Elon Musk: Man who turned a tycoon in lockdown

 ELON MUSK

Man who turned a tycoon in lockdown  

Introduction

Elon Musk, who doesn’t know him ? The cofounder of the electronic payment firm PayPal, the founder of the spacecraft company SpaceX and  CEO of the electric car maker Tesla and now he is even the owner of Twitter. In the lockdown due to the pandemic when the majority of the population struggled to survive for bread and butter, Elon Musk on 7th of January, 2021 was the person who was declared as the world’s richest man who had earned more than the worth of 150 billion dollars in the lockdown. In recent years Musk has gained a great level of popularity in the media and online. Recently, again, when he bought Twitter at $44 billion on the 25th of April and became the owner. So, how did he get a billionaire? Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Facebook, or Microsoft have got great value all over the world and their value totally depends on the value of the company in the share market. The founders’ wealth is closely linked to the value of their companies in the share market. In fact, it is so closely linked that, If the value of the company shows a downfall in the market, the founder may have to incur a great loss of millions and billions and if the company’s value in the market goes up, the founder may become a billionaire. This is exactly what happened with Tesla. In 2020, the increment of 720% was seen in Tesla’s stock price within one year which ultimately, made Musk a billionaire. However, it was not Elon Musk who actually founded the Tesla company, rather those are Martin and Mark made and founded this company in 2003. It was in 2004, that Elon Musk joined by investing $30 million in Tesla and after 2008 he became the CEO of this company. Further, in 2009, when the company was facing a great financial issue, Musk decided to list it in the stock market, so as to recover the loss by public investment. 

But there have been several reports claiming that the billionaire already belonged to a wealthy family and that his father owned an emerald mine. So, is that true that he did not have to work hard to get to the position of where he is today?  Well, you will get to know further in this Blog. To get a clear view let us look back to his life and where did it all started. 

His Early Life

Elon Reeve Musk was born on 28th June 1971, in Pretoria, which is one of the capital cities of South Africa. He was undeniably born into a wealthy family during his youth as his mother Maye Musk was a model and a dietitian and his father Errol Musk was an electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, and property developer, who was also a half-owner of a Zambian emerald mine. He also has a younger brother Kimbal and a younger sister Tosca. At the age of 3, he drifted off as if deaf so his adenoids get removed by his parents. When he was 9, his parents got divorced and Elon chose to live with his father. At the early age of 10, he developed an interest in computing and video games and bought himself a Commodore VIC-20. He learned computer programming and coding himself using a manual and he coded a game himself at the age of 12 which he later sold for $500. It was apparently, his first earning. He attended the University of Pretoria in South Africa for five months and then he moved to Canada at the age of 17 in 1989 because he was unwilling to support apartheid through compulsory military service. Aware of the fact that it was easier to enter the US from Canada, Musk applied for a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother. He lived with his second cousin in Saskatchewan for a year, working odd jobs. 

Musk said that there have been three biggest influences in his life and those are:

• Internet

• Space Travel and,

• Renewable Energy

His Career

PayPal and SpaceX

Musk after moving to Canada attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In 1992, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia where he received two bachelor’s degrees one in Economics and another in Physics by 1997. He enrolled in a graduate school to study physics at Stanford University in California, but he left only after two days because he felt that the internet has got much more to bring a change in society than working in physics. In 1995, he got his first break with the Zip2 company which he founded with his brother. Zip2 was a company that provided telephone directories to online newspapers which was later sold to the computer manufacturer company, ‘Compaq' for $307 million. Then in 1999, he founded an online bank company called X.com, which later in 2000 got merged with another company to form PayPal, which specialized in transferring money online. In 2001, Elon Musk became the CEO and Chairman of the same. The online auction eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion. By this point in time, he had become a billionaire already. So Musk now decided to work on the second thing from which he is greatly influenced which was Space Travel. Musk was convinced that for the survival of humans, they may have the need to become a multiplanet species. But he was highly disappointed with the great expense of rocket launchers. So, in 2002, he founded Space Exploration Technologies, SpaceX to make more affordable and budget-friendly rockets by investing more than $100 million dollar in it. Musk’s SpaceX main objective is to send humans to Mars and establish a colony there. In 2020, it became the first private company to send a person to space and by 2025 its goal is to send the first human being to Mars. SpaceX’s first rocket Falcon 1 was launched in 2006. The larger Falcon 9 got launched in 2010, which was designed at a much less price than competing rockets. A third rocket, the Falcon Heavy, launched in 2018 was designed to carry 53,000 kg to orbit, nearly twice as much as its largest competitor, the Boeing Company’s Delta 5 Heavy for one-third of the cost. In addition to being the CEO of SpaceX, Musk was also the chief designer in building the Falcon rockets, Dragon, and Starships.    

Tesla

As explained earlier in the Blog that the founder’s wealth is highly dependent on the value of his company in the market and the public invests in a company when they see a chance to rise in the value of the company on the basis of various business environments and on the future potential. In the case of Tesla, its future potential looks quite good as being an electric car there is no need to pay for the constant rising prices of fuels like petrol or diesel which is even a good move to control global warming and fight climate change. So more and more of the public are investing in Tesla with the same mindset in the developed countries where they are highly aware of climate change. Tesla is no doubt one of the most popular electric cars and its cars are most likely to be sold worldwide soon by the next 10 years, so this is one of the prime reasons why more of the public is investing in it making Musk a billionaire.  

Till date, Tesla’s share price has risen to the extent that there have been several claims on being it is overvalued and to be more valued in the near future about thrice of the value that it is now.

Twitter

Elon Musk had purchased a 9.2% stake in Twitter. Later, on the 25th of April Musk bought out Twitter for $44 billion  and became the owner with the objective of two main changes on this social media platform, which are:

• To make Twitter a platform for free speech as Elon believes until a company becomes a private company, it can never promote free speech.

• To remove spam accounts to eradicate online bullying and stop trolling practices as he himself had been a victim of bullying back when he was in school. He was thrown also thrown down a staircase. 

There is one last but not the least reason why he wants Twitter, and that is, that Musk can cause wide fluctuations in crypto prices through just one tweet through which he can generate or destroy millions of worth. With one tweet Elon Musk announces that Tesla can be bought with bitcoins. This causes a massive rise in the prices of Bitcoin and the prices climb to an all-time high. But then by saying that Bitcoin is not good for society, he takes back his own decision to accept Bitcoin resulting in Bitcoin prices sharply crashing for days. 

Conclusion

Therefore, he is not just known as the richest man in the world just like that. He is even known as the biggest business magnate or business tycoon, the real-life Tony Stark and now due to twitter the biggest financial influencer also.  

By Sonali Munda