How Tesla made it to the top
Tesla has transformed the auto industry and made Elon Musk the richest man on the planet
“How strange,” tweeted Elon Musk when news broke on 7 January that he had overtaken Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest person, worth some $185bn (£136bn).
Born in Pretoria, South Africa, 49-year-old Musk was an introverted, bookish child who was bullied at school (once so badly that he was hospitalised for a fortnight), before emigrating to Canada and the US to study physics and economics.
In his 20s, he founded two digital businesses, Zip2 and X.com, which became PayPal: he was ousted as chief executive of the latter, but made $165m. In 2002, he founded SpaceX, the space transport outfit which he hopes will enable people to live on other planets, and now divides his time between SpaceX, Tesla and projects like Hyperloop, a proposed ultra-high-speed train line.
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Musk combines messianic business aims with a taste for showmanship: Robert Downey Jr spent time with him to prepare to play the tech genius Tony Stark in Marvel’s Iron Man. In 2018, Musk smoked marijuana during a live webcast, and claimed that he had secured funding to take Tesla private. He didn’t, and so was fined £20m by regulators. The same year he began a relationship with the pop star Grimes; last year, the couple gave their baby son the name X Æ A-Xii.
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