By Aaron Miller-
Elon Musk inherited the mind that made him the richest man in the world from his father, Errol Musk, who was a successful entrepreneur.
Elon Musk was born into a wealthy family in Pretoria, South Africa in 1971. His mother, Maye, is a Canadian dietitian and model, while his father, Errol, is an engineer.
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His father, Errol Musk, 76, was a creative businessman, who converted almost anything he touched to gold. Errol was an electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, and property developer- a Jack of all trades and master of all.
In 1969, he became a 50% shareholder of an emerald mine on Lake Tanganyika, he bought for £40,000, funded by selling an airplane for £80,000.
In a 2018 interview with Business Insider, Errol Musk boasted that as a result of the emerald mine “we had so much money we couldn’t even close our safe”.
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Errol Musk Image:AFP
Errol’s success in making money genetically or environmentally influenced his son Elon. The chances are high that both factors played a role in the exceeding wealth the recent twitter owner has amassed in his lifetime.
Character traits are established to be capable of being inherited genetically but can also be influenced by upbringing. A link between Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial success and that of his father is discernible, irrespective of the strained relationship between the billionaire and his father. Elon is known to be close to his mother. Errol’s moral standards may be questionable, given the fact he fathered a daughter to his 35-year-old stepdaughter, who is 42 years his junior.
His high business acumen and financial success must have spoken louder than the age differential between himself and his stepdaughter, who must have struggled to resist any advances or opportunity to double up with the business magnate.
The younger Musk, Elon, was reportedly good with computers as a child and designed a video game aged just 12-years-old. He left for Canada when he was 17 to avoid military service under the Apartheid regime – initially studying at Queens University, Ontario before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania in the US in 1992.
Elon Musk’s wealth is estimated to be $240 billion by Bloomberg, multiplying over the years. In early 2020, h his then-fortune of $25.6 billion placing him below the likes of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Elon arrived in Canada with CA$2,500 and paid his own way through college, eventually incurring $100,000 of student debt.
The billionaire started his first company with no funding besides the computer he built.
Musk’s wealth is believed to be linked to his ownership stake in electric car maker Tesla, and to a lesser extent his holdings in ventures including Space X and Boring Company.
Tesla has been his predominant source of wealth creation, with the company’s stock surging more than 1,100% in the past five years as investors rewarded the company for its huge growth in vehicle sales. Tesla’s revenue jumped from $12 billion in 2017 to $54 billion in 2021.
“I built these two companies and it was extremely difficult to build them,” Musk told the conservative satire site Babylon Bee in December 2021, referring to Tesla and Space X. “Rewarding, too, but massively difficult … and I didn’t sell the stock in the companies.”
Space X is an integral part of Nasa’a operation Image: Getty Images
He added, “My sort of impression was that you shouldn’t take money off the table — or stock off the table — that a captain should go down with their ship.”
Musk’s wealth has fluctuated over the past few years. At his peak, standing at $340 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That occurred in November 2021, when Tesla’s stock price hit a record high of $414.50 a share, according to FactSet. Since then, the car maker’s stock has dropped by about one-third.
The billionaire has sold billions of dollars’ worth of Tesla stock in the past year, his sales increasing 2022 ahead of a court battle with Twitter. As of mid-August, Musk had sold nearly $7 billion worth of shares in the car maker. Musk tweeted that he sold the stake in order to avoid “an emergency sale of Tesla stock” if he loses his bid to cancel his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
Currently, Musk’s Tesla stake stands at 14.9% of its outstanding shares, an investment that is valued at about $124 billion, according to FactSet.
Elon Musk’s business ventures are multiple. They range from his finding PayPal and SpaceX to becoming the CEO of Tesla. His net worth is also based on his shares in Tesla, as he owns around 24 per cent.
Musk’s first company – which he founded in 1995 – was an online local business directory called Zip2. In 1999, Compaq Computer Corp. bought Zip2 for $307 million and it became a part of the search engine AltaVista. The sale earned Musk $22 million.
He subsequently founded an online bank called X.com which merged with Confinity in 2000 – and was later rebranded as PayPal. When eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, it is thought Musk made around $170 million, after taxes.
In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX, an aerospace manufacturer, which has been valued at $74 billion. He joined Tesla in 2004 and became its CEO in 2008. The car company is thought to be worth more than $1 trillion.
He also founded tunnelling construction company The Boring Company, which has been valued at nearly $5.7 billion, according to CNN Business.
Musk also co-founded nanotechnology company Neurolink and AI research company Open AI. He invested in SolarCity, which was sold to Tesla for $2.6 billion.
A year later, he ploughed $6 million into Tesla despite the company having not even produced a real car. Both firms struggled initially, but SpaceX took off in 2008 after penning a $1.6 billion deal with NASA and Tesla’s first vehicle – Model S – went into mass-production in 2012.
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