At 53, Elon Musk is not only the CEO of several innovative companies, such as Tesla and SpaceX, but has also become a major political force in the incoming Donald Trump administration. Last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called tech giant Elon Musk a “superman” after his company xAI created the fastest AI training supercomputer. However, the label is not entirely unfounded. At 53, Musk is not only the CEO of several innovative companies, such as Tesla and SpaceX, but has also become a major political force in the Donald Trump administration.
On Wednesday, as expected, Trump announced that Musk will work with another tech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), which will aim to cut unnecessary spending. However, this department will not be part of the government.
The event highlights Musk's rise from growing up in a violence- and apartheid-ridden part of South Africa to becoming the richest person in the world and now an influential figure in the US government. He is close to setting a new wealth record that could take his fortune to $335 billion.
However, the vivacious entrepreneur came from humble beginnings before making his mark in Silicon Valley more than 20 years ago. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk had a troubled home life, as his parents divorced when he was just eight years old.
Musk showed entrepreneurial skills at a very young age, such as selling homemade chocolate Easter eggs and creating his first computer game at age 12. However, Musk had a difficult childhood and revealed that he was bullied at school and also had trouble understanding social situations because he has Asperger's syndrome.
"He knew pain early on, but he also knew how to endure it," writes Walter Isaacson, author of the Elon Musk biography.
But Musk's life took a turn when he moved to Canada and then the United States for higher education. He studied economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He then went on to study at Stanford University in California, but dropped out and turned to entrepreneurship during the dot-com boom of the 1990s.
Entry into Silicon Valley
He founded two start-ups, including a web software company (Zip2) and an online banking company that later became PayPal. It was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Even before selling PayPal, Musk had considered his next move, and his goal was to make space flight cheaper.
In early 2002, Musk founded a company called Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, investing $100 million he made from the sale of PayPal. Six years later, he invested his fortune in an electric car startup, Tesla, and became its CEO in 2008.
That same year, Musk nearly declared bankruptcy. But a turning point came in 2009, when SpaceX signed a $1.5 billion contract with NASA and Tesla found new investors. Musk founded and bought several other companies, including OpenAI, SolarCity, and The Boring Company.
In 2017, Musk founded Neuralink, which is developing devices that can be implanted in the human brain. That was also the year he met Trump, although the relationship was brief. Musk decided to join Trump's business advisory board, but later resigned after facing strong opposition.
But the most important acquisition he made came in October 2022, when after months of back-and-forth he bought the social media platform Twitter for $44 billion.
2024: An unforgettable year
2024 has been an unforgettable year for Musk, 53, as he has fathered 11 children from three partners.
In a significant step towards bringing rockets back to full usefulness, SpaceX managed to get its hands on a rocket booster with chopstick-like hands. These mechanical hands are designed to hold the rocket with pincer-like grips as it descends to the launch pad.
SpaceX is also tasked with bringing back NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) for 100 days longer than scheduled.
While Musk has cemented his role from a technological perspective, it remains to be seen what impact he will have on the Trump administration.
0 comments:
Post a Comment