Today, the world was shocked to learn that Elon Musk managed to buy Twitter for $44 billion dollars. This is a gigantic amount of money, and what is most striking is that we are not talking about a company of the caliber of Microsoft, but about an executive who has achieved position himself as one of the richest people on the planet in a matter of years.
Unlike traditional stories like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, who had a really good idea and capitalized on it, or high-profile companies like Warner Bros., who made safe investments, Musk made his money differently than most. of today’s famous billionaires. Instead of one amazing invention, he had several good ones.and instead of a lot of smart and safe investments, he made just a couple of risky decisions.
After escaping from South Africa to avoid military service, Elon Musk and his family moved to Canada, eventually going on to study at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. where he majored in physics and business, and turned his bedroom into a nightclubthe first of his risky investments.
After college, Musk and his brother, Kimbal, moved to Silicon Valley, where they founded a company called Zip2, which functioned as an online business directory. The brothers began recruiting investors and getting outside help to run the company, which made deals with publishers like the New York Times. By 1999, they sold the Zip2 to Compaq, a giant computer manufacturer in decline, for $307 million dollars. Musk obtained $22 million dollars in this transaction.
With some of that money, Musk bought a McLaren F1, which he crashed one day while traveling with Peter Thiel, co-founder of a payment company called Confinity. After this, the executive invested his millions to start another online banking company called X.com. The two companies merged in March 2000, forming a business that eventually became PayPal. Musk was named CEO, but in September, while on vacation, the board fired him and replaced him with Thiel, in part because of a disagreement over changing company servers. By 2002, the year eBay bought PayPal, Elon received $180 million for his actions.
Almost immediately, Musk founded SpaceX, this with the mission of colonizing Mars. Alongside this, in 2002, he invested $6 million in Tesla, who at the time only had the promise of electric cars, and nothing else. The executive invested almost all the money he received from PayPal in these two projects, who suffered from bad luck during their early years. SpaceX had multiple failed launches, nearly bankrupting it, while Tesla ran into trouble when its engineers realized its prototype batteries were likely to burn up.
By 2008, like many others, Elon Musk almost went bankrupt because of the great recession. However, that same year was when SpaceX and Tesla finally started to take off. The space company secured a $1.6 billion deal with NASAwhile in 2012, the automaker began producing its first mass-market car, the Model S.
Today, Tesla controls about two-thirds of the electric vehicle market in the United States, and SpaceX is the leader in private space exploration. By the end of 2021, Musk held 17% of Tesla stock, valued at $175 billion, making up the majority of his net worth. For its part, SpaceX is valued at more than $100 billion, according to its October funding round, and Musk’s 48% stake in the rocket maker, plus cash and other assets, brings his total net worth to about $266 billion.
This is not all, as Musk continues to invest in new companies, such as The Boring Company, which he started in 2016, which digs tunnels, and the neurotech startup known as Neuralink. Now, Twitter is added to this group. What kind of changes will the manager bring to this social network? We just have to wait to find out. Here you can learn more about this topic.
Via: Time
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