Elon Musk gained notoriety by developing some of the most forward-thinking tech firms in the world today, such as the manufacturer of electric vehicles, Tesla, and the space exploration firm, SpaceX. According to Bloomberg, Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, mainly because of his approximately 16 per cent ownership share in Tesla, valued at $144 billion as of August 2022.
But Musk’s business strategies are unusual and occasionally contentious. He promised to pay $44 billion to purchase the social media giant Twitter in 2022 but later backed out of the agreement for reasons that some analysts deemed unreliable. The transaction is pending in court, and a trial is set for October 2022.
What more about Musk should you be aware of? Please continue reading to learn about his early career and current most significant investments.
According to Bloomberg, Elon Musk’s estimated net worth is $254 billion as of August 2022, making him the world’s richest person. He has roughly $90 billion more than Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who comes in second.
Directs Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company, four businesses.
Pretoria, South Africa native who acquired his first computer at ten.
A Physics and Economics graduate from the University of Pennsylvania.
In 2012, Musk pledged to support charity causes with the bulk of his wealth, signing Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge.
Co-founder of PayPal, an online payment platform acquired by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
contributed to the founding of The Boring Company, a tunnelling project that aims to reduce urban congestion and open up long-distance, high-speed transit.
The CEO of Neuralink, a company that is striving to create interfaces that let computers and the human brain communicate.
In 2018, when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) claimed that his tweets “lacked an appropriate foundation in fact,” in which he claimed that he could take Tesla private for $420 per share and that funding had been secured, he agreed to resolve charges of securities fraud.
Announced a 9% interest in Twitter in April 2022 before deciding to pay $44 billion to buy the entire company later in the same month. Later, he attempted to back out of the agreement.
Top investments by Elon Musk
Elon Musk has worked with some of the top tech firms, some of which have grown among the biggest in the United States.
Company Value
$943 billion Tesla
$125 billion SpaceX
The Boring Company $5.7 billion
$500 million to $1 billion Neuralink 200
PayPal $114 billion
Note: Prices for Tesla and PayPal are as of August 8, 2022. The worth of SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink are as of June 2022, April 2022, and August 2021, respectively.
Sources include Crunchbase, Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg, The Boring Company, and
X.com now PayPal :
Musk founded X.com with the money he received from selling Zip2, a software startup that helped newspapers publish online city guides, to Compaq Computer in 1999. Later, he merged the business with money transfer provider Confinity, and the two entities came together to form PayPal.
At the time, Musk made around $180 million after taxes on his 11.7 percent ownership in PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. For PayPal’s founders and early employees, the sale of the company resulted in substantial riches, which they used to form and invest in new software businesses. The founders of PayPal, which now include the CEO of Affirm and political activist Peter Thiel, became known as the “PayPal Mafia.”
Tesla
Tesla, established in 2003, has risen to the top of the electric vehicle industry. In 2004, Musk joined Tesla as an investor and rose to the position of board chairman before taking over as CEO in 2008. Tesla debuted its first automobile in 2008, and in 2012, the publication Consumer Reports ranked the Model S as the best car overall. In the summer of 2020, Tesla overtook Ford as the world’s most valuable automaker; in the fall of 2021, it reached a market value of $1 trillion before declining in 2022.
Musk is a prominent player at Tesla and has approximately 16 per cent ownership in the business. He oversees product development, engineering, and global production for the company’s EVs, batteries, and solar energy products.
After Musk tweeted that he could take the firm private for $420 per share and that funding had been obtained, even though there was insufficient support for the claim, Musk and Tesla agreed to each pay $20 million to resolve securities fraud charges brought by the SEC. As part of the settlement, Musk was also required to resign for three years from his position as Tesla’s chairman.
SpaceX
SpaceX, which develops rockets and spaceships for journeys to Earth’s orbit and eventually, the firm claims, to other planets, has Musk as its CEO and chief designer. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, with most of his money from PayPal. The business has earned contracts to design rockets for NASA and the U.S. Air Force.
Even though SpaceX is a privately held corporation, Musk reportedly owned a trust that possessed a 47 per cent share in the company, per a 2020 filing by Bloomberg.
Neuralink
According to the company’s website, Neuralink is creating ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to link human brains to computers. The business disclosed that it had raised $205 million from many venture capital firms and investors in 2021, including Google.
According to the firm, Musk’s objective with Neuralink is to assist those who have had brain injuries shortly and, in the long run, lessen the danger that artificial intelligence poses to humanity. Less than 200 people work for the business, which is among Musk’s smallest.
The Boring Company
The Boring Company aims to reduce urban traffic and enable high-speed, long-distance travel by fusing quick, economic tunnelling technology with an electric public transportation system. The business constructed a 1.15-mile research and development tunnel in Hawthorne, California, and is currently constructing the Vegas Loop, a public transit system at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
When the company raised $675 million in its most recent investment round in April 2022, it was valued at $5.7 billion. Vy Capital and Sequoia Capital spearheaded two renowned venture capital firms spearheaded the fundraising.
Musk was a prominent investor when DeepMind Technologies, an artificial intelligence firm, was founded in 2010. The business has created AI gaming systems that outperform people. Musk has long expressed concern about the risks that artificial intelligence poses to civilisation.
2014 saw Google purchase DeepMind for an alleged $600 million.
SolarCity
Two of Musk’s cousins founded SolarCity in 2006 with funding support from Musk, who also served on the board of directors. The business serves residential, commercial, and industrial consumers by selling and installing solar power equipment.
In 2016, Tesla and SolarCity agreed to a $2.6 billion acquisition. Some detractors viewed the deal as a bailout for SolarCity because it had trouble raising capital. Musk claimed he wasn’t engaged in the acquisition’s valuation and later prevailed in a shareholder lawsuit concerning the arrangement.
What Elon Musk is worth :
Elon Musk’s investments in and creation of businesses have increased his net worth. He was able to reinvest the money from the sale of PayPal at the beginning of his career into incredibly successful businesses, turning the earnings into much more significant sums.
According to Bloomberg, his estimated net worth had increased significantly from the beginning of 2020 to $27.6 billion. His current estimated net worth is $254 billion. Since then, the value of Tesla’s stock has increased tenfold, and Musk’s net worth has grown along with it, making him the wealthiest man in the world. At the start of 2020, he would be number 46 on the current list of billionaires, with a net worth of $27.6 billion.
Twitter and Elon Musk :
In April 2022, Musk, a longtime active user with a sizable following, revealed a 9% interest in social media giant Twitter. He ultimately agreed to buy the entire business before walking away from the arrangement. The sequence of events is shown in the following timeline:
On April 4, 2022, Musk revealed that he had a 9% interest in Twitter, which caused Twitter shares to skyrocket.
Twitter accepted Musk’s $44 billion takeover offer on April 25, 2022, valuing the firm at $54.20 per share.
The merger deal between Musk and Twitter is up for termination as of July 8, 2022, according to Musk, who claims he hasn’t gotten enough information to know how many bogus accounts are on the platform.
Twitter sued Musk on July 12, 2022, attempting to get him to uphold the merger deal. The business claimed that to give him the information he wanted, it “bent over backwards.”
A five-day trial is scheduled to start in October after a Delaware judge grants Twitter’s request for its lawsuit to be expedited on July 19, 2022.
August 4, 2022: In a countersuit, Musk accuses Twitter of deceiving him by misrepresenting the company’s crucial user figures before he decided to buy it.
Musk challenges Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to a public discussion regarding the proportion of Twitter users that are fraudulent or spam accounts on August 6, 2022.
Cryptocurrency and Elon Musk :
Musk has also been a consistent commenter and proponent of cryptocurrencies through his tweets. Tesla said in February 2021 that it had spent $1.5 billion on Bitcoin and intended to accept it as payment for its goods and services. A few months later, Musk appeared on Saturday Night Live and referred to Dogecoin as a “hustle,” calling it a cryptocurrency. Following Musk’s remarks, the price of the coin dropped by 30% and has since declined.
A few months after it began, Tesla stopped accepting Bitcoin as payment owing to environmental concerns. In July 2021, Musk stated that Tesla would “most certainly” resume accepting Bitcoin once it became more environmentally friendly.
Tesla touted Bitcoin’s long-term potential a year earlier but revealed in July 2022 that it had converted around 75% of its holdings into fiat money.
Also Read – Crypto Exchange : 5 Important Things to Consider When Picking a Crypto Exchange
Elon Musk’s suggestions for Investments :
Invest in tangible items: In a tweet from March 2022, Elon Musk stated that “when inflation is strong, it is often better to hold tangible items such as a home or stock in firms you think make good products, rather than currency.” He further stated that he would not sell any cryptocurrency holdings, including his Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin holdings.
Diversification: In 2022, Musk advised followers to “own stock in multiple firms that produce goods and services that *you* believe in. Musk is promoting a diversified strategy by advising investors to select several businesses, which means you won’t be destroyed if one or two of your investments do poorly.
Remain composed: According to Musk, the only time to sell an investment is if the quality of a company’s goods and services is declining. He advises, “don’t freak out when the market falls.”