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The 49-year-old founder of SpaceX now has a net worth of more than $ 188.5 billion (£ 136 billion), an increase of $ 150 billion in just 12 months and is believed to be the fastest accumulation of wealth. of history.
His fortune is now $ 1.5 billion more than Bezos, who has ranked first since 2017, according to Bloomberg. Just seven months ago, Musk’s reported wealth was just a quarter of Bezos’s, which is no small feat during a year in which Amazon’s shares soared thanks to the decline of top stores. Musk’s characteristically understated response on Twitter? “How strange. Well, let’s get back to work …”
The South African business magnate’s stratospheric rise in fortune is due in large part to the more than eight-fold rise in shares of Tesla, which surpassed Toyota in July to become the world’s most valuable automaker. Its shares soared 6 percent yesterday after Democrats won control of the Senate, hoping President-elect Joe Biden will grant electric car buyers additional tax breaks.
Musk, who owns 20 percent of Tesla shares, was the 35th richest person in the world at the beginning of 2020. He launched his career as one of the co-founders of PayPal in 2000 and also owns the rocket company SpaceX, which is transporting astronauts to the International Space Station in an agreement with NASA. She is currently in a relationship with Canadian singer Grimes, with whom she has an eight-month-old (and strangely named) baby.
So what will you do with your new fortune? Musk has previously said that he intends to use half of his wealth to “help the problems on Earth” and “half to help establish a self-sufficient city on Mars to ensure the continuation of life (of all species ) in case the Earth is hit by a meteor like the dinosaurs or the Third World War happens and we destroy ourselves ”.
In a series of tweets placed at the top of his timeline, the billionaire said the reason he wants a lot of money “is not what you think.” He said he had “very little time for recreation” and that he has “no vacation homes or yachts or anything like that.”
But what else do we know about the South African billionaire? From being bullied as a schoolboy to the unusual name he gives his new son, here are 30 surprising facts about the real-life Tony Stark.
1. Musk was born in Pretoria on June 28, 1971 to Errol, a wealthy South African engineer, pilot and sailor, and Maye, a Canadian dietitian and model, on the day the United States Supreme Court overturned Muhammad Ali’s conviction for evading recruiting.
2. It is worth $ 188.5 billion (£ 136 billion), $ 1.5 billion more than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
3. Musk is 6’2 ”, eight inches taller than Bezos.
4. Musk’s IQ is estimated at 155. Jeff Bezos’s IQ is unknown.
5. Musk has never accepted a salary from Tesla; instead, you’ve opted for share-based compensation plans. When he left South Africa to study in the United States, Musk was living on $ 1 a day, mainly buying sausages and oranges in bulk.
6. When Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket left Earth’s atmosphere last year, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley became the 567 and 568 people to go into space (according to the NASA definition of spaceflight). Fédération Aéronautique Internationale like any flight over 100 km, or 62 miles: the US recognizes some lower flights).
7. In May of last year, nearly $ 15 billion was removed from Tesla’s valuation after Musk tweeted that its stock price was “too high.”
8. His younger brother, Kimbal, owns an American restaurant company, Kitchen Restaurant Group. His younger sister Tosca is a filmmaker.
9. All three brothers share a middle name Reeve, although a petition was launched on Change.org in 2016 suggesting that Elon should change his middle name to “Gated.” The petition won five supporters.
10. Musk was so quiet as a child that his parents briefly believed he might be deaf.
11. He, Kimbal, and his cousins made pocket money as children selling homemade chocolate Easter eggs door-to-door in affluent neighborhoods.
12. Musk reportedly read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica at age nine and was a huge fan of Dungeons and Dragons. Unfortunately, if you ever write your autobiography, you can’t call it Nerd Do Well, Simon Pegg’s title.
13. As the youngest and smallest child in his elementary school class, Musk was horribly bullied. He was hospitalized after a gang of children pushed him down a flight of stairs and said that on one occasion he was “almost beaten to death”. At 15, he learned karate, judo and wrestling and the bullying stopped.
14. Her father, Errol Musk, was once tried for manslaughter and acquitted after shooting and killing three men who tried to break into his Johannesburg mansion.
15. In 2017, Errol had a son with his stepdaughter Jana Bezuidenhout, 40 years his junior, a few years after divorcing his mother Heidi. Elon has described his father as “evil” and they are separated.
16. Musk taught himself to write computer code at the age of 12, creating a video game called Blastar that sold for $ 500 to PC magazine and Office Technology.
17. Musk met his first wife, science fiction writer Justine Wilson, when they were students at Queen’s University in Ontario and they were married in 2000. After the death of their first child, Nevada, from sudden infant death syndrome At the age of 10 weeks in 2002, they conceived twins Griffin and Xavier in 2004, and then triplets Kai, Saxon, and Damian in 2006, through IVF.
18. Musk’s son Xavier is named after Professor Xavier in X-Men. Tesla is named after Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. Had Tesla not secured the rights to the name, Musk claims the company would have been named Faraday, after the British scientist Michael Faraday, who was born in what is now Elephant and Castle in 1791. SpaceX’s Falcon rockets are named after him. Millennium Falcon from Star Wars.
19. After earning degrees in economics and physics from the University of Pennsylvania, Musk enrolled in graduate school in physics at Stanford, but dropped out after two days to ride the wave of the dot-com boom.
20. He sold his first software company Zip2, which he co-founded with Kimbal, for more than $ 300 million in 1999 and the same year he co-founded online bank X.com, which later became PayPal. In 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $ 1.5 billion. He founded SpaceX in 2002 and joined Tesla in 2004 as president, having helped fund the company. Since then, he has founded artificial intelligence and neuroscience companies and a tunneling company called The Boring Company to excavate tubes intended to improve the movement of cars and create a new high-speed public transportation system called Hyperloop. “I think public transportation is painful. It sucks, ”he told Wired.
21. He allegedly once said to a potential investor: “My mind is that of a samurai. I’d rather commit seppuku [ritually disembowel himself] to fail. “
22. Musk agreed to serve on Donald Trump’s two business councils in 2017, but resigned from both the same year in protest at the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris agreement on climate change.
23. Robert Downey Jr based his portrayal of Tony “Iron Man” Stark on the Marvel Avengers movies on Musk. However, Stan Lee originally based Tony Stark on Howard Hughes, whom he described as “an inventor, an adventurer, a billionaire, a womanizer, and ultimately a madman.”
24. Musk makes a cameo appearance in Iron Man 2 and has also appeared as himself on The Simpsons, Big Bang Theory, and South Park.
25. In 2013, Musk bought “Wet Nellie,” the custom Lotus Esprit from the 1976 Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, which he said was an inspiration for Tesla cars.
26. The launch of the Tesla Cybertruck took place in November 2019, the month and year in which Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is developed.
27. In 2018, Musk used his own Tesla sports car as a payload for the successful launch of his Falcon Heavy rocket, with a doll named Starman in the driver’s seat, with Bowie’s Space Oddity and Life on Mars on the high gear. fidelity. The car is now in orbit around the sun. You can track it at whereisroadster.com, which also notes that the car has exceeded its 36,000-mile warranty more than 31,000 times.
28. Musk was named a member of the most admirable order of Direkgunabhorn (5th class) by the King of Thailand for his efforts to free 12 children trapped in the flooded cave of Tham Luang in 2018, with a mini-submarine (although this was somewhat overshadowed over a dispute with British spelunker Vernon Unsworth, a consultant on the rescue, in which he called Unsworth a “fart boy” on Twitter). Musk later won the defamation case.
29. Musk met his second wife, actress Tallulah Riley, at Whiskey Mist nightclub in Mayfair in 2008, and proposed to her the same year. They were married in 2010, divorced in 2012, remarried in 2013, and divorced again in 2016.
30. Although Musk and his current partner, singer Grimes, named their baby X Æ A-12 (later modified to X Æ A-Xii to comply with California legal guidelines), they apparently refer to him as “Little X “
