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Credit, fake images
Musk surpassed Bill Gates and is only behind Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon
Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk surpassed Microsoft founder Bill Gates to become the world’s second-richest man after a meteoric rise in his personal fortune.
Musk’s net worth jumped from $ 7.2 billion to $ 128 billion after shares in his automaker Tesla soared.
Only Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is richer than he is, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, compiled by the Bloomberg financial news agency.
The exponential growth of Musk’s fortune came after news that Tesla shares will be added to the S&P 500, one of the major US stock indices.
Investors rushed to buy shares in the electric car maker thereafter, raising its market value to more than $ 500 billion and consequently catapulting the equity capital of Musk, who owns 20% of the company. .
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Tesla has become the carmaker with the highest market value in the world
Tesla is already the world’s most valuable auto company, despite producing a fraction of the vehicles of rivals like Toyota, VW and General Motors.
In Germany on Tuesday, Musk said it might “make sense” for Tesla to expand in Europe by entering the mass market segment with a small car.
“In the United States, cars tend to be bigger for reasons of personal taste,” he said. “In Europe, (they) tend to be smaller.”
After years of losses, Tesla posted five consecutive quarters of earnings with its car sales performing well, despite the pandemic.
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, was the richest person in the world for years before Bezos took him out of first place in 2017.
Credit, Reuters
Elon Musk announced in 2018 the first private flight of a passenger to the Moon
Gates’ fortune is $ 127.7 billion, but it would have been higher if he hadn’t donated large sums to charities for decades.
Jeff Bezos’ net worth is estimated at $ 183 billion by Bloomberg. He also saw his personal fortune increase this year, as demand for Amazon’s services increased during the pandemic.
Musk, who has occasionally been involved in controversy, has had busy weeks recently.
Last weekend, he tweeted that he “probably” had a moderate case of covid-19 and had symptoms of “a minor cold.”
It happened the day before four astronauts were launched to the International Space Station on a rocket built by SpaceX, their space company.
Credit, Reuters
In 2018, SpaceX launched its most powerful rocket ship
But who is Elon Musk?
Elon Musk is one of the most prominent corporate figures in the world.
In 2018, the announcement that SpaceX would take its first private passenger to the moon around the world.
Musk has a number of pioneering achievements to his name, including the creation of the online payment platform PayPal, the management of electric car manufacturer Tesla, as well as SpaceX.
His wide-ranging and innovative interests include solar energy and artificial intelligence, a high-speed travel system that includes tubes and magnets, as well as projects on Mars.
But it is not only its commercial side that arouses interest.
His erratic behavior, along with controversial public appearances, including smoking marijuana on a webcast, drinking whiskey in public (a practice frowned upon across the country), and accusing one of the divers who rescued the Thai soccer team abandoned in a cave in Thailand for being a pedophile – an allegation that resulted in a lawsuit against him – is also striking.
Credit, fake images
Musk served as the inspiration for the Iron Star character Tony Stark.
Origin and wealth
Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, to a South African father and Canadian mother. As a kid, he was obsessed with science fiction novels and everything related to electricity, a perfect platform for his current projects.
An introverted boy, he was bullied so badly that he once had to be hospitalized for a week.
At age 10, he learned to program on his own, and at 12, he created a video game that he later sold to a magazine for $ 500.
At 17, Musk moved to Canada to study physics and economics, before moving to the United States in 1992 to continue his studies.
He dropped out of the doctoral program after just two days and then founded Zip2 with brother Kimbal, who provided city business directories for newspapers.
At age 27, he sold the business and invested what he made, $ 22 million, in X.com, a company that promised to revolutionize the way money transfers were made and would become PayPal’s payment platform. Worldwide. famous.
When eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $ 1.5 billion, Musk pocketed $ 165 million. He was 31 years old.
And so?
Although Musk did not find Tesla, his name is most commonly associated with the company.
After pocketing the proceeds from the PayPal sale, Musk invested his fortune in SpaceX and Tesla, which he led as chairman of the board before becoming CEO in 2008.
That year turned out bad for the businessman: SpaceX had a third rocket accident and rising costs threatened to ruin Tesla.
Despite phenomenal technological achievements and exciting innovations, their companies missed deadlines and suffered huge losses.
A decade later, in 2018, things went wrong again for the tech entrepreneur.
In August of that year, he surprised investors with a tweet saying that he was considering going public with Tesla’s offering after the company’s initial public offering (IPO).
Two weeks later, he said he had abandoned the plan, encouraging dissatisfied investors to file a lawsuit against him.
Then in September, he was ordered to resign as Tesla chairman and pay a $ 20 million fine, a deal made with US regulators for the tweets he posted about the IPO.
Australian Robyn Denholm, then a board member and telecommunications industry executive, replaced him in this role.
Credit, fake images
Elon Musk and his ex-wife Talulah Riley at the White House in 2014
Private life
In addition to smoking and blasts on Twitter, he has also married three times, twice to the same woman.
The first was Justine Wilson, who is a fiction writer.
He married Talulah Riley in 2010, but they divorced in 2012.
The following year, the couple got engaged again. In 2014, he filed for a new divorce, but then he gave up. Two years later, Riley did the same and the couple went their separate ways.
Musk also has connections to Amber Heard and Cameron Diaz. Robert Downey Jr was inspired by him to play Tony Stark in the Hollywood film franchise. Iron Man.
Musk is considered a tireless worker. When he founded Zip2, he was supposed to work all day, sleep in the office, and shower across the street at the Young Christian Association (YMCA).
In 2018, in an interview for the American newspaper In the New York Times, Musk said he worked “120 hours a week” and sometimes took sleeping pills to combat insomnia.
Credit, SPACEX
Tesla Roadster in Earth orbit
That year, Musk also launched the world’s most powerful active rocket, took a Tesla sports car into space, as well as making possible the successful vertical landing of two rockets (Falcon 9) at the same time – a historic feat.
Musk now directs his energies towards a new conquest: reaching and colonizing Mars and other planets, a plan that, according to him, can begin from 2024.
“Of the two, one: either we are a multiplanetary species and we explore the universe or we are the one-planet species, waiting for eventual extinction,” he said.
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