245 miles (394 kilometers) on a single charge. Unlike most previous electric vehicles, it was a sports car that could go from 0 to 60 miles (97 kilometers) per hour in less than four seconds. In 2008 Musk took over as chief executive officer. Four years later Tesla introduced a sedan, which was acclaimed by automotive critics for its performance and design. The company won further praise for its luxury sports utility vehicle (SUV), which went on the market in 2015. The Model 3, a less-expensive vehicle, went into production in 2017.

In 2013 Musk proposed a high-speed rail system for California called the Hyperloop. It would use podlike vehicles to carry people through a system of tubes. The Hyperloop would complete the 350-mile (560-kilometer) trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 35 minutes at a top speed of 760 miles (1,220 kilometers) per hour, nearly the speed of sound. In 2016 Musk founded a tunnel-digging company called the Boring Company. It investigated ways to lower the cost and speed up the process of digging tunnels to accommodate the Hyperloop.

Musk joined the social media service Twitter in 2009. He became one of the most popular accounts on the site, gaining millions of followers. In 2018 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk for fraud after he sent misleading tweets claiming that he had secured funding to take Tesla private. He was ultimately forced to step down as Tesla’s chairman for three years, though he was allowed to continue as CEO. In addition, both Musk and Tesla received millions of dollars in fines.

Musk was critical of Twitter’s policies regarding free speech on the site. In April 2022 it was revealed that he bought more than 9 percent of the company. Soon after, Twitter announced that he would join the company’s board. However, Musk decided against that and instead made a bid to buy the entire company for $44 billion. Twitter’s board accepted the deal, which would make Musk sole owner of the company. Musk said he planned to add new features and to eliminate bot, or fake, accounts. Bot accounts are automatically generated and can spread misinformation and enable fraud. In July Musk announced that he was withdrawing his bid. He claimed that Twitter had not provided sufficient information about the site’s bot accounts. Twitter sued Musk to force him to buy the company. In September Twitter’s shareholders voted to accept Musk’s offer. Musk ultimately proceeded with the deal, which was completed in October.

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‘Elon Musk,’ a Biography by Ashlee Vance, Paints a Driven Portrait

By Dwight Garner

• May 12, 2015

“We’ve become a nation of indoor cats,” Dave Eggers wrote in “A Hologram for the King” (2012), his existential novel about an American doing IT work in the Saudi Arabian desert. “A nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers.”

Ashlee Vance, in his new biography of the celebrity industrialist Elon Musk, delivers a similar notion of the deflating American soul. An early Facebook engineer tells Mr. Vance, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” The author quotes the venture capitalist Peter Thiel: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

If Silicon Valley was holding out for a hero after Steve Jobs’s death, a disrupter in chief, it has found a brawny one in Mr. Musk. This South African-born entrepreneur, inventor and engineer is the animating force behind companies (Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity) that have made startling advances in non-indoor-cat arenas: electric cars, space exploration and solar energy. He is all of 43.

Mr. Musk is about as close as we have, circa 2015, to early industrial titans like Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Along with his swagger, he totes surprise, style and wit. Tesla’s Model S sedan was not only Motor Trend’s car of the year in 2013 — the first non-internal-combustion engine vehicle to win that award — but it also has a sound system that, in a homage to the film “Spinal Tap,” you can turn up to 11.

“Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” isn’t the first biography we’ve had of Mr. Musk, nor will it be the last. But it is easily the richest to date. It’s also the first one Mr. Musk has cooperated with, though he had no control, the author says, over its contents. Mr. Vance is a technology writer for Bloomberg Businessweek . He won over Mr. Musk, who initially declined to be interviewed, impressing him with his diligence after he had interviewed some 200 people.

The result is a book that is smart, light on its feet and possesses a crunchy thoroughness. Mr. Vance can occasionally veer toward hagiography and the diction of news releases. After noting that Mr. Musk’s grand vision is to colonize Mars, for example, Mr. Vance writes:

“He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He’s less a C.E.O. chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to ... well ... save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.” As the Beast from “X-Men” likes to remark, Oh my stars and garters.

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Inside the Mind of Elon Musk: What We Learned From His Biography

Walter isaacson’s 688-page book reveals the (strange) man behind the tech mogul.

Tim Appelo,

Billionaire Elon Musk, 52, let Walter Isaacson, 71, bestselling biographer of Steve Jobs, follow him for two years and interview his family and colleagues. The resulting book, Elon Musk (September 12), provides fascinating insights into the mogul’s weird mind, titanic achievements and astounding failures.

Yes, he grew Tesla into a company worth more than its five biggest rivals put together; built a spacecraft company, SpaceX, that sent astronauts into orbit; and bought Twitter — which he famously renamed X and is a huge force in American politics and culture.

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But there’s so much more to those stories, and Musk’s life, which Isaacson details in this weighty, 688-page portrait.

Here are some of the more interesting points from the buzzy biography.

Musk was bullied as a child

While Musk was growing up in his native South Africa, a schoolyard bully stomped on his head, leading to injuries that required decades of corrective surgery. The worst part? His father, Errol Musk, sided with his assailant, berating Elon for an hour. “He yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless,” Musk reports.

But at age 12, Musk learned an important lesson at a wilderness survival camp: "If someone bullied me, I could punch them very hard in the nose, and then they wouldn’t bully me again.”

Musk’s dad was probably the scariest person in his life

Musk compares his father — whom he refuses to speak with — to Jekyll and Hyde: bright and jolly one moment, darkly frightening the next. He says that Errol spins fantasies he seems to believe, embraces bizarre conspiracy theories, has made and lost fortunes, is addicted to high drama and has a peculiar love life. Musk’s mother, the model Maye Musk , 75, fears that her son will become like his father.

He may be on the autism spectrum

“He was never actually diagnosed as a kid,” Maye Musk told Isaacson, “but he says he has Asperger’s, and I’m sure he’s right.” (The term Asperger’s, which once was used to describe someone with autism spectrum disorder who has strong intellectual abilities, is no longer used by the autism community .) He does seem to display some characteristics associated with autism spectrum disorders; the book suggests that he is bad at picking up social cues, for instance. And he said, “It was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really meant.”

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He's got a very dark side

“He’s attracted to chaotic evil,” said the singer Grimes, Musk’s former partner. She told Isaacson, “He associates love with being mean or abusive.” Musk demanded, for example, that she shame him for being fat. Grimes says that when he goes into “demon mode,” he “goes dark and retreats inside the storm in his brain. Demon mode causes a lot of chaos. But it also gets shit done.”

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He chose unique names for many of his 10 children

​​With his first wife, Justine Wilson Musk, he has five children: Vivian Jenna, Griffin, Kai, Saxon and Damian.

​With Grimes’ friend Shivon Zilis, an executive at his company Neurolink, he has two more kids, Strider and Azure.

He had no children with the actress Talulah Riley, who married and divorced him twice.

Estrangement from his child Jenna helped downsize his lifestyle

Jenna, who has criticized her father’s wealth, has stopped talking to him. Stung by her rejection and criticism, Musk sold his six extravagant homes and moved to a small tract house rented from SpaceX in Boca Chica, Texas. "Possessions kind of weigh you down and they’re an attack vector,” he explains.

He wasn’t exactly happy in 2021 when he became the richest person on earth

When Tesla stock went from $25 a share in late 2019 to $260 on Jan. 7, 2021, Musk's wealth hit $190 billion, surpassing the fortune of the previous richest human, Jeff Bezos, 59. “He just couldn’t let himself enjoy the moment,” Musk's sister-in-law Christiana Musk told Isaacson. “He was throwing up and stricken with excruciating stomach pain.”

He falls to the floor when he's depressed — or extremely amused

When Musk is too depressed to stand up, his executives have to conduct meetings lying down next to him. And when he discovered that Twitter banned the word “turdburger,” he laughed so hard he fell to the floor, wheezing.

Musk likes to play with fire

When forbidden to play with fire as a child, Musk lit a boxful of matches. He once floored his $1 million McLaren sports car, flipping it and flying into the air, risking death for himself and passenger Peter Thiel, 55, another billionaire entrepreneur, who refused to wear a seatbelt. Both survived unscathed. Amber Heard, the actress whose marriage with Johnny Depp sparked lawsuits and whose affair with Musk was also fiery, told Isaacson, “Elon loves fire, and sometimes it burns him.” 

His impulsive actions are sometimes bad for business

After Musk loaned Ukraine communications satellites to help resist Russia’s invasion, the Pentagon offered $145 million to support his effort, but there was backlash on Twitter. So he angrily tweeted, "The hell with it ... we'll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free." When he abruptly unplugged Twitter’s computer servers and sent them from California to Oregon, it destabilized Twitter for two months and caused a meltdown while he was hosting a Twitter Spaces event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

He has regrets. Or does he ?

“My main regret,” Musk told sister-in-law Christiana Musk, “is how often I stab myself in the thigh with a fork, how often I shoot my own feet and stab myself in the eye.” But when Isaacson asked him about regrets, Musk quoted a line from his favorite movie, Gladiator : “Are you not entertained?”

Tim Appelo covers entertainment and is the film and TV critic for AARP. Previously, he was the entertainment editor at Amazon, video critic at  Entertainment Weekly , and a critic and writer for  The Hollywood Reporter, People , MTV,  The Village Voice  and  LA Weekly .

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• Elon Musk Biography

Elon Musk Story

Elon Musk life story begins in South Africa, where he was born. Later, he went on to become an American entrepreneur who co-founded PayPal and established SpaceX, a launch vehicle and spacecraft manufacturer. He was also one of the original major investors in and the CEO of Tesla, an electric car company.

Elon Reeve Musk is the eldest of his parents' three children, and a citizen of three countries: South Africa, Canada, and the United States. He was born in 1971 to Maye Musk, a model and nutritionist, and Errol Musk, an electromechanical engineer whom Elon has described as "a dreadful human being." Read the entire article to learn about Elon Musk History which is inspiring for generations to come.

(Image will be uploaded soon)

Elon Musk Early Life

Musk was born in Canada to a Canadian mother and a South African father. Musk grew up with his head stuck in books and computers. He was bullied by his classmates and often beaten up by class bullies as a little, timid youngster until he grew strong enough to defend himself during a growth spurt in his teens. He developed a video game at the age of 12 and sold it to a computer magazine. Musk left South Africa in 1988 after getting a Canadian passport because he refused to support apartheid through compulsory military duty and wanted to pursue the higher economic prospects offered in the United States.

Elon Musk Qualification

Musk travelled to Canada at the age of 17 to attend Queen's University and evade military service in South Africa. Musk got his Canadian citizenship the same year, partly because he thought it would be easier to get American citizenship that way. Musk moved to the United States in 1992 to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned an undergraduate degree in economics before continuing on to earn a second bachelor's degree in physics. Musk went to Stanford University in California to earn a Ph.D. in energy physics after leaving Penn. But that Ph.D couldn’t make it to Elon Musk Degrees since he walked out of Stanford after only two days to start his first firm.

Elon Musk Works

In the summer of 1995, Musk relocated to Silicon Valley. He enrolled at Stanford University's PhD programme in applied physics, but dropped out after only two days. Kimball Musk, Elon's 15-month younger brother, had recently graduated from Queen's University with a business degree and had travelled to California to join him. As the early Internet grew in popularity, the brothers decided to develop a company called Zip2, an internet business directory with maps. That’s how Elon Musk started entering into the business world.

Zip2 eventually recruited angel investors and grew into a profitable firm thanks to the brothers' efforts. Zip2 was sold to Compaq for ＄307 million in 1999 by the brothers. Elon subsequently went on to create his own online financial services company, X.com. Confinity, a company formed by Peter Thiel and two others mere months after X.com and with headquarters in the same building, was its main competitor. In March 2000, the two firms joined and adopted the name of their major product, PayPal, an online money transfer service for individuals. In October 2002, Ebay, the online auction site, purchased PayPal for ＄1.5 billion in Ebay stock. Elon Musk, who had been the largest shareholder in PayPal with 11.7% of the company's equity shares, found himself with ＄165 million in Ebay stock at the age of 31.

Since leaving PayPal, he has founded, co-founded, and/or led companies focused on addressing three distinct existential risks to humanity's long-term survival: climate risk, single-planet dependency risk, and human species obsolescence risk. Two of these companies, SpaceX and Tesla Motors, he risked his entire early fortune to build.

Elon Musk Success Story

Musk joined engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning to help operate Tesla Motors in 2004, where he played a key role in the development of the world's first electric vehicle, the Tesla Roadster. Musk took over as CEO and product architect after Eberhard was fired from the company in 2007 due to a series of conflicts. Tesla has grown to be one of the most popular and desirable vehicle brands in the world under his leadership.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has signed many high-profile contracts with NASA and the US Air Force to manufacture rockets and execute military missions. Musk has been vocal about his desire to work with NASA on a collaborative mission to deploy an astronaut to Mars by 2025. Elon Musk has always been a proponent of various space-age technologies, but it hasn't always been a smooth journey for him. He went on to become a small business owner and eventually the CEO of two creative firms after being bullied in school. But he made the decision to ascend from there and never settle for anything less.

Tesla, in addition to creating electric automobiles, has a strong presence in the solar energy sector, courtesy to its purchase of SolarCity. This clean-energy services company, which was founded in 2006, now develops two rechargeable solar batteries that are primarily used for stationary energy storage. The Powerwall is designed for residential backup power and off-grid use, whereas the Powerpack is designed for business or electric utility grid use.

Facts about Elon Musk

Elon Musk was born in the year 1971 in South Africa.

He is best known for co-founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, but he first got his wealth as a PayPal co-founder.

Tony Stark, the fictional character created, was heavily influenced by Musk (a.k.a. Iron Man). Indeed, elements of Iron Man 2 were shot both inside and outside of SpaceX. Even Elon Musk makes an appearance in the film!

Musk's official annual pay for Tesla Motors is ＄1, similar to that of Steve Jobs and other well-known entrepreneurs.

Musk taught himself computer programming at the age of 12 and produced the video game Blastar, which he sold for $500.

Elon Musk did not become an American citizen until he was 31 years old, in 2002.

Elon Musk immigrated to Canada from South Africa when he was 17 years old. He eventually went to the University of Pennsylvania in the United States for college.

Musk moved to California after graduation to pursue physics graduate school at Stanford University. He dropped out of Stanford after only two days, opting to take advantage of the booming Internet industry.

Musk swiftly founded his first startup, Zip2, which supplied online newspapers with maps and business directories, after dropping out of graduate school. In 1999, he sold the company for ＄307 million.

Musk co-founded X.com in 1999, an online payment startup that later became PayPal before being purchased by eBay for ＄1.5 billion in equity (of which Musk received ＄165 million).

Tesla Motors, a firm that designs and manufactures electric sports automobiles, was co-founded by Musk. Tesla was able to flourish where other significant manufacturers failed in the electric vehicle sector. He is presently Tesla's CEO and chief product architect.

The National Highway Safety Administration gave the Tesla Model S a 5.4/5 safety rating, the highest ever given to a car.

Musk is one of the driving drivers behind SolarCity, which he and his cousins created. He is also the company's main shareholder.

Elon Musk also created SpaceX (formerly known as Space Exploration Technologies), a corporation that designs and manufactures space launch vehicles, with a concentration on rocket technology. His goal is to lower the cost of space travel in order to expand human life beyond the Earth.

Musk originally struggled to raise funds for SpaceX, which investors dismissed as a pipe fantasy. Musk put all of his personal funds into SpaceX in order to make it a reality (going against every piece of business advice ever written).

Elon Musk has shown entrepreneurial inclinations since he was a child. His Engineer father and Dietician mother, who recognised and encouraged his son's passion in technology, accepted him warmly. He got his first computer when he was ten years old and taught himself how to programme. At the age of 12, the young boy built a fully playable video game called "Blastar," which he allegedly sold for ＄ 500. Elon Musk attended Pretoria Boys High School and graduated in 1988. To avoid South Africa's obligatory military duty, he went to Canada in 1989 and enrolled at Queen's University in Ontario. He only stayed at the University of Pretoria for five months after that. Musk went on to the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business to earn a bachelor's degree in economics. He also left after two days to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions after being accepted into the University of Stanford's Physics Graduate Program. As we learn about Elon Musk biography, we understand that he has pursued goals that have motivated not only himself, but also the team of people he has engaged to work with him. Whether it's interplanetary space flight or electric vehicles, these objectives are all geared toward the future and dramatically improving existing conditions.

FAQs on Elon Musk Biography

1. What is Elon Musk's Full Name?

Ans: Elon Musk is an American entrepreneur and businessman who was born in South Africa. His full name is Elon Reeve Musk.

2. What Did Elon Musk Study?

Ans: Elon earned a double major in physics and business at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Elon says that while his business schooling was superb, he loved physics.

3. What are Some Interesting Facts About Elon Musk?

Ans: Some interesting facts about Elon Musk are:

Musk was born in the country of South Africa.

Musk developed a video game when he was 12 years old and sold it for ＄500.

Fun fact about Elon Musk qualification is that he dropped out of Stanford after only two days.

Musk is the father of six boys, all of which are boys.

To date, Musk has started eight businesses.

Musk earns ＄1 million a year at Tesla.

Musk has appeared in a number of Hollywood films and shows.

A Complete Timeline of Elon Musk’s Business Endeavors

W ith Elon Musk close to claiming a new role as owner of Twitter after a winning bid to purchase it for $44 billion this week , the billionaire entrepreneur can add the social media app to a long list of business ventures he has led, invested in, and supported over his lengthy career . Here’s a timeline of Musk’s most notable business endeavors—both successful and not—over the past three decades.

Along with his brother, Musk founded Zip2, an online business directory, as an online alternative to the standard paper yellow pages. (Google would not launch until 1998.) He sold it for over $300 million in 1999 to Compaq Computer Corporation. Musk was ousted as CEO in 1996, however, when the board of directors decided to install a more experienced leader in his stead.

1999: X.com

Musk invested some of his windfall from the Zip2 sale into his next venture: X.com, an online bank, launched with three other co-founders. X.com’s business model was innovative for its time, in that it incentivized sign-ups and eased the process of transferring funds digitally, with no need for mail or traditional banking infrastructure. In an interview with CBS MarketWatch at the time of the launch, Musk explained his business: “There are no minimum balances. You can open an account and receive a $20 promotional offer in your checking account. You can move $8 to your S&P fund, $3 each to your money market and bond fund, and be left with $6 in your checking.”

He went on to expand more philosophically on the new company: “In my view, the Internet had gone through a couple of stages and was ready for another stage,” he said. “The first stage was where people could trust the Internet for information. This was perhaps ’95 or ’96. The second was to trust the Internet for purchases and begin to use credit cards online to buy books, toys, pet food and that kind of thing. I think we’re at the third stage now where people are ready to use the Internet as their main financial repository.”

2000: PayPal

X.com merged with software company Confinity just one year later, forming PayPal , a secure online payments platform with a foundation in payments conducted for PalmPilots. PayPal would go on to be one of his most successful companies; Musk and his partners, including Confinity co-founder Peter Thiel , sold it to eBay in 2002 for a $1.5 billion stock deal. However, it was a rough start. PayPal was named at one point as one of the “worst business ideas” of 1999, and Musk himself was again removed from his role as CEO while on honeymoon in 2000 , replaced by the board with Thiel.

After going public on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 2002, eBay snapped up PayPal. They would hold onto PayPal until 2015, spinning it off into a separate entity.

2002: SpaceX

Musk next set his sights on a lofty goal: space exploration, and the future colonization Mars. In the past 20 years, SpaceX has dealt with a series of rocket launch failures and Starship explosions. But it has also become a heavy-hitter in the space industry with a number of records to its name, including being the first private company to send a craft to the International Space Station and send astronauts to orbit. It is known for its reusable rockets.

SpaceX is also behind the development of Starlink , a constellation of satellites intended to offer commercial internet service around the globe.

2002: The Musk Foundation

Founded as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the Musk Foundation is one of Musk’s least-talked-about endeavors. Its stated goals including supporting renewable energy and pediatric research and education, and the developing of “safe artificial intelligence to benefit humanity.” Between 2002 and 2018 it handed out around $25 million , about half of that to OpenAI, a company owned by Musk himself. (Since 2012, Musk has also been a signatory of The Giving Pledge, in which many of the world’s richest people have committed to giving away the majority of their wealth at some point.)

2004: Tesla

These days, Musk is perhaps best known for his leadership at Tesla , the electric car company named after famed inventor Nikola Tesla. Valued at over $1 trillion at one point in 2021, Tesla was founded in 2003 by two other men; Musk entered a Series A funding round with an investment of $6.5 million, and eventually took an increasingly active role in the company. He has been CEO since 2008. The Model 3 is the most popular electric car in production today, with over one million units sold globally.

Tesla has come in for its fair share of controversy , however, from dealing with long production and fulfillment delays to safety issues with its vehicles and employee complaints about working conditions and management practices.

2006: SolarCity

Founded by his cousins in 2006, SolarCity received Musk’s patronage from the offset; he was their primary financial backer. A solar energy company that became the leading residential solar installer in the U.S. by the mid-2010s, SolarCity installed solar energy systems that were leased to residential users. Musk, via Tesla, acquired SolarCity in 2016 for $2.6 billion in stock and incorporated it into its operations as Tesla Energy.

2015: OpenAI

Musk co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015, with a for-profit artificial intelligence research lab component; it was started with a $1 billion collective pledge from its founders. Musk has been open about his interest in developing “friendly” AI that supports humanity, but he ended up resigning from the board in 2018 due to conflicts with Tesla’s AI projects.

2016: Neuralink

Another research endeavor, Musk co-founded Neuralink in 2016 with the goal of working on “brain-machine interfaces,” or BMIs, that can be implanted directly into the body. Neuroscientists have been skeptical of Neuralink’s research and claims. While they currently conduct experiments on animals, they moved plans to begin working on human subjects to 2022.

2016: The Boring Company

Founded with the intention of helping dispel city traffic via underground tunnels as a subsidiary of SpaceX, the Boring Company is one of Musk’s side projects. Its aim: build tunnels. They first experimented by tunneling under the SpaceX factory in California. The Boring Company became an independent entity in 2018, and in 2021 completed a tunnel project in Las Vegas to shuttle visitors beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. It is currently working on further tunnel projects in Las Vegas for underground transport. Other projects are primarily speculative.

Musk once spoke boldly about an ambitious “Hyperloop” system, creating tunnels across the country to revolutionize and speed up underground mass transport between cities. However, Hyperloop mentions have been scrubbed from the Boring Company’s website.

2022: Twitter

After buying up enough stock to make him a majority shareholder by April 1, Musk made the move to purchase Twitter for $44 billion at the end of April. His plans include making Twitter “better than ever” by “enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”

🚀💫♥️ Yesss!!! ♥️💫🚀 pic.twitter.com/0T9HzUHuh6 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 25, 2022

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• Famous Personalities /

Elon Musk Education & Biography

• Updated on  
• Nov 21, 2022

Elon Musk has become a global figure and a symbol of invention, innovation, technology, entrepreneurial creativity, and leadership. The younger generation wants to be like him. He motivates individuals by showing them what is achievable and how to manage a high-performance team to develop a worldwide corporation. Musk is the creator of numerous futuristic firms that have become brands in their own right, such as Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX , and The Boring Company, but he is most known for the electric vehicle manufacturing company Tesla. Musk has amassed a net worth of $57.9 billion via hard work, perseverance, and of course his smart work. But, what young and fresh entrepreneurs or leaders can learn about leadership from this renowned and ambitious billionaire? Here are the top 10 leadership lessons that you should be learning and inculcating from Elon Musk. 

This Blog Includes:

Elon musk biography, about elon musk, elon musk early childhood, elon musk personal life, elon musk education, elon musk career, elon musk startups, elon musk’s net worth, elon musk rewards & recognitions, 1. always believe in having a vision, 2.  stretch goals like musk, 3.  stop blindly following trends, 4.  believe in micromanaging , 5. talent plays a vital role, 6. embrace failures, 7. always use feedback to find solutions, 8. communication is the key , 9.  waive the need for unnecessary meetings , 10.  adapt to change, some lesser known facts about elon musk.

Elon Musk is a visionary entrepreneur and CEO. He co-founded PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX. He serves as CEO of Tesla and CEO of SpaceX, which he founded with the goal of reducing traffic congestion on the roads by using tunneling systems to create quick, cheap tunnels in urban areas.

He is also the founder of The Boring Company, which will build a network of high-speed tunnels in Los Angeles to relieve traffic congestion. The company’s first tunnel was completed in December 2017 and was officially opened in December 2018.

Furthermore, Musk’s companies have been valued at $82 billion by Forbes as of November 2017. At that time, Musk owned 30% or more of Tesla (TSLA), SolarCity (SCTY), and SpaceX.

The point is that Musk made his fortune from disrupting an industry (electric cars) with a product that makes financial sense while threatening traditional incumbents (automobiles). He did it by reinvesting his profits into research and development, improving production efficiency, and making good business decisions. That’s what makes him a visionary leader in our eyes — not only did he create new markets, but he also managed to make money while doing so.

Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa . His parents are Canadian: his mother is a former model and dietician , while his father is an electromechanical engineer. *

Elon’s childhood was marked by tragedy. He was pushed down the stairs and suffered serious injuries when he was a child. Luckily, he recovered. He even suffered from a serious accident when he has pushed down a flight of stairs at the age of ten. This experience, however, made him determined to succeed and to create a world that would be better for everyone in the future.

When Elon was ten years old, his father bought him a Commodore VIC-20 microcomputer. He taught himself how to program it. Back then, computer programming was considered a very challenging skill that most kids could not master. But Elon not only mastered it but developed a genuine passion for it as well.

He loved to read as a child. He later developed a deep fascination for computers and taught himself computer programming when he was ten.

Later in life, Elon severed ties with his father: “I had absolutely no contact with my father from the age of about 12 or 13 until I left for university,” he said in an interview last year. “When I came back two or three years later [for a visit], I had a million questions for him about how to do various things on the computer… And he just wasn’t interested in talking about it at all. He was like ‘I don’t know anything about computers. You’re on your own now.

His personal life has been the subject of significant public interest. He dated actress Talulah Riley for several years before marrying British actress Talulah Riley in 2002, with whom he had two sons, then divorced in 2008. In October 2017, he married Canadian Grimes, who released her first solo single “Flesh Without Blood” on April 7, 2018.

Elon Musk and his wife are the parents of six children. Griffin, Xavier, Damian, Saxon, Kai, and  X Æ A-Xii are among those present.

Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, grew up in Canada . The son of a Canadian model and a South-African engineer, Musk studied physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in physics (1992) and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics (1994).

He then attended Stanford University where he earned his Masters of Business Administration degree (1998) and Ph.D . in business administration (2002).

After graduating from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Musk worked for an Internet startup called Zip2 before going to work at PayPal as vice president of business development. After that, he founded his own company X.com, which later merged with Confinity and then PayPal. In 2002, he sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion – around 13 times what Musk had invested.

In his early career, Musk was known for taking bold risks. In 2000, he co-founded X.com, online financial services, and electronic payment company, with Kimbal Musk and the sale of zip2 to Compaq in 1999. After some initial success, the company was eventually acquired by PayPal in October 2002.

When PayPal was purchased by eBay in 2002, Elon Musk became a vice president at the company where he focused on new product development and strategic matters. In 2004, Musk left PayPal to form SpaceX as CEO and lead the development of the Dragon spacecraft family.

In addition to his work at SpaceX, Musk is a co-founder of Tesla Motors, Inc., an American automobile manufacturer specializing in electric cars. In 2003, he formed SolarCity (now owned by Tesla) as well as Zip2. He also owns a private rocket company called The Boring Company, which is developing a high-speed transportation system called the Hyperloop.

Although his companies are all cutting-edge technology companies that aim to revolutionize transportation and space travel, Musk tends to think big. He famously described his goal with Tesla as “to accelerate the advent of electric cars and renewable energy,” and he hopes that SpaceX will help us colonize Mars by making interplanetary travel a reality.

• Tesla Motors

The billionaire has recently unveiled Hyperloop, which is a transit system designed to transport people on high-speed trains between major cities in the world at speeds of over 1,200 mph (1,931 km/h), reducing journey times between cities significantly compared with conventional rail

The man behind Tesla and SpaceX is not only a tech pioneer but also a problem solver. He’s been credited with revolutionizing the electric car market, while at the same time working on improving space exploration technology. Elon Musk is an entrepreneur who has achieved the unimaginable, making him the most influential person of our times.

He started off working as a programmer in Silicon Valley before founding PayPal and Tesla Inc. In 2003 he founded SpaceX and SolarCity, with the aim to change the world for the better.

In 2016, he became only the second person to reach $20 billion in stock market value after Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos. At that point, Musk was worth more than $19 billion, according to research firm Bloomberg.

He has received numerous accolades for his work in the fields of business, engineering, and philanthropy.

Some of Elon Musk’s most notable achievements include:

● Co-founding both SpaceX and Tesla with the goal of creating a more sustainable future.

● Creating one of the first modern hyperloop(a type of transportation system), which aims to connect major cities in a way that is faster than a plane but safer than driving on surface streets.

● Pushing forward the development of rocket technology through his company SpaceX

• In 2006, Musk was an individual from the United States National Academy of Sciences Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board.
• Inc. magazine Entrepreneur of the Year grant for 2007 for his work on Tesla and SpaceX.
• 2007 Index Design grant for his plan of the Tesla Roadster. Worldwide Green 2006 item configuration grant for his plan of the Tesla Roadster, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev.
• American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics George Low honor for “the most extraordinary commitment in the field of room transportation in 2007/2008”. Musk was perceived for his plan of the Falcon 1, the main secretly evolved fluid fuel rocket to arrive at circle.
• Public Wildlife Federation 2008 National Conservation Achievement grant for Tesla and SolarCity. Other 2008 beneficiaries incorporate writer Thomas Friedman, U.S. Congressperson Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and Florida Governor Charlie Crist.
• Public Space Society’s Von Braun Trophy in 2008/2009, given for authority of “the main accomplishment in space”. Earlier beneficiaries incorporate Burt Rutan and Steve Squyres.
• Recorded as one of Time’s 100 individuals who most impacted the world in 2010.
• The world overseeing body for aviation records, Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, introduced Musk in 2010 with the most noteworthy honor in air and space, the FAI Gold Space Medal, for planning the main secretly evolved rocket to arrive at circle. Earlier beneficiaries incorporate Neil Armstrong, Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites and John Glenn.
• Named as one of the 75 most powerful individuals of the 21st century by Esquire magazine.
• Perceived as a Living Legend of Aviation in 2010 by the Kitty Hawk Foundation for making the replacement to the Space Shuttle (Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon space apparatus). Different beneficiaries incorporate Buzz Aldrin and Richard Branson.
• In February 2011, Forbes recorded Musk as one of “America’s 20 Most Powerful CEOs 40 And Under.”
• In June 2011, Musk was granted the US$250,000 Heinlein Prize for Advances in Space Commercialization
• In 2012, Musk was granted the Royal Aeronautical Society’s most elevated honor: a Gold Medal.
• In 2013, Musk was named the Fortune Businessperson of the year for SpaceX, SolarCity, and Tesla.
• Granted the President’s honor for Exploration and Technology of the Explorers Club at the yearly occasion on March 16, 2014.
• In 2014, Elon Musk was regarded with an Edison Achievement Award for his “obligation to advancement all through his vocation”.
• 2015 at Yale’s 314th Commencement Ceremony, got Honorary Doctorate in Engineering and Technology.
• In 2015, he was granted IEEE Honorary Membership.
• In June 2016, Business Insider named Musk one of the “Main 10 Business Visionaries Creating Value for the World” alongside Mark Zuckerberg and Sal Khan.
• In May 2017, Musk was granted the Oslo Business for Peace Award.
• In 2018, Musk was positioned 25th on Forbes rundown of The World’s Most Powerful People.
• Musk was chosen a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2018.
• Recorded among the Time 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2010, 2013, 2018 and 2021.
• Musk was granted as part (fifth class) of the Most Admirable Order of the Direkgunabhorn on March 4, 2019 for his commitment in the salvage at Tham Luang cave, Chiang Rai Province, Thailand.
• In 2019, Musk was granted the Starmus Festival’s Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication
• Musk was recorded joint first on the Forbes rundown of the “Most Innovative Leaders of 2019”.
• Musk was refered to as one of the Top 100 most powerful Africans by New African magazine in 2020.
• On December 1, 2020, Musk was granted the Axel Springer Award.
• Musk Ranked No.1 on Businessperson Of The Year 2020 List By Fortune Magazine.
• On January 7, 2021, Musk was positioned as the richest individual on the planet as indicated by Bloomberg.
• On January 10, 2021, Musk was positioned #1 on Forbes’ Billionaires List
• Monetary Times is naming Musk Person Of the year for his commitment to speed up the world’s vehicle industry towards EVs.
• Musk added to Newsweek Hall of popularity for his disturbance in the Auto and Space Industry
• On December 13, 2021 Time magazine named Musk Person of the Year.

10 Leadership Lessons to Learn from Elon Musk

One of the most important tenets of leadership is to have a vision and further inspire people and your followers to make that vision come true. Musk explains, “You need to have a very compelling goal for the company. Then, putting yourself in someone’s shoes who is talented at a global level, they have to trust that there is a potential for a great outcome and must believe the leader of the company that you’re the right person to work with.” 

Elon Musk is a wildly ambitious individual when it comes to innovation and chasing his vision to come true. He has proven it to the world multiple times, whether by creating brain chips to revolutionize neuroscience or finding ways to colonize Mars. These are all a part of his ‘stretch goals’ strategy. Such objectives are considered as truly important sources of individuals and organizational achievement & motivation. 

Did you know? Elon Musk created and sold a video game to a magazine when he was 12 years old. The space battle game ‘Blastar’ was sold for $500 to PC and Office Technology magazine. Musk also worked at ‘Rocket Science,’ a game start-up.

Meet the CEO Captain Raghu Raman Mentoring the World with His Army Lessons

Elon Musk believes that one should have his way of looking at everything. It’s definite that to achieve things that have never been conquered before, one has to do things that have never been done before. He is a firm believer in questioning and challenging the status quo. This approach has led SpaceX to create a truly innovative vehicle on its terms. 

Being a well-known workaholic, this serves as both a blessing and a curse for his employees. He has always led by example by taking an interest in every single aspect of his projects. Musk describes, “If you are a co-founder or CEO of a brand, you have to perform all the kinds of tasks you might not want to do. If you don’t do your chores, the company would never succeed because no task is too menial.” 

Did you know? PayPal, formerly X.com, was the source of Musk’s fortune. Paypal was founded in 1999 and was later bought by eBay for $1.5 billion, $165 million of which was handed to Musk in shares.

Elon Musk has always been meticulous about hiring employees of his company. There is no question that he sees the value in building an excellent team. Talent plays an extremely important role. To create such a fruitful team, Musk said, “Hire great people; this is 90% of the solution, as hiring wrong can cost you so much.” 

The Marvelous Matthew Perry a.k.a Chandler Bing: Could He Be More Inspirational!

Failure never derailed his visions. Instead, he has always embraced it as a way to prove that his team is doing something disruptive. Musk said, “A failure is always an option; if things are not failing, you are not innovating.” 

Did you know? Both of Musk’s triumphs and accomplishments, SpaceX and Tesla, were on the verge of failure. While the first three rockets failed to launch, the fourth did, and the Roadster had many production issues.

When an individual uses failure as a lesson, it allows them to tackle solutions and finally reach the goal. Musk’s piece of advice is, “I feel it is important to have a feedback loop, where you are constantly thinking about what you have done and how it could have been done better. Always think about how things can be done in a better manner and keep questioning yourself.” 

Communication is something Elon Musk has always urged his friends to do as efficiently as possible. The issues come from poor communication between departments. The only way out is to allow the free flow of information at all levels. To make something work between departments, people must talk to each other directly and make the right decisions. 

Did you know? Elon Musk was awarded the FAI Gold Space Medal by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale in 2010 for developing the first privately constructed rocket to reach orbit.

Musk has waived unnecessary meetings because that usually results in wasting time that doesn’t result in meaningful takeaways. He describes, “Excessive meet-ups are the blight of the big companies and almost always get worse with time. So get off the large meetings unless there’s something valuable to the audience, in which case keep them precise.” 

Did you know? Elon Musk also made an appearance in The Simpsons episode, “The Musk Who Fell to Earth”, Iron Man 2, The Big Bang Theory, and Rick and Morty

The billionaire is well-known for changing his mind based on whatever needs attention at that moment or to quickly change course on projects. Elon Musk has an erratic sense of decision making, especially in reaction to things he reads on social media platforms, and can sometimes give his employees a breakdown. 

Did you know? Musk named one of his sons Xavier, after Professor Xavier from the X-Men, as he admitted.

• His initial startup was Zip2
• Musk exited Stanford after only two days
• Musk made an appearance on ‘The Simpsons’, The Big Bang Theory
• Musk purchased James Bond’s submarine vehicle for near $1 million
• Musk ran a club to pay lease
• Musk started a non-profit school to teach his kids

Elon Musk helped to establish the electronic installment firm PayPal and established the rocket organization SpaceX. He became CEO of the electric-vehicle creator Tesla.

He started his career at the University of Pennsylvania in material science, Musk began considering making the plunge as a sequential tech business person with early victories like Zip2 and X.com. He was instrumental in making the organization that became PayPal.

He has invented Musk’s the Electric jet apart from starting new ventures, He is a great inventor too.

Musk was brought into the world by a Canadian mother and South African dad and brought up in Pretoria, South Africa.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you know Elon Musk is all over the news and it makes sense to look at exactly what Musk is doing and what you can learn from him. We hope you found our blog on 10 leadership lessons you can learn from Elon Musk thought-provoking. For more insightful content, keep reading on Leverage Edu ! 

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71 pages • 2 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 11

Chapters 12-23

Chapters 24-35

Chapters 36-47

Chapters 48-59

Chapters 60-71

Chapters 72-83

Chapters 84-95

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

The biography Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, published in 2023, explores the life and achievements of one of the most enigmatic figures in the tech and business worlds. Isaacson, a biographer with a track record of profiles on iconic individuals such as Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci, brings his expertise to unravel the complex layers of Elon Musk’s persona. Isaacson’s deep dive into Musk’s life aims to give readers a deeper understanding of the man behind Tesla, SpaceX, and numerous other ventures. This work navigates the intersections of Musk’s personal and professional spheres, shedding light on his ambitious pursuits, visionary goals, and the controversies that surround him.

This guide references the Simon & Schuster 2023 Kindle Edition.

Content Warning: The source text includes descriptions of violence, physical and psychological abuse, and transphobia.

The biography is structured chronologically, providing readers with a detailed account of Elon Musk’s life from his childhood in South Africa to his ventures in the United States, where he would become a key player in revolutionizing the automotive and space industries.

The narrative begins by unraveling Musk’s formative years in Pretoria, South Africa. Isaacson focuses on how Elon’s childhood, which was shaped by violence and verbal abuse, laid the foundation for his behavior as an adult. These chapters also outline Musk’s childhood interests in computers, technology, and science fiction, which inspired his future endeavors. Musk’s relentless pursuit of knowledge and his ambition to make a mark on the world set the stage for his eventual move to the United States.

The book then chronicles Musk’s early entrepreneurial ventures, starting with Zip2, a city guide software for newspapers. The challenges and successes of Zip2 provided Musk with invaluable experiences and lessons. Subsequently, the narrative transitions to the creation of X.com, an online payment company, which eventually merged with Confinity to become PayPal. Isaacson details Musk’s struggles, innovations, and eventual sale of PayPal, emphasizing his extreme work ethic and his desire for control and autonomy.

A significant portion of the biography is dedicated to Musk’s founding and development of SpaceX. It particularly focuses on the challenges faced during the company’s early years. Isaacson elucidates Musk’s vision for interplanetary colonization and his unwavering commitment to reducing space travel costs. Isaacson argues that Musk’s willingness to challenge the conventionally accepted notions of the cost of rockets enabled SpaceX to move more nimbly than NASA and jumpstart the United States’ flagging participation in the space industry.

Another pivotal aspect of Musk’s career is explored in the chapters dedicated to Tesla Motors. The biography describes Musk’s involvement with Tesla, from investing in the company to taking over as CEO and becoming a driving force behind its electric vehicle revolution. Isaacson touches upon Tesla’s challenges, including financial difficulties, and highlights Musk’s leadership style and determination to cut costs and create an efficient means of production, even at the expense of alienating employees and driving them to the point of burnout.

The narrative extends beyond Musk’s automotive and space endeavors to cover his involvement in SolarCity, a solar energy services company, and his ventures into neuroscience with Neuralink. Isaacson also discusses The Boring Company, a venture focused on infrastructure and tunnel construction. These chapters illuminate Musk’s wide-ranging interests and his desire to address global challenges.

Throughout the book, Isaacson provides glimpses into Musk’s personal life, exploring his relationships, marriages, and the toll his professional commitments take on his personal well-being. The narrative doesn’t shy away from portraying Musk’s complex personality, including his struggles with social interactions and the toll his intense work ethic has on his health.

Isaacson draws connections between Musk’s abusive childhood and his behavior in relationships, repeatedly intoning that Musk possesses a predilection for drama, conflict, and crisis, something that he brings to his relationships in both his personal life and his business life. Isaacson observes that when Musk experiences phases of relative stability or success, Musk feels a need to artificially create crises to feel energized. Isaacson contends that this enables Musk to drive his teams to high levels of success, pushing them to reach achievements that they previously thought were impossible, though Isaacson also acknowledges the interpersonal fallout from Musk’s driven and sometimes callous behavior.

The biography concludes with Musk’s foray into social media, particularly his acquisition and transformation of Twitter. The book explores Musk’s unorthodox management style and the consequences of his decisions on the platform. Additionally, the narrative touches upon Musk’s concerns about artificial intelligence and his efforts to ensure ethical development in the field.

Isaacson concludes the biography by reflecting on Musk's lasting impact on various industries and the tensions between his controversial behavior and innovative contributions. The book presents Musk as a complex figure, acknowledging both his successes and the controversies surrounding his leadership style. Isaacson implies that Musk’s behavior, while sometimes callous, cruel, and reckless, may be justified by the grandiosity of his accomplishments.

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Elon Musk on track to be the first trillionaire by 2027, according to report

Musk, 53, is currently the richest person in the world, with a net worth of $251bn (£191bn), according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.

Sunday 8 September 2024 16:35, UK

Elon Musk is on track to become the world's first trillionaire by 2027, according to a new global wealth report.

Musk, 53, is currently the richest person in the world, with a net worth of $251bn (£191bn), according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.

However, according to Informa Connect Academy's findings, his wealth has been growing at an average rate of 110% a year.

It means that - providing his wealth continues to grow at the same rate - he could reach the trillionaire mark within the next three years, according to the findings.

The same report - the 2024 Trillion Dollar Club - puts Musk's electric car business Tesla at a market value of $669.3bn (£509.7bn).

Its growth rate is also exceedingly high - 173.3% per year according to Informa Connect Academy - which means the business alone could exceed $1tn (£0.76tn) by next year.

Read more Elon Musk v Sir Keir Starmer 'Elon Musk is delusional'

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Unsurprisingly, the top two richest companies valued by the growth report were Microsoft ($3.4tn or £2.6tn) and Apple ($3.3tn or £2.5tn).

The two tech giants reached the trillion-dollar mark in 2019 and 2018 respectively.

Informa Connect Academy estimated Indian business conglomerate founder Gautam Adani as being the second closest to becoming a trillionaire.

Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News

With an annual growth rate of 123%, he is said to reach the milestone by 2028.

Jensen Huang, chief executive of tech firm Nvidia, and Indonesian energy and mining mogul Prajogo Pangestu are also predicted to become trillionaires by 2028, according to their current trajectories.

Repeated controversies

Musk's other businesses include spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX, neurotechnology firm Neuralink, and The Boring Company - formerly a subsidiary of SpaceX but now its own tunnel construction company.

Since the multi-billionaire bought Twitter for around $44bn (£33.5bn) in late-2022, soon rebranding it X, he has repeatedly caused controversy , including apologising for endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory and telling advertisers who had left the platform to "f**k off".

Most recently, a feud with Brazil's Supreme Court has seen X banned in the country .

He also interviewed former President Donald Trump live on the platform after declaring his support for his bid for re-election.

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This week, Musk posted on his X account to say that a Tucker Carlson interview with podcaster Darryl Cooper was "very interesting" and "worth watching".

In the interview, Cooper, another right-wing media figure, made false claims about the Holocaust, saying the Nazis didn't intend to murder so many people and instead suggested they didn't have the resources to care for them.

The White House condemned the interview, describing the comments as "disgusting" and a "sadistic insult to all Americans" and "to the memory of the over six million Jews who were genocidally murdered by Adolf Hitler".

Musk later deleted the post.

He has also taken issue with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, branding him " Two Tier Keir " during the recent UK riots and accusing him of endorsing so-called "two-tier policing".

Sir Keir responded by criticising "social media companies and those who run them" of "whipping up violent disorder online".

Related Topics

Musk Says Tesla 'Actually Smart Summon' Goes Wide Next Week: What to Expect

Elon Musk has confirmed on X that Actually Smart Summon, will be going to wide release next week. Let’s take a look at what that means in the context of Tesla updates – because we know for sure it won’t be on every single vehicle next week.

Actually Smart Summon

The new feature set of Actually Smart Summon is fairly broad, and it's a feature that many have been waiting a long time for. So far, it's been completely unavailable on vehicles without ultrasonic sensors (USS) and has been more of a party trick on older vehicles that did have the sensors. It was pretty much only safely usable in straight lines and with direct supervision.

This updated version of Smart Summon uses Tesla Vision – just like AutoPark , to accomplish the task in a faster and safer manner. You’ll be able to summon your vehicle from its parking spot to another location or have it come directly to you.

Wide Release

Wide release will include hardware 3 and AI4 vehicles alike – as some early access HW3 testers have already received update 2024.27.20 with FSD 12.5.3 and Actually Smart Summon. As a reminder, in order to be able to use Actually Smart Summon, you’ll need to be subscribed to or own FSD and be in North America at this time. It’ll eventually be available to users with Enhanced Autopilot, when FSD 12.5 and Actually Smart Summon become part of the regular feature releases.

This wide release will come in gradual, small waves at first. These small waves serve as a test pool for Tesla to ensure that the update is safe to install on a wider pool of vehicles. After that, it’ll go out in larger waves. Once large waves start getting pushed out, it takes approximately a week for most users to receive the update.

Expect Tesla to start rolling out update 2024.27.20 with Actually Smart Summon next week, and if everything goes well, waves will continuously get larger and most users will have it about a week later. Unfortunately, if there are issues found with Summon or FSD 12.5.3, there will be a delay while Tesla issues a patch.

Other Regions

This release is only going out to North America for the time being – as it is only available on the primary FSD release branch. Eventually, it will be released to users with EAP in North America, as well as other regions.

This will happen when Tesla bundles FSD V12.5 with its feature updates, which will likely happen later this year. At the moment, Tesla is still bundling FSD V12.3.6 with its newest feature release update, 2024.32 . So for those waiting for vision-based Actually Smart Summon in other regions, you’ll likely be waiting at least a month before it hits the regular feature branch.

We’re still waiting for Park Seek and Banish Autopark , but seeing Actually Smart Summon finally show up, including for hardware 3 vehicles is exciting. September is going to be a month filled with good Tesla news, including the Cybertruck getting FSD and all the other news that Tesla announced for September.

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Tesla Announces FSD Roadmap With Dates: Reverse Capability, HW3, FSD in Europe, Banish Autopark, FSD V13

In response to the many questions the Tesla AI team receives daily, they’ve finally caved in and shared their FSD release roadmap. Release Roadmap . This roadmap outlines the upcoming feature improvements and plans for FSD in the short term, up to about Q1 2025.

We expect this roadmap to be more accurate than some of the timelines we’ve heard from Elon in the past for FSD releases, as it's something that the entire team has presumably had some input in.

Let’s take a look at what we’ve got coming up soon!

September 2024

September looks to be full of improvements for FSD V12.5, and some of them are quite exciting. First off Tesla outlines the improvements that are available with FSD v12.5.2, which recently started going out to HW3 and HW4 vehicles.

FSD 12.5.2 & Reduced Interventions - Tesla says that FSD 12.5.2 brings a 3x improvement between necessary interventions. That will be a great improvement, especially as users on FSD 12.5.1.5 have noted several major issues with the path planner, including braking on green lights and path-planning to the opposite side of traffic.

Larger FSD Model for HW3 - Another big September item is that v12.5.2 is confirmed to be a unified FSD model. The same AI model that powers FSD 12.5 on AI4 is now being shared with the less powerful hardware 3. HW3 was previously running a smaller FSD model that was less intensive, although we were told they would soon run the same model.

This is definitely great news, as v12.5.1 has a different model for HW3 and AI4. We expect HW3 to see a performance boost in capabilities with the newer model. Tesla releasing a unified model shows their commitment to continue developing and supporting older hardware, so we’re happy to see this. If you’re not sure which FSD hardware you have, you can check here .

Actually Smart Summon - The improved Summon was released to early access testers already, (including on HW3), but it’s also on the list for September for a wider release. The feature isn’t available on FSD v12.5.2, but it is on v12.5.3.

Cybertruck Autopark - The Cybertruck which recently received High-Fidelity Park Assist, will be receiving AutoPark this weekend . Later this month Tesla says it will also receive full FSD support . Some Cybertruck owners have been waiting close to a year waiting for FSD capabilities, but with four-wheel steering, steer-by-wire, and cameras in slightly different locations, it’s not surprising it’s taken longer to implement. The Cybertruck is Tesla’s only vehicle with a front bumper camera, so it’ll be interesting to see if Tesla will leverage this camera for FSD in addition to the vehicle’s other 8 cameras .

Vision-Monitoring With Sunglasses - One of Tesla’s latest features, eye tracking, replaces the previous steering wheel torque detection. Tesla confirms that they’ll add support for vision monitoring with sunglasses in September. This feature isn’t available in FSD 12.5.3, so it could be a part of FSD 12.5.4 or FSD 12.6. Newer Tesla vehicles feature infra-red lights near the cabin camera which allows the camera to see at night. It’s not clear whether Tesla will leverage IR lights to help see-through sunglasses or what kind of sunglasses will be allowed.

End-to-end on the Highway - Tesla says they’ll also support end-to-end FSD for highway driving , which should be a huge improvement – as highways are still running the FSD v11 stack. End-to-end allows for AI to control the vehicle’s output like acceleration and steering instead of just input from cameras. When E2E was implemented for city-driving it was a huge boost, and we expect to see similar improvements for highway driving.

End-to-end for highway driving will only be included on the latest FSD versions for now, but at some point we expect the same end-to-end highway support to trickle down to regular Autopilot highway use, even outside of North America. The vehicle may not be more capable, but what it’s allowed to do in other regions will be smoother.

October 2024

Tesla AI seems to be focusing on Unpark, Park, and Reverse in FSD for October 2024. This appears to have been a milestone for a while now which we’re associating with Tesla’s previous comments on Park Seek and Banish Autopark . These two features allow the vehicle to drive around a parking lot by itself, find a parking spot, and finally park itself. These functions are necessary for Robotaxi to function, and with the Robotaxi event taking place in October , it’s a good fit that these features are also coming along for the ride — at least in an internal beta the Robotaxi will be running.

Unpark - Tesla mentions “unpark,” which sounds very much like Actually Smart Summon — essentially having the vehicle remove itself from a parking spot and start driving. These capabilities appear to be coming to FSD. You'll be able to start FSD from a parked position and the vehicle will back up and exit the parking spot before it starts driving to your destination.

Park - “Park,” could see some improvements over what is available today. Right now Tesla’s new AutoPark feature is only capable of backing a vehicle into a parking spot, which actually isn’t allowed in some areas. With improvements to Park, we could see the ability for the vehicle to go nose-in into parking spots or maybe support angled parking spaces.

Parking in FSD is a feature we’ve also been waiting for. Eventually, the car should be able to navigate to a parking lot, cruise around until it finds a parking stall, and then AutoPark should be initiated. Musk said this was coming to FSD back in May , so it seems like we may finally be close. You could see the pieces coming together where Actually Smart Summon can now traverse parking lots and Autopark can park itself. It’s just a matter of piecing these together.

Banish AutoPark is expected to be an upgrade to the current Autopark feature – where the vehicle drops you off near the entrance to your destination and then finds a parking stall autonomously, and parks itself entirely without user intervention. This is one feature we’re super excited about and is pretty much the opposite of Actually Smart Summon.

Reverse in FSD - Reversing capability for FSD will be huge. It’ll allow the vehicle to perform much more complex turns and even back up when it has gone too far into an intersection. Currently, FSD cannot shift into reverse, but users have already noticed that the path planner is capable of thinking about switching to reverse but is unable to. Reverse may already be part of the FSD model, but Tesla has a strict rule that doesn’t allow the vehicle to be put into reverse.

The ability for the vehicle to go in reverse will be critical to get the vehicle moving in and out of parking lots, as well as making tight three-point turns, so we’re excited to see what this will enable FSD to do.

FSD V13 - The final item Tesla lists for FSD in October is FSD v13. Tesla says v13 will bring a 6x improvement in miles between necessary interventions. That’s a huge leap, but we’ve heard similar numbers in the past that didn’t come to fruition, so we’ll have to wait and see. Tesla doesn’t release a major FSD version without large architectural improvements, so we do expect major improvements in capabilities or interventions — or both.

Q1 2025 - FSD Outside of North America

To go along with all the FSD improvements, Tesla also announced its FSD expansion plans and timelines. Tesla specifically outlined that they expect to launch FSD in Europe and China in Q1 of 2025. However, Tesla did say that this is pending regulatory approval. If Tesla has FSD ready for these markets, they should be able to launch at least portions of it in some countries.

This is definitely a slip from Tesla’s original release plan of EOY 2024 for FSD in Europe and China , but it's still a good sign to see the light at the end of the tunnel. We recently found out that the FSD test for China was put on hold, which could explain some of the delays.

Q2 2025 - FSD for Right Hand Drive

This time frame seems a bit more flexible following a comment from Elon on the post, but it seems that right-hand drive markets will take a bit longer than the team initially expected. Musk followed up saying that RHD markets will arrive in late Q1/Q2, pending approval.

The Tesla AI team has been hard at work getting FSD prepared for RHD markets, while other parts of Tesla have been working closely with national and regional governments to get approval for FSD.

Overall, this roadmap looks fantastic, and we’re happy to see Tesla AI providing this information to reduce speculation and help provide real timelines to Tesla owners. This is a super-packed release roadmap, and all the upcoming features and updates are going to be coming in back-to-back until the end of this year, with more around the corner next year!

Tesla Continues to Crack Down on Leaks

Tesla continues to crack down on leaks, even after making changes to its internal builds. Internal testers and employees previously leaked new software updates with impunity, but it recently got a little harder, with Tesla watermarking release notes with the vehicle’s VIN .'

Tesla has recently taken this a few steps further than just watermarking the release notes in the vehicle and in the Tesla app.

API Changes

Tesla has an internal early access program (Wave 1), which allows employees access to the newest updates before they’re made available to the public. This allows employees to experience the latest features on their personal vehicles and help provide feedback to Tesla. It’s a nice perk for employees and gives Tesla one last chance to test software before it’s rolled out more widely.

Previously, if these vehicles were enrolled in the Wave 1 program and a third-party service, the service could use Tesla’s APIs to leak the latest release notes. This used to be a convenient and simple way for outside organizations to get their hands on release notes early, but Tesla has now made changes to prevent this.

Now, vehicles enrolled in the employee early access program won’t return release notes through the API anymore.

Who Gets These Early Updates?

Tesla issues these early updates to its internal ADAS testers, as well as Wave 1 employees. Any Tesla employee can sign up for their early-access program. The tester vehicles are tightly controlled, and there usually aren’t any leaks at this level, other than sightings of unique test beds like the Cybertruck with LIDAR .

Wave 1 employees come after the internal testers and serve as an additional step before public release to early-access customers, such as Tesla influencers.

Most Tesla releases follow this release process: QA > Wave 1 > Influencers > Customers

Wave 1 employees serve as a barrier between customers and a buggy update. Since Tesla needs to test hundreds if not thousands of hardware variations, due to different manufacturers for certain parts, this group plays a critical role in letting Tesla test a wider fleet that is still private.

Tesla doesn’t allow customers to roll back vehicle software, but it is doable through Tesla’s internal service tools on an as-needed basis. This lets Tesla find and kill bugs before they grow into a rampaging problem when released to hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles worldwide.

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Semaforum: Kate Conger and Ryan Mac

Sign up for Semafor Media: Media’s essential read. Read it now .

Semaforums are occasional short Q&As with authors and other interesting figures, edited and compressed for space and clarity. Kate Conger and Ryan Mac are tech reporters for The New York Times and authors of the new book ” Character Limit .” They spoke here with Ben Smith and other Semafor staffers.

Ben Smith: This played out so much in public, a lot of it on Twitter. How did you think about a story that navigates behind the scenes, when so much is in front of the scenes?

Ryan Mac: I think they gave us an opportunity. Because it was so public, there was like a daily drumbeat of stories — “Elon fires these people today,” or “the site shut down,” or “this employee went rogue.” It was so much to do that I don’t think it gave anyone an opportunity to do a deep dive. There weren’t any big magazine stories or New Yorker features on a takeover or the deal itself. And so I think because of that, it left kind of a hole for us to fill.

And on top of that, like there was just so much material that anyone could have covered. We have a lot of scenes in the book that are text messages and text messages, like the internal dealmaking.

There’s a scene in there of Elon at Berghain, this club in Berlin, trying to text the board members as he’s getting rejected from the club, whether or not he should join the board at Twitter. If people had just lined up the tweets with the timing of the text messages, you would have seen this incredible storyline. But because people were so focused on the immediacy of it, and trying to break the news when it came out, no one ever went back.

Ben: Why did he get turned away from the club?

Ryan: I don’t think we ever got to the bottom of that. We didn’t send anyone to Berlin’s nightclub scene to find out. But he was tweeting about it. He got rejected, as many people do from the lines of Berghain. Within a couple hours, he was on his plane back home, trying to figure out if he should join the Twitter board.

Ben: The first, maybe, 100 pages of the book are set in the “before” times, when Twitter employees are trying to create an infrastructure for misinformation — for safety, as they see it. But it sounds, from your reporting, like they’re themselves growing a little uncomfortable with what they’ve built around throwing people off the platform and trying to control speech and guarantee free speech at the same time.

I read it and I thought, “I think that Kate and Ryan are more sympathetic to the Elon critique of Twitter now than they used to be.” But I don’t know if that’s true. Not his conduct after, but the right-wing diagnosis that Twitter had thrown too many people off, was censoring too much speech — do you think there’s something to that?

Kate Conger: Something that really bothered me in the telling of this story as it played out, was that it really simplified what was going on at Twitter, and the story became sort of these White Knights of the Old Company fighting off this evil character in Elon. And I think that that really flattened and oversimplified what was happening at Twitter. And it was really important to me that we capture some of the mismanagement and some of the problems in Twitter 1.0 that set the company up to be taken over.

I don’t know that I would describe myself as sympathetic to the right-wing complaint that Twitter banned too many people, removed too much content. But I do think there was a consensus among the three CEOs that we cover in the book, Jack [Dorsey], Parag [Agrawal], and then Elon, that the way that Twitter was dealing with content moderation wasn’t working and would not scale over time.

Ben: The original sin, in some ways, for a lot of conservative criticism is the Hunter Biden laptop [story]. What do you think is misunderstood about how Twitter handled that?

Kate: I don’t know if this is misunderstood anymore, but what I think was misunderstood at the time was how much pressure Twitter had been put under to prepare for a second coming of Russian interference in that election, and how much stress and anxiety that put on this staff. So in that moment, when that story broke, and there was a very low level of information about where the laptop had originated from and how it had made its way into the media — there was that kind of looming fear of foreign interference that influenced a lot of the decision-making around that.

Ryan: We see that now with Mark Zuckerberg’s letter the other day, he is talking about that and kind of using that as a crutch, an explanation for why he did it. And also that kind of became a moment for Dorsey himself to kind of split with his staff. There was a lot of blame, even internally at Twitter at the time, and Jack tried to cleave himself off from the decision-making process, even though he was very much a part of that machinery that made that decision. So it was, in some ways, a breaking point for him.

Ben: The book covers these just incredibly destabilizing layoffs. I remember the time people were saying, “I don’t know if they’re gonna be able to keep the website online.” I still use Twitter. It seems like it works OK. Was Musk basically right, that they were wildly overstaffed?

Kate: So that is actually something that the company had believed previously. Under Parag Agrawal, there were plans for mass layoffs that got put on hold when Elon came in and made the offer to buy the company. But it was something that I think that both management[s] agreed on, that the company was overstaffed.

That being said, I think that Elon’s cuts, by any measure, are quite severe, and the site still functions well enough to get by, but I think there’s a lot of things in the overall stability that are broken. You know, there’s some outages — yesterday, for example, timelines weren’t loading out here on the West Coast; a lot of search functions are broken now. You can’t really dig as easily into the archive of Twitter and see what people have posted in the past. There’s no longer any transparency reporting their advertising. And there’s no longer a robust sales apparatus to keep that business afloat. And so the core product, I think, is still chugging along, but there are a lot of things along the periphery that are broken and are not functional at this point.

Ryan: When we were reporting, someone told us this great metaphor of, “Twitter’s a pretty well-run car. Think about a car. And, you know, as you start to swap out parts, maybe it continues to run and run and run and run, but eventually it’s going to hit problems as you continue to take out parts.” And that stuck with me for a while. I think there’s always going to be people that use Twitter, but I think it’s pretty undeniable that he has made it a worse experience.

Ben: How much of Musk’s own identity and way of being in the world now a product of spending a lot of time on Twitter?

Ryan: I think a lot. If you go back and look at his early tweets, it’s very funny, because he really didn’t like the medium. His earliest tweets were like, hanging out with his kids at the ice rink and photos of Kanye West wearing SpaceX, pretty normie stuff. It was just online for everyone to see.

But then he starts to grasp, “this is an outlet for me.” Like he starts tweeting about book recommendations and his thoughts on SpaceX. And then I think there’s a lightbulb moment that clicks for him, where he uses this thing to push back on any media narrative.

Even early Elon hated the media, he loved fighting and debating and pushing back on anything that was wrong. There were tweets about him fighting over a detail in a reporter’s story about what he ate for breakfast and that just became part of what he did every day — so much so that we talked to Twitter or to former staffers of his that were told to go fight, like, some random blogger in Belgium over tweets. He would stay up till 3 a.m. telling his communications staffers to do this. And so that happened over the last decade, where he grew to mistrust media, learned how to use Twitter effectively for his own message, built a following and just spent hours every day on there, to the point where it became his main social circle.

Ben: How does your understanding of Musk from what’s basically like a disaster movie of a book fit into this person who’s undeniably accomplished, in a business context — built some stuff that is quite amazing and transformative.

Ryan: He contains multitudes! That’s a cliche. Just because you’re a successful entrepreneur in rocketry or electrifying vehicles, doesn’t necessarily make you the best person to run a social media network.

Kate: I think X/Twitter is a fundamentally human problem. It’s a social problem. It’s less of an engineering feat. And where Musk has really shown [strength] in the past is in engineering and hardware, and that’s just not a problem that Twitter addresses.

Reed Albergotti: Was Elon surprised that advertisers fled? Did that catch him off-guard? Or was he always kind of like, “Oh, screw it, I don’t need these people, I’m gonna just stop my mouth off.” And do you think that he can potentially, one day get advertisers back to Twitter? Or has that ship completely sailed?

Ryan: I don’t think he had a plan, really. All our reporting shows that there wasn’t much thought into this, and he was really leaning heavily — a lot of his focus was on Twitter Blue, building the subscription model, really believing that he could sell this to millions of people. And it wasn’t till he walked through the doors, like after the sink moment, that I think he started talking with some executives and realizing there are concerns about his tweets and his ownership, and that we really do have to woo advertisers.

So there was that brief period where he wrote a note, it was a pretty well-written note, to advertisers, trying to assuage them and comfort them in a way. But like everything with Elon, he can whiplash back and forth and throw a lot of good work out the window. There’s one moment we have in the book where he’s in a meeting with a top ad executive, and the ad executive asks him, “is Donald Trump going to be back on the platform?” And in response, he whips up a tweet and he says, “if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me if Donald Trump would be on the platform, I’d be a rich person.” And he shows it to the ad executive and asks him, “Should I tweet this?” It’s such an insane moment. This isn’t just like normal behavior, but there’s no one really holding him accountable to this. And he just kind of does what he wants.

Kate: Something that we encountered time and time again in reporting this book is that Elon cannot handle public criticism very well if he needs to be corrected. That has to be done in private and when he’s confronted publicly, he will react very aggressively and kind of double down, and we’ve seen that in his relationship with advertisers. When there’s been publicity around advertisers pausing their campaigns on the platform, he’s reacted very negatively to that. And I don’t think that there is a world where a lot of mainstream advertisers return and are the fundamental part of Twitter’s business that they used to be.

Ben: What did you wind up thinking about Walter Isaacson’s biography?

Kate: I was worried about that book. We knew it was going to come out before ours. And I was worried, are we going to get scooped on all this stuff that we knew he was in the room for? And I think we got really lucky, in that his focus and his sourcing was really spotlighted on Elon himself. We had really the privilege of reporting around Elon and working with a lot of sources who were in his periphery. And I think that really benefited us.

I think we all know this in journalism, that people are unreliable narrators of their own stories, and it can be really helpful to talk to folks around them to get a fuller picture. And I think Elon is a great example of that, and someone who’s very unreliable about his own story, and that it is really a benefit to go to the people around him to get the truest picture of him. And I think in that circumstance, our sourcing just really benefited us to obviously not have access to Elon, and have access to the folks around him.

Ryan: In some ways, we treated that book like the voice of Elon. We use it in our sourcing material. We mentioned it. Let’s say some event happens, then Elon will spout off on it, and then Walter just writes about it. And it’s great to understand Elon’s thought process at the time, as well as where he was. There’s a lot of physical detail in there that helped us a lot in placing him. But as soon as we started to talk to folks, maybe one level down from executives, we started to realize Walter didn’t really talk with them at all. There wasn’t much beneath the surface reporting and beyond that. He had kind of become captured by Elon in some ways, he became an adviser.