Elon Musk is considered the world’s 3rd richest person with a net worth of $140 Billion after Bearnrd Arnault and Jeff Bezos. He is regarded as the most innovative person of the current era because of his out of the box ideas. Elon Musk is currently serving as founder, CEO, and CTO of various high-tech organizations such as Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, and The Boring Company. Elon Musk is a brilliant individual. He was born in South Africa, moved to Canada at the age of 17, and came to the United States as a transfer grad student at the University of Pennsylvania. Bill Gates considers Elon Musk as a person whose ideas revolve around engineering and business. Let’s have a look at various projects that have transformed into a multi-billion organization in a time-line fashion;
Founder – Paypal
Paypal has initially been an online platform for banking applications by X.com, founded and programmed by Musk himself in 1999. The platform got the attention of online businesses by its diversity and ease of use by many organizations. Paypal became a real success, but Musk had many new ideas floating in his mind, and to finance those ideas, Musk took a bold decision to sell the company to eBay after one and a half years of its creation for $1.5 Billion. Now, the world recognizes Paypal as one of the best online funds transfer platforms.
CEO – Tesla Motor Company
Elon Musk got recognition as a tech giant after he founded Tesla. Tesla is the flagship electric vehicle producer, designer, and research organization. It holds the first company’s title to mass-produce high quality and high-tech electric sedans. With increasing global warming and other environmental hazards, Musk claims that his automobile company’s sole purpose is to move the transport sector towards a sustainable and smart future. After the company started mass production in 2003, Tesla’s market capitalization is around $450 Billion with shares worldwide with ever-increasing values despite great competition in recent past by big automakers. Tesla is also expanding its core business to energy generation and storage at different levels after the Gigafactory.
CTO & CEO – SpaceX
SpaceX was a very ambitious idea by Elon Musk and gave Musk an adamant time in terms of everything. Elon Musk founded the company in 2002 to reduce space travel costs by recycling and reusing space rockets and instruments. Hence, saving millions on a single flight. Most people are not aware of the idea that why is space transportation so important or why would anyone spend much time and money to make it more sustainable; well, the fact is it’s imperative as there are hundreds of satellites revolving around our planets and our fashionable society heavily relies on them.
Whenever a satellite is put into orbit, a million-dollar rocket transports it through the atmosphere and sets it in its orbit; Musk’s idea was to save the load-carrying rockets by landing them back to the ground at pinpoint accuracy. Musk not only faced lots of design failures but he also faced financial pressure due to them. He was even on the verge of selling Tesla. SpaceX is currently holding a worth of $36 Billion and, after its successful trials, signed significant agreements with NASA and other organizations.
Co-founder – OpenAI
AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the future! AI is giving machines the ability to think and analyze. Almost all the tech giants are investing heavily in AI for future technologies. OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and development laboratory founded in 2015. Although Musk resigned from the company board as the others were doing great but remained a prominent donor. OpenAI is working on giving machines human intelligence considering critical safety parameters. In June 2020, OpenAI released its first commercial product, “the general-purpose text generator”. OpenAI received a $1 Billion investment from Microsoft in 2019.
Founder – Neuralink
Elon Musk founded Neuralink Corporation in 2016. The corporation aims to develop brain implants to not only read and write but also render neural signals to control and read brain activity. They demonstrated the technology using pigs as subjects to read and never alter activity. Musk also aims to cure nerve damage due to disease or accident by implanting the Neuralink to a human brain after Musk receiving FDA approval to conduct limited human testing. In July 2019, Neuralink received $158 Million in funding, however, Musk added $100 million to it. This gesture not only shows his passion but also his commitment towards the goals.
Founder & CEO – The Boring Company
Elon Musk got the idea of urban tunnel traveling after seeing incredible frustration in Los Angeles traffic. Musk founded The Boring Company in 2016, aiming to make underground fast transit pathways for vehicles. And a hyperloop mass transit system. The company processes all the tools and expertise to make long underground long tunnels to transit goods and people from one point to another in very little time. The Boring Company constructed a test tunnel in California to transit people around the LA Convention Center campus. The Boring Company has signed multiple agreements around the globe for revolutionizing urban transportation. However, Boring Company is currently holding a worth of $120 Million and signing new million-dollar projects worldwide.