Elon Musk facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Elon Musk
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Musk in 2023
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Elon Reeve Musk
June 28, 1971 Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa
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| Education | University of Pennsylvania (BA, BS) |
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| Political party | Republican (since 2022) |
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| Children | 12 |
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| Awards | Full list |
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Elon Reeve Musk (born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO, and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of the Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; president of the Musk Foundation; and owner and CEO of X Corp., formerly Twitter. He is one of the wealthiest individuals in the world; as of August 2024[update] Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$247 billion.
Contents
Early Life
Musk was born and grew up in Pretoria, South Africa. He has British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. His mother is Maye Musk (née Haldeman), a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised in South Africa. His father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, and property developer, who was a half-owner of a Zambian emerald mine near Lake Tanganyika. Musk has a younger brother, Kimbal, and a younger sister, Tosca. After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk chose to live primarily with his father. Musk later regretted his decision and became estranged from his father.
Musk had been described as an awkward and introverted child. He was an enthusiastic reader of books, later attributing his success in part to having read Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, The Lord of the Rings, the Foundation series, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When he was ten, he became interested in computers and video games. He taught himself how to program Commodore VIC-20 user manual and created a game. When he was twelve, he sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500.
Musk graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. When he was 17, he became a Canadian citizen and moved to Canada. Two years later, in 1990, he attended Queen's University, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received bachelor's degrees in economics and physics.
Business career
In 1995, Musk moved to California to attend Stanford University but decided to instead pursue a business career. He partnered with his brother Kimbal and Greg Kouri to begin Zip2. Errol Musk provided them with $28,000 to start the company, which developed an Internet city guide with maps, directions, and yellow pages. Compaq purchased Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999, and Musk received $22 million for his 7% share.
In 1999, Musk co-founded the online bank X.com, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
In early 2001, Musk became involved with the nonprofit Mars Society. He wanted to help pay for placing a growth-chamber for plants on Mars. Because of his inexperience, companies did not want to pattern with him, so he began his own company, SpaceX, in 2002. Musk wants to make rockets that are reusable so they can make many trips to space. The first rocket, Falcon 1, failed to reach earth's orbit three times, but it succeeded in 2006. Another rocket, the Falcon 9, has been launched over 100 times. In 2008, SpaceX signed a contract with NASA to fly 12 flights of its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station to resupply it. Since 2019, SpaceX has been developing Starship, a fully-reusable, super-heavy-lift launch vehicle. In 2020, SpaceX launched its first crewed flight, the Demo-2. It became the first private company to place astronauts into orbit and dock a spacecraft with its crew at the International Space System. SpaceX has also developed a group of satellites called Starlink. They provide satellite Internet access to customers on earth. SpaceX also designs and launches custom military satellites for the Space Development Agency as part of a new missile defense system in low Earth orbit. In 2024, NASA awarded SpaceX an $843 million contract to deorbit the ISS at the end of its lifespan.
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In 2004, Musk invested in the electric vehicle company Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.). He became its chairman and was active in creating several vehicles for the company. In 2008, he became Tesla's CEO. In 2022, Musk unveiled a robot developed by Tesla, Optimus.
In 2006, he helped create SolarCity, a solar energy company that was later purchased by Tesla and became Tesla Energy. By 2013, SolarCity was the second largest provider of solar power systems in the United States.
In 2013, Musk announced plans for a version of a vactrain—a vacuum tube train. The purpose of the train was to travel quickly between major cities. He called it the hyperloop. In 2015, he began a design competition for students and others to build Hyperloop pods that would run on a mile-long track owned by SpaceX.
In 2016, Musk co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology startup company. Neuralink believes it is able to merge the human brain with artificial intelligence (AI) by creating devices that are implanted in the brain to help it merge with the machines. This kind of technology could improve memory or allow the devices to communicate with software. The company also hopes to create devices with which to treat neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, dementia, and spinal cord injuries.
In 2017, Musk founded the Boring Company to construct tunnels. He revealed plans for specialized, underground, high-occupancy vehicles that could travel up to 150 miles per hour. His goal is to reduce above-ground traffic in large cities. Two tunnel projects announced in 2018, in Chicago and West Los Angeles, have been canceled. However, a tunnel under the Las Vegas Convention Center was completed in early 2021. Local officials have approved further expansions of the tunnel system. In 2021, tunnel construction was approved for Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
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I made an offer
April 14, 2022
Since joining Twitter in 2009, Musk has been an active user and has over 100 million followers as of June 2022[update]. Musk expressed interest in buying Twitter as early as 2017. In January 2022, Musk started purchasing Twitter shares. He quickly became the company's largest shareholder. On April 13, Musk made a $43 billion offer to buy Twitter. On October 27, 2022, the deal was final, and Musk became the owner of Twitter. He immediately fired many of the company's top executives.
Leadership style
Musk is often described as a micromanager and has called himself a "nano-manager." He expects his employees to work hard. Musk's leadership has been praised by some, who credit it with the success of Tesla and his other businesses. It has been criticized by others who see him as insensitive and too harsh.
Philanthropy
Musk is the president of the Musk Foundation. The foundation has many goals.
- It helps provide solar-power energy systems in areas that have been hit by disasters.
- It supports research and development for human space exploration, pediatrics, renewable energy, and safe artificial intelligence.
- It supports education in science and engineering.
In 2015, Musk founded OpenAI, a not-for-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research company, whose goal is to make artificial general intelligence that is meant to be safe and helpful to humanity. He left OpenAI in 2018 so that someone else could run it and still use Tesla products and ideas.
In July 2018, Musk arranged for his employees to build a mini-submarine to help rescue the children trapped in a flooded cavern in Thailand. Engineers worked hard on this project. However, by the time it was ready to use, eight of the 12 children had already been rescued using full face masks, oxygen, and anesthesia. Rescuers helped the other children in this way, too, so the submarine was never used.
Wealth
Musk made $175.8 million when PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002. He was first listed on the Forbes Billionaires List in 2012, with a net worth of $2 billion. In January 2021, Musk became the richest person in the world. He says he is gathering resources for humanity's outward expansion to space.
Personal views
Existential threats
Musk has stated that AI could be a great existential threat to humanity. In order to prevent AI taking over humanity, as is seen in several movies, he believes the government should be careful to limit how AI is used.
After AI, Musk sees climate change as the greatest threat to humanity. He believes there should be a carbon tax so people are more careful about preventing global warming.
Musk said fewer people being born each year is one of the biggest risks to human civilization. He believes that humans have the ability to live on Mars, and we will need many from earth to move there.
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COVID-19
Musk criticized COVID-19 lockdowns, but closed the Tesla Fremont Factory because of the shelter-in-place order. In May 2020, he reopened the Tesla factory, even though the shelter-in-place order was still in effect.
Musk bought and donated BiPAP and CPAP machines, which are non-invasive ventilators. These machines helped many people who had to be treated for COVID-19.
In September 2020, Musk stated that he would not get the COVID-19 vaccine; however, he did receive the vaccine because he had to travel to visit Tesla Giga Berlin and felt that he was given no choice. He said on Twitter, "I had major side effects from my second booster shot. And my cousin, who is young & in peak health, had a serious case of myocarditis."
Finance
Musk has stated that he does not believe the U.S. government should provide subsidies to companies; instead they should impose a carbon tax to discourage poor behavior. He says that the free market would achieve the best solution.
Technology
Musk has promoted cryptocurrencies and supports them over traditional government-issued fiat currencies. However, when Musk was shown that cryptocurrency mining took more energy than it was worth from the environment, he announced on Twitter that Tesla would not use Bitcoin until the energy consumption issues are solved.
Musk has been known to criticize public transportation and encourage the use of private vehicles. Urban planners have pointed out that public transportation in dense urban areas is more economical, more energy efficient, and requires much less space than private cars.
Personal life
From the early 2000s until late 2020, Musk resided in California, where both Tesla and SpaceX were founded. In 2020, he moved to Texas, stating that California had become "complacent" about its economic success. While hosting Saturday Night Live in May 2021, Musk stated that he has Asperger syndrome.
Musk has 10 surviving children. He met his first wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson, while attending Queen's University in Ontario, Canada; they married in 2000. In 2002, their first child died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of 10 weeks. After his death, the couple had twins in 2004 followed by triplets in 2006. The couple divorced in 2008 and shared custody. In 2022, the eldest twin officially changed her name to reflect her gender identity and to use Wilson as her last name because she no longer wished to be associated with Musk.
In 2008, Musk began dating English actress Talulah Riley. They married two years later at Dornoch Cathedral in Scotland. In 2012, the couple divorced, before remarrying the following year. After briefly filing for divorce in 2014, Musk finalized a second divorce from Riley in 2016. Musk then dated Amber Heard for several months in 2017; he had reportedly been pursuing her since 2012.
In 2018, Musk and Canadian musician Grimes said that they were dating. Grimes gave birth to their son in May 2020. According to Musk and Grimes, his name was "X Æ A-12"; however, the name would have violated California regulations as it contained characters that are not in the modern English alphabet, and was then changed to "X Æ A-Xii". This drew more confusion, as Æ is not a letter in the modern English alphabet. The child was eventually named X AE A-XII Musk, with "X" as a first name, "AE A-XII" as a middle name, and "Musk" as surname.
In December 2021, Grimes and Musk had a second child, a daughter named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk (nicknamed "Y"), born via surrogacy. Despite the pregnancy, Musk confirmed reports that the couple were "semi-separated" in September 2021; in an interview with Time in December 2021, he said he was single. In September 2023 it was reported that the pair had a third child, a son named Techno Mechanicus "Tau" Musk. In October 2023, Grimes sued Musk over parental rights and custody of their eldest son.
In July 2022, Insider published court documents revealing that Musk had had twins with Shivon Zilis, director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, in November 2021.
Media appearances
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Musk was one of the three men who were an inspiration for the character of Tony Stark in the Marvel film Iron Man. The other two men were Steve Jobs and Donald Trump. He has made guest and cameo appearances in several movies, TV shows, and documentaries.
Awards and honors
- Received an honorary doctorate in engineering and technology from Yale University (2015)
- Awarded an IEEE Honorary Membership (2015)
- Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) (2018)
- Won the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics George Low Transportation Award (2008)
- Won the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale Gold Space Medal (2010)
- Won the Royal Aeronautical Society Gold Medal (2012)
- Listed among Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People (2010, 2013, 2018, and 2021)
- Selected as Time's "Person of the Year" (2021)
- Elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2022)
Elon Musk quotes
- "I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary."
- "I'm nauseatingly pro-American. I would have come here from any country. The U.S. is where great things are possible."
- "If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic."
- "Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."
Interesting facts about Elon Musk
- When Musk was 12 years old, he created the video game Blastar. He ended up selling it to a computer magazine in 1984 for $500.
- Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla in 2003. Musk and his money joined a year later.
- He almost sold Tesla to Google for $6 billion in 2013.
- His first cameo was in the 2010 movie Iron Man 2 and he played himself on TV’s The Big Bang Theory.
- Musk was able to start SpaceX with the $100 million he earned when eBay bought PayPal.
- He has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a milder form of autism.
- Musk’s wealth is based on stocks and his ownership of companies. He takes no salary.
- Musk’s son Xavier has a special inspiration for his name: Comic book character Professor Xavier of Marvel’s X-Men.
- Musk purchased James Bond’s classic submarine car at a London auction in 2013 for close to $1 million.
- Maye Musk, Elon's mother, is currently a model.
See also
In Spanish: Elon Musk para niños
