What is Elon Musk’s net worth? 30 facts about the tech billionaire (soon to be billionaire)

Forecasters predicted this week that the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk is on track to become a billionaire by 2024, a feat never before achieved by a human being.

A report released this week, titled trillion dollar club used data to predict the future wealth of the 30 richest people in the world. The report revealed that on his current investment trajectory, Musk is on course to hit the trillion-dollar mark by 2024, followed a year later by Adani Group CEO Gautam Adani.

Despite these speculative reports, Musk and his companies have had a tough few months. Tech stocks fell sharply in May, leaving the world’s richest man falling from $340 billion in November to $206 billion this month.

Still, he’s fine, the founder of SpaceX and You’re here The 49-year-old boss leads the nearly $100 billion billionaire peloton, followed by LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault with a relatively modest $137 billion, followed by Amazon owner Jeff Bezos. $128 billion and Microsoft founder Bill Gates $121 billion.

Musk’s meteoric rise to the top of the billionaire ladder happened almost overnight, in October 2021, thanks to a pandemic-driven tech stock boom that saw Tesla shares soar nearly $10 billion a day. Musk’s newly acquired net worth of $300 billion christened him the richest man in the history of this planet.

To give this benchmark some perspective, Musk’s wealth was greater than Finland’s annual GDP.

In May, Musk’s net worth soared to even greater heights, peaking in November at just over $340 billion, before dropping to $197 billion last week, according to Bloomberg.

Part of the reason for Tesla’s decline in value has to do with Musk’s 9.2% stake in Twitter, which he bought in April, sparking fears among investors about his continued commitment to the automaker .

Musk, who owns 20% of Tesla shares, was the 35th richest person in the world at the start of 2020. He launched his career as one of the co-founders of PayPal in 2000 and also owns the rocket company SpaceX , which transports astronauts to the International Space Station under an agreement with NASA.

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(AFP via Getty Images)

Musk has previously said he intends to use half of his wealth to “help with problems on Earth” and “the other half to help establish a self-sustaining city on Mars to ensure the continuation of the life (of all species) in case the Earth is hit by a meteor like the dinosaurs or World War III comes along and we destroy ourselves”.

In a series of tweets pinned to the top of his timeline, the billionaire said the reason he wanted the big bucks was “not what you think”. He said he had “very little time for leisure” and had no “vacation homes or yachts or anything like that”.

But what else do we know about the South African billionaire (soon to be billionaire?)? From being bullied as a schoolboy to very unusual kid names, here are 30 surprising facts about Tony Stark’s real life.

1. Musk was born in Pretoria on June 28, 1971, to Errol, a wealthy South African engineer, pilot and sailor, and Maye, a Canadian dietician and model, the day the US Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Muhammad Ali for evading conscription.

2. He is worth $206bn (£170bn), $78bn more than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

3. Musk is 6’2″, eight inches taller than Bezos.

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(@Elon Musk)

4. Musk’s IQ is estimated at 155. Jeff Bezos’ IQ is unknown.

5. Musk never took a salary from Tesla — instead, he opted for stock-based compensation plans. When he left South Africa to study in the United States, Musk lived on $1 a day, mostly buying hot dogs and oranges in bulk.

6. When Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket burst from Earth’s atmosphere last year, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley became the 567th and 568th people to go into space (according to the definition of the International Aeronautical Federation of space flight as any flight over 100 km, or 62 miles: the United States recognizes certain lower flights).

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(NASA TV/AFP via Getty Images)

7. In May last year, almost $15 billion was wiped from Tesla’s valuation after Musk tweeted that its stock price was “too high”.

8. His younger brother Kimbal owns an American restaurant business, the Kitchen Restaurant Group. Her younger sister Tosca is a filmmaker.

9. All three siblings share the middle name Reeve, although a Change.org petition was started in 2016 suggesting Elon should change his middle name to “Gated.” The petition garnered five supporters.

10. Musk was so quiet as a kid that his parents briefly thought he might be deaf.

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11. He, Kimbal and their cousins ​​earned pocket money as kids selling homemade chocolate Easter eggs door-to-door in wealthy neighborhoods.

12. Apparently, Musk read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica when he was nine years old and was a big fan of Dungeons and Dragons. Unfortunately, if he ever writes his autobiography, he won’t be able to call it Nerd Do Well, Simon Pegg’s title.

13. As the youngest and smallest boy in his elementary school class, Musk suffered horrific bullying. He was hospitalized after a gang of boys pushed him down a flight of stairs and said he was “almost beaten to death” on one occasion. At 15, he learned karate, judo and wrestling and the bullying stopped.

14. Her father Errol Musk was previously tried for manslaughter and acquitted after shooting dead three men who tried to break into his Johannesburg mansion.

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(AP)

15. In 2017, Errol had a son with 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 learned to write computer code when he was 12, creating a video game called Blastar that he sold for $500 to PC and Office Technology magazine.

17. Musk met his first wife, science fiction writer Justine Wilson, when they were students at Queen’s University in Ontario and they 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, then triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian in 2006, by IVF.

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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 failed to secure the rights to the name, Musk claims the company would have been called Faraday, after British scientist Michael Faraday, who was born in what is now Elephant and Castle in 1791. Falcon from SpaceX are named after the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars.

19. After earning degrees in economics and physics from the University of Pennsylvania, Musk enrolled in a graduate degree in physics at Stanford, but dropped out after two days to ride the wave of the dotcom 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 co-founded the online bank X.com, which became PayPal. In 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion. He founded SpaceX in 2002 and joined Tesla in 2004 as chairman, after helping fund the company. He has since founded AI and neuroscience companies and a tunneling company called The Boring Company to dig tubes to improve car traffic and create a new high-speed public transportation system called Hyperloop. “I think public transport is a pain. It sucks,” he told Wired.

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(Paramount Pictures)

21. He reportedly once told a potential investor, “My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku [ritually disembowel himself] than to fail.

22. Musk agreed to serve on two Donald Trump business boards in 2017, but resigned from both the same year in protest at Trump’s withdrawal from the United States from the Paris climate change accord.

23. Robert Downey Jr based his portrayal of Tony “Iron Man” Stark in the Marvel Avengers movies on Musk. However, Stan Lee originally based Tony Stark on Howard Hughes, whom he described as “an inventor, adventurer, multibillionaire, ladies’ man, and finally crackpot”.

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24. Musk made a cameo in Iron Man 2 and also appeared as himself in The Simpsons, Big Bang Theory and South Park.

25. In 2013, Musk bought “Wet Nellie,” the customized Lotus Esprit from the 1976 Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me, which he says inspired Tesla cars.

26. The Tesla Cybertruck launched in November 2019, the month and year Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner takes place.

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27. In 2018, Musk used his own Tesla sports car as the payload for the successful launch of his Falcon Heavy rocket, with a dummy called Starman at the wheel, with Space Oddity and Bowie’s Life on Mars on the stereo. . The car is now orbiting the sun. You can follow him on whereestroadster.comwhich also notes that the car exceeded its 36,000 mile warranty more than 31,000 times.

28. Musk was named a member of the Most Admirable Order of Direkgunabhorn (Fifth Class) by the King of Thailand for his efforts to free 12 boys trapped in the flooded cave of Tham Luang in 2018, along with a mini-sub sailor (although this was somewhat overshadowed by a row with British caver Vernon Unsworth, a salvage adviser, in which he called Unsworth a “pedo” on Twitter). Musk then won the libel suit.

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29. Musk met his second wife, actress Tallulah Riley, at Mayfair’s Whiskey Mist nightclub in 2008, and proposed to her the same year. They married in 2010, divorced in 2012, remarried in 2013, and divorced again in 2016.

30. Although Musk and his former partner, the singer Grimes, called their baby boy X Æ A-12 (later changing it to X Æ A-Xii to comply with California legal guidelines), they apparently call him “Little X”. In March 2022, the couple welcomed a baby girl, naming their second child Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, nicknamed “Y”.

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