On April 25, 2022, American billionaire Elon Musk announced an agreement to buy Twitter for about $44 billion.
Twitter Inc. said it had entered into an agreement under which Elon Musk's company would acquire Twitter for more than $54 per share. Who is Elon Musk, who is classified as the richest man in the world?
Birth and upbringing
June 28, 1971: Elon Musk was born in Pretoria to a Canadian mother, May Haldeman, and a South African father, Errol Musk, with 3 nationalities from the United States of America, Canada and South Africa.
Musk Sr. was an engineering consultant, real estate developer, and owner of an emerald mine in South Africa.
Musk has been passionate about the computer world since his childhood, and taught himself computer programming since ten.
At the age of 12, he designed an electronic game called "Blaster" and sold it for $500, which was a starting point to the world of commerce and business.
1980: His parents divorced, and Elon stayed with his father in South Africa for a while.
After completing the age of 17, Elon moved to Canada later with his mother.
Musk then joined a scholarship at Queen's University, but he only lasted two years, as he then moved to the University of Pennsylvania to obtain a degree in economics from the Wharton School, and a physics degree from the College of Arts and Sciences.
1995: Musk started his PhD in applied physics and materials science at Stanford University, but he did not continue writing the thesis because he gave up the idea two days later to become interested in entrepreneurship.
trade world
Musk and his brother Kimball co-founded Zip 2, a web programming company that Compaq acquired in 1999 for $340 million.
Musk then founded X.com, an online payment company that later merged with Confinity Inc. in 2000 to become the now-known PayPal company that eBay bought for $1.5 billion in October 2002.
2000: He married his first wife, Justin Musk, a Canadian author, at Queen's University in Ontario, but they divorced in 2008.
May 2002: Musk founded SpaceX, a company to manufacture spacecraft and launch space missions, as CEO and chief designer.
2003: He co-founded Tesla, a company that manufactures electric vehicles and manufactures solar systems, in which he also holds the position of CEO and product engineer.
2006: He was inspired to establish the SolarCity plant as a company to provide solar energy services, and it is currently a subsidiary of the Tesla Motors group of companies, where he is the Chairman of the Board of Directors.
2010: He married the English actress, Talula Riley, and they separated in 2012, and a year later they returned again, and the second separation took place in 2014.
2015: Musk helped found OpenAI, a nonprofit research firm that develops artificial intelligence, for which he is currently an associate director.
He co-founded Neuralink, a company specialized in the field of neurotechnology, focused on developing ways to communicate the human brain with the computer (the computer of the intermediate brain), to become the CEO in 2016.
2016: Musk established a tunnel and infrastructure company called “The Boring Company,” or in Arabic, “The Boring Company,” in an attempt to get rid of traffic congestion in Los Angeles.
March 2016: He came in the 80th place in the list of the world's richest men.
December 2016: Forbes chose him as the 21st most powerful man in the world.
In October 2017, Musk's net worth was estimated at about $20.8 billion, ranking 21st in Forbes magazine's list of the 400 richest people in the United States.
February 6, 2018: SpaceX conducted a successful test of the "Falcon Heavy" missile, which is capable of transporting a car the weight and size of "Tesla", and the company's value is estimated at about $20 billion.
richest man in the world
October 2021: His net worth is estimated at $320.9 billion, making him the richest man in the world.
Bloomberg Agency said that Musk lost more than 50 billion dollars in two days due to the drop in the share prices of his Tesla company.
Musk stated that the goals of his companies, such as Solar City, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX, serve his vision of changing the world and humanity.
Among those goals is to reduce global warming by finding new, clean and inexpensive ways to generate, transmit and distribute energy to homes and stations, and protect humans from the threat of extinction by establishing human colonies on the surface of Mars.
Musk loved developing engines, as he developed a transportation system known as a rapid cycle or "Hyperloop", and submitted it to work in fast aircraft that use an electric propeller, which became known as the Musk electric plane.
He appeared in science fiction films and series such as "Iron Man" and "The Big Bang" and other works that establish the model of the self-made emperor who made his fortune thanks to his intelligence.
Musk is accused of defaming a British diver who participated in the rescue of the "cave boys" in Thailand, after a series of tweets from him attacking the diver, after the latter considered that Musk's proposal to send a submarine to rescue the boys was a "propaganda act."
smoking marijuana
August 2018: The American billionaire was criticized after smoking marijuana in a radio broadcast during an interview with him, and although the drug is legal in California, Tesla's shares fell 9% after this appearance, and a few newspapers and followers described him as "crazy" after it.
April 28, 2022: Musk announced that he would buy Coca-Cola Beverage Company, but this announcement seemed like a joke, as Musk wrote on his verified Twitter account, "Next time I will buy Coca-Cola to return the cocaine to it."
He received an honorary doctorate four times in design from the Art Center at the Faculty of Design, in aerospace engineering from the University of Surrey, in engineering and technology from Yale University, and the fourth from the University of Krakow.