Elon Musk was born in South Africa on 28 June 1971. His mother was a Canadian and his father was South American. He became famous for starting Tesla Motors and SpaceX but the series of his exceptional fortune started as a co-founder of Paypal. At the age of 17, he moved from South America to Canada. He attended college in u.s at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating he moved in order to begin graduate school in physics at Stanford University but he dropped it just after two days and established his first company zip2 that was meant to provide online newspapers with maps and business directories.
He later sold that company in 1999 for 307 million dollars. The concept of cheap electric cars, making Mars habitat for humans and robots doing home chores this all is a part of Elon’s world. Elon Reeve Musk is famous for his crazy ideas. No wonder that in the list of the world’s most powerful people Elon Musk was ranked 25th. He is on the 5th in the list of richest people in the world. Musk brought enthusiasm in the generation for entrepreneurship. He is a huge inspiration to millions of people around the world.
Tesla Motors
Elon Musk co-founded Tesla Motors a company that designed and manufactured electric sports cars. Tesla was able to succeed in the electric car market where other large manufacturers failed and currently with Tesla as its CEO and chief product architect.
Elon faced failures as well
Despite Elon’s huge success in being a multi-billionaire both of his main companies SpaceX and tesla Motors came very close to failing so Tesla’s first electric car the Roadster faced an ongoing string of production problems.
SpaceX had three launch failures before its first and final effort became a success so that clearly goes to show you that just because you failed it doesn’t mean it’s time to give up on your dreams.
Downfall
Talking about the downfall, Elon almost went broke in the middle of the massive contraction in economic activities and his divorce from his first wife. He used to live off on loans from his wealthy friends he put his last 35 million dollars into Tesla and maintained his stake in the company despite his lack of cash. Tesla went public and today its valued at $450 Billion dollars. Elon Musk himself is worth 94 billion dollars according to Forbes.
Elon’s love for big mansions
Seems like Elon loves big mansions as he spends a lot on it. He bought a house in Los Angeles that is his fifth neighborhood in bel-air for 24.25 million dollars now before that purchase he apparently had already spent 48 million dollars on other mansions as well bringing that total spend to around 72 million dollars.
Elon considers AI a threat to man
Elon Musk considers Artificial intelligence the biggest threat to the existence of the human race. He sounds quite cautious about AI. As he believes that AI could become more powerful than humans by causing human extinction. Once he quoted in an interview that the important thing is that if we do get some sort of runaway algorithm then the human-AI collective can stop the runaway algorithm but if there’s a large centralized AI that decides then there’s no stopping it.
Reference
Rocket Man: Elon Musk in his own words
Vanity fair-Elon Musk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPsHN1KyRQ8