Just three weeks ago he shook Wall Street by making an offer to take control of Twitter for US$44 billion, news that he made known, precisely, through a tweet on the same social network where he accumulates almost 83 millions of followers.
“Freedom of expression is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital public square where vital issues for the future of humanity are debated”Musk stated in the statement announcing the purchase of Twitter.
Born in Pretoria on June 28, 1971, the son of a South African engineer and a Canadian model, Musk left South Africa in his late teens to attend Queen’s University in Ontario where, after two years, he transferred to the University of Ontario. from Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in physics and business.
After graduating from the prestigious Ivy League institution, he abandoned his plans to continue studying at Stanford University.
Instead, founded Zip2, an online media publishing software company that sold to American computer manufacturer Compaq for more than $300 million in 1999.
Musk’s next company, X.com, ended up merging with PayPal, the online payment company bought by eBay, the internet auction giant, for 1.5 billion dollars in 2020, according to information cited by AFP.
What for many would have been the end of a successful career was only the beginning of Musk’s journey.
That same year he founded SpaceX, a company of which he is now CEO and CTO, with the idea of creating a company that could send astronauts into space and, in the future, lcome to Mars to turn humans into an “interplanetary species”.
To do this, SpaceX is developing a prototype rocket, Starship, which plans to take crew and cargo to the Moon, Mars and beyond.
After a few failures and near misses, SpaceX perfected the art of landing rockets on land or sea platforms, making them reusable, something unique in aerospace history and indispensable for lowering the cost of space research.
In fact, At the end of 2021, it sent four tourists into space, in the first orbital mission without professional astronauts on board.
Parallel to his work at SpaceX, Musk became president of the electric car manufacturer Tesla in 2004. After multiple fiascoes, which included the threat of the company’s shareholders to remove him from the management, today Tesla is a huge industrial success and financial, with record profits of $5.5 billion in 2021 and a gigantic market capitalization.
However, Musk is also making headlines in less flattering ways: Tesla faced a series of discrimination and harassment lawsuits against black workers, as well as sexual harassment.
Parallel to the flow of business news, the billionaire’s personality flirts with controversy through a riotous style on Twitter, where he recently challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin to a fight and compared Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler.
Musk’s company jokingly called The Boring Company (the boring company) is promoting an ultra-fast rail transport system, Hyperloop, that would transport people at almost supersonic speeds.
Holder of American, Canadian and South African nationality, the businessman was married and divorced three times, once with the Canadian writer Justine Wilson and twice with the actress Talulah Riley.
He has seven children – an eighth child died in infancy.
It recently emerged that Musk had had a second child with his partner, singer Grimes: a girl they named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, although the parents — who have an on-and-off relationship — will usually call her Y. In May 2021, he revealed that he suffers from Asperger syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder.
Source: Ambito
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