Elon Musk, 51, is the world’s richest man, ahead of Jeff Bezos and Bernard Arnault, with a net worth of $257.5 billion, according to the Forsige Billionaire Index, leaving many people puzzled as to how he came to be so wealthy.
Elon Musk cofounded more than six companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, Nuralink, a neurotechnology company that develops implantable brain-machine interfaces, and Boring Company, a tunneling startup.
Elon Musk was born on 28 June 1971 into a wealthy family in Pretoria, South Africa.
His mother, Maye, was a Canadian dietitian and model, and his father, Errol, was an engineer.
Musk was reportedly good with computers as a child and designed a video game at the age of 12. At the age of 17, he fled to Canada to avoid military service under the Apartheid regime.
After attending Queens University in Ontario, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, where he studied physics and business.
Following graduation, he briefly pursued a Ph.D. in physics at Stanford University in California before co-founding the online business directory Zip2 with his younger brother Kimbal in 1995.
A business he would later sell, signaling his entry into the game of wealth.
The pair sold the company in 1999 for $307 million, with Elon Musk receiving $22 million.
How did Elon Musk become extremely rich?
Billionaires are usually known for starting something that led to the majority of their wealth. But the story is different for Musk.
Unlike most other billionaires, Elon Musk amassed his fortune through a series of successful business ventures rather than a single large success.
After selling Zip2, he ventured into online banking and payments with controversial businessman Peter Thiel, co-founding what became PayPal.
When eBay bought the company in 2009, his stake in it was worth $180 million.
He founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of colonizing Mars using low-cost rockets. And he did this with a portion of his earnings from the Paypal sales.
The following year, he invested $6 million in Tesla, despite the fact that the company had yet to produce a real car.
Both companies struggled at first, but SpaceX took off in 2008 after signing a $1.6 billion contract with NASA, and Tesla’s first vehicle, the Model S, entered mass production in 2012.
SpaceX is now a key partner in NASA missions, and Tesla cars can be seen on streets all over the world as people become more environmentally conscious.
Elon Musk was worth about $20 billion alone in 2018 and was nowhere near the top fifty of the World’s Richest People.
Musk has since seen a meteoric rise to become the world’s richest person in 2020, with a net worth of more than $100 billion, and then another significant rise over $300 billionaire, with him becoming the first person to reach that level of wealth.
Elon Musk’s fortune has grown to astronomical proportions as a result of Tesla’s share price, which tripled in value to more than $1 trillion in 2021 – though it is now worth approximately $887.82 billion.
After a funding round in May 2022, SpaceX is worth $125 billion, having quadrupled its value in three years.
Boring Company, which aims to eliminate traffic, raised $675 million in April 2022 at a valuation of $5.7 billion.
Musk, who has a net worth of $257.5 billion, purchased a 9.1% stake in Twitter before announcing a $44 billion takeover bid a few days later.
Elon Musk is worth more than the gross domestic product (GDP) of more than 150 countries and territories.
This includes the GDPs of countries such as New Zealand and Iran.
