Elon Musk

Who is Elon Musk?

One of the richest people in the world, founder, CEO, and co-founder of Tesla, PayPal, and SpaceX. At just 30 years old, he was already a millionaire thanks to one of his first companies, Zip2. 

He was born in South Africa in 1971 with his brothers, his mother is Canadian and his father is South African, with whom apparently he does not have a good relationship. He grew up in his home country but at the time of university, he went to Canada, to Queens University, at the age of 17. But he also went to Stanford and Pennsylvania universities, where he obtained degrees in economics and physics. in 1997.   

Companies

In 1995, together with one of his brothers, he founded Zip2, a kind of online business directory. In 1999 the company was purchased by Compaq, a computer manufacturer, for $307 million. Later, he created a financial services company, X.com, on his behalf. His main rival was Confinity, founded by Peter Thiel and two other partners, just a short time later. In March 2000, they merged to create PayPal, a peer-to-peer online money transfer service. In October 2002, Ebay, the Internet auction service, bought PayPal for $1.5 billion. 

The companies he founded, co-founded, and/or led since the PayPal sale are focused on addressing three long-term dilemmas for humanity: 

• climate risk
• The risk of dependence on a single planet
• Risk of the obsolescence of the human species

The first company he founded in 2002 was Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), an aerospace and space transportation services manufacturer, of which he is currently CEO and CTO. In 2004, he joined the company Tesla Motors, Inc., now Tesla, Inc, as President and Product Architect and in 2008 CEO. He helped create SolarCity in 2006, a solar energy services company that was acquired by Tesla and later became Tesla Energy. 

In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, a non-profit company that promotes eco-friendly artificial intelligence. A year later, in 2016, she co-founded Neurolink, a nanotechnology company focused on brain-computer development and founded a bridge-building company called The Boring Company. 

Musk is a highly criticized person due to his unorthodox or unscientific stances and controversies. He was sued twice, in 2018 for defamation, and in the same year by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for false tweets about funds for a private acquisition of Tesla, thanks to this he had to resign his presidency for three years and with limitations in the social network. He recently spread misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic and criticism for his views on artificial intelligence and professional public transportation. 

Heritage

When he was named to the Forbes Billionaires List in 2012, he had a net worth of $2 billion. 

At the beginning of 2020, he had a net worth of 27 billion, throughout that year his net worth increased by $150 billion, fueled by his 20% shares in Tesla. It was quite volatile, falling by $16.3 billion in September, the biggest one-day drop in the history of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. In November, he overtook Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to become the third richest person in the world, just a week later he overtook Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to become the second richest. 

In 2021, with a net worth of $185 billion, he overtook Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest person. 

Importance of Elon Musk in the crypto world

With the economic importance and the presence of Musk, his relationship with cryptocurrencies was to be expected. He greatly helped in the development of the cryptocurrency market, simply by tweeting about it the price of a coin can suffer consequences, both bad and good. 

This was happening, or is it the most current thing about the relationship with crypto. Lately, Elon Musk has posted his thoughts and opinions on the subject on the Twitter social network. The possibility of selling Tesla products through Bitcoin was considered, but, after an internal analysis, it was concluded that this went against the company’s objectives since Bitcoin’s issue of energy consumption isn’t clear yet. 

Featured Tweets

This produced huge price drops in the digital currency, with just one tweet.

Instead of supporting Bitcoin, Musk came out in favor of the meme currency, Dogecoin, helping propel it and its formation on the internet.

In addition, as we already know, Musk is taking the fall of Bitcoin like no other influential in the economy would, through memes.